Obsolete words in lexical fund of silver age poetry (on materials of composite dictionary of poetic language)

Obsolete words make up a considerable part of the lexical fund of the Silver age poetry. Today, the words used practically by every poet of the epoch, demand our special attention. The lack of knowledge of the words’ meaning, of their cultural and historical connotation can interfere with the proper perception of the Silver age works by the modern reader. The author of the article studies obsolete words, used in the Silver age poetry, employing composite dictionaries of poetic language. A “Dictionary of the Russian Language of the XXth Century Poetry” was used as a source material. The dictionary describes poetic language of ten Russian poets inclusive of Annensky and Tsvetaeva. Systematization of materials, included into the Vth volume of the Dictionary, showed that the array of obsolete words mostly consists of archaisms of different types. They are lexical (народоправство ‘демократия’), semantic (ничтожество ‘небытие’), lexical-phonetic (нейрастения), lexical-wordforming (небречь), etc. This lexicon is non-uniform from stylistic point of view and includes words inherent to different layers of the Russian language (bookish: невозбранно, colloquial: невтерпь, etc.). According to the research, a prevailing majority of obsolete words is used by singular authors, a set of obsolete words is employed by two or three poets, and some words are present in the works of all poets (огнь, око, пажить). The place and the role played by obsolete words in the lexicon of Silver age poets are specified by their correlation with actual words. In some cases, only one archaic word is noted, and it becomes a single exponent of a concrete sense (for example, the noun непокорство, the noun непокорность). However, most of the dictionaries provide coupled words used by the authors - modern and archaic (for example, Pasternak used отмета и отметина). Such practices helped poets to enhance the meaning and the motive of their poetry. Conclusions of the research concerning the structure, the types, and semantics of obsolete words are supplemented with supervisions of functional character.