The article dwells upon the brief outline of the life and work of the writer and critic V. Titov. The author touches upon different aspects of his life path: literary, diplomatic, public. The biographical material helps the reader to reveal the inner world of the artistic personality, to see the history of his self-fulfilment in different spheres, to determine the place in the cultural and public life of the Russian society. Titov’s aspiration for philosophical thinking and catholicity of his world outlook led to various attempts in prose. In his art works and on duty Titov always preferred his Motherland’s interests, work for the sake of the Russian society.

The paper presents an analysis of E. Rein’s poetry of the second half of the 20th century. As a subject of study metalandscape lyric discourse is chosen, the category of the author’s picture of the world is used in the conceptual and functional aspects of the device as a methodological study. We study the figurative sphere of the poetry, highlight the main conceptual models, mark continuity of space-time images. The distinctive features are reverse poetics - interattributization of natural and cultural realities - and discourse of landscape image in E. Rein’s mature work.

The article explores the problem of poetics in prose of the younger generation of Russian writers of the first wave of emigration, in particular the questions of poetics of narrative. In their prose, writers of the so-called "unnoticed generation" used some metanarrative techniques, which play extremely important for the Russian emigration role of the succession of generations. The Russian emigration perceived the art, especially literature, as a reality capable to preserve the national cultural identity, and pointed to devotion to modernist strategy of Russian and World Literature of the late 19th - early 20th century, to realization of the aesthetic systems of the writers of "the unnoticed generation", aim of the literature of the early 20th century to self-knowledge.

The article covers Moisei Olgin's critical view of Eugine Chirikov works during the period up to 1920. M. Olgin is the author of the cycle “Guidance of Russian Literature”. In its essays he gives a short review of the Russian literature and focuses on writers starting from A. Pushkin to modern authors of 1920s.The essays are of special interest due to the fact that Olgin wrote them for American readers to get them acquainted with the best Russian writers, including Chirikov.

V. Odoevsky’s “New Year” was published in the newspaper “Literary Additions to the “Russian Invalid” in 1837. The study of this novel in the context of the publication allows to make interesting conclusions about the relationship of the writer with his time, and the development of literature at the end of the 1830s in whole. In the works of this period, more often appears the image of the "yesterday" romantic hero, who is no longer capable of the decisive actions today. Writers regarded this weakness as a characteristic feature of the contemporary Russian reality, and as a quality of an individual in general that manifests itself in different epochs. The tendency of an objective understanding of life and the "hero of time" shows the development of the literary process, the gradual transition from romanticism to realism.

Present-day stage of science can be characterized by appearance of new multidisciplinary ways. The process of integration, caused by anthropological paradigm has an influence on all fields of human knowledge, including linguistics. As a result new branches of science appeared: sociolinguistics, psycholinguistic, gender linguistics etc. Numerous researches carried out in gender linguistics in last decades, seem to be considered all linguistic phenomena and aspects, but consideration of category of modality came to nothing more than modal verbs. Despite of that, the study of communicative and universal category of modality can help to clarify social laws of gender constructed communicative behaviour. The goal of our study is to establish gender specificity of mood in forming modal meanings in media discourse. The functional-semantic analysis we approach allows us to research the diversity of modal meanings in more detail and to consider all levels of language. The results of study show gender difference in frequency of usage of mood and communicative goals of their usage.

The article presents the semantic characteristic of linguoconcept «precipice» in the novel of the same name by I. Goncharov. On the basis of the novel, some semantic-cognitive peculiarities in the structure of the word-name of the concept «precipice» are examined, and the semantic relations of the concept with other language units in the text and their semantic volume are estimated. It is concluded that the studied concept in its basic lexical realization appears to be the semantic complex in which the denotative component of ‘place’ is literary reinterpreted and deepened with additional semantic components.

This paper examines the symbolic meaning of the rites of birth and christening in the Russian linguistic culture on the material of N. Leskov’s journalism and folklore studies of the woodland part of the modern Bryansk region. Fixation of the symbolic meaning of the rite of birth in journalism of N. Leskov is linguocultural fact especially because in modern conditions this ritual text is no longer a part of the traditional spiritual folk culture. It is established that the symbolic meaning of the rituals defined by the key symbols of gates, bath, breaking dishes, porridge, and lexical meaning of the symbol becomes the embodiment of the conceptual vector of the rite.

The given article deals with Proto-Slavic derivation, particularly Proto-Slavic noun suffixation. Proto-Slavic nouns (as modern Slavic nouns) used to fall into following classes: nominations of living beings, names of exact items and phenomena, nominations of abstract concepts. Each class comprised several groups of lexemes with different meanings which were formed by means of specific word-formative tools. There is now ample evidence illustrating the productivity of Proto-Slavic word-formation patterns in the present-day Russian language.

The paper is devoted to peculiarities of word-formative structure of qualitative adjectives that are described from the point of synchronous-diachronic approach. Functioning in a language for a long time in some cases the words retain meaningful contact with their productive ones, and in others - they are detached because of loss of source words or semantic convergence of adjectives with other words. Comparing historical word-formative structure of adjectives ending with «-кий» with their modern word-formative structure and derivation with motivation author reveals several types of changes.

It is shown that prosopography as a method of description of a fictional being possesses its own system of expressive means. The system finds the coexistence with the aspect of the transfer of functional and semantic category of inexpressible, because the meaning of inexpressible as a characteristic feature is related to the transcendent world. The means of expression of prosopography are distributed by three parts, correlated to the stages of perception of new. The introduction contains indefinite pronouns with affixes не- and -то, consistently audio (optionally olfactory and / or tactile) and visual vocabulary, "negative attributes". The introduction can contain syntactic constructions то ли..., то ли...; не то..., не то...; не..., не..., а.. .The main part includes "a kaleidoscope of nominations", various in grammatical gender category, pronominal substantive it in the meaning of ‘unknown creature’. If the meaning of it is 'something difficult to verbalize, terrible, inevitable' it is not a prosopography. The final part of prosopography contains a concrete noun, common and / or proper, occasional substantive

In the paper, three ecolignuistic principles are formulated to analyze the Russian newspaper text concerning ecological subject - the diversity principle, the principle of interaction between system and environment, the principle of emergent property. The author describes such components of the text as the topic, participants and relationship between them, the purpose, design, structure and linguistic features of the text. The last component comprises contextual synonymic sets, the map of key verbs and various types of attribution. Three basic features that characterize the text as an integral system are official register, uncertain modality and polyphony.

Basing on the Russian dialects spoken in the Republic of Mordovia the paper considers phraseological units associated with religious Christian and pagan beliefs of dialect speakers. It’s found out that in the phraseological corpus under study such collocations constitute a special group that is heterogeneous in conceptual and structural aspects. Human’s pagan concepts of soul, afterlife, other world are connected with Christian beliefs that are also represented by means of dialectal phraseology in the Russian dialects. The analysis demonstrates how dialect phraseology accounts for the formation of the axiological system, ethical principles, stereotyped patterns of behaviour among village residents.

The article examines the current issue of the impact of communicative factors on the formation of modern children and youth nicknames. Starting from kindergarten, the child is being socialized and adapted, while communication in the team provides the necessary information from the outside, practical skills of communication of the individual and, importantly, a social assessment of personal characteristics, which often take shape in the nickname as a sign of the feedback in the communication situation, transmitting all the knowledge accumulated in the onym.

The article considers the semantic features of the evaluative adjective СТРАННЫЙ and its function in our language. The adjective was explored by means of its analysis through explanatory dictionaries and the method of constructing of lexicographic paradigms by L. Cherneyko. The results of the analysis were projected onto lexicographical information. It helped to find out its special function in the texts of different genres.