SEMANTICS POETIC STYLE IN THE ESTIMATES OF RUSSIAN CRITICISM 1st HALF OF THE XIX CENTURY

The article is devoted to the analysis of the 19th century critical judgments about the language of poetic works. Such statements reflect current cultural and speech problems of the epoch, the difficulties of language standardization, linguistic habits and tastes and are very important for the linguistics. The analysis of Russian literary criticism of the 1st half of the 19th century brings one to the conclusion that the reviewers, exacting and very sensitive to lexical and semantic correctness of fiction, meticu- lously recorded inaccuracies in the use of poetic words, i. e. romantically colored, mostly archaic words having a symbolic function. Outdated tokens, such as chelo ‘ forehead ‘, sen’ ‘ cover ‘, kushcha ‘ hut ‘, etc., as a result of their intense poetic figurative-personalized use often lost their semantic clarity? Which disagreed with standard rules and caused an extremely negative and sometimes ironic reaction of critics. This article describes instances of reviewers’ negative reactions to the use of the archaism chelo in the meanings ‘ head, face ‘; sen’ in the meanings ‘mental tranquility, shelter ‘; kushcha ‘foliage, thicket’, etc. A good illustration of semantic “vagueness” of archaic Church Slavonic vocabulary is the discussion between A. S. Pushkin and M. A. Dmitriev concerning semantic content of the poetic word лоно ‘ depth’, or ‘surface, bosom’. Such phenomena manifest the tendency for losing semantic clarity and then rapid withdrawal of high frequency words to the periphery.