LEO TOLSTOY’S LANGUAGE: CORPUS APPROACH AND INTROSPECTION

The paper presents a corpus check for the series of notes by Alexander Bisk. In the mid-twentieth century, A. Bisk, an attentive reader and expert in Russian literature, who was then in exile, published an article in a journal specializing in the problems of teaching Russian to foreigners. In this article, he shares the results of his close reading of Leo Tolstoy’s works, primarily the novel “War and Peace”. Relying on his own ideas about linguistic norms and personal standards of literary taste, Bisk summarizes his observations on the peculiarities of Tolstoy’s style that distinguish him from other fi rst-line authors. He notes Tolstoy’s desire to distance himself from linguistic clichés, considers some turns like “to build instruments”, “to join the conversation” to be individualized, and draws attention to the atypical for the language refl exive forms of some verbs. The advantage of this article is its verifi ability. A. Bisk presents observations on Tolstoy’s language as a series of examples not typical of other authors. A. Bisk pays special attention to the contrast between writers of the fi rst row and writers of the second row. While Tolstoy belongs to the former, his language seems to A. Bisk to be more similar to that of the latter. The corpus check does not confi rm the majority of A. Bisk’s statements. Almost all the word-uses he detected are found in the language of Tolstoy’s contemporaries and in the texts of the front-rank writers.