Elena I. Seliverstova

Professor, Doctor of Sciences in Philology, Professor of the Russian Language Department for Humanities and Natural Sciences

St. Petersburg State University

(St. Petersburg, Russia)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2023-1-110-117

Abstract. The question is raised by the fact that in the collections of proverbs of the Peter the Great era there are units, which not only have not been subsequently lost, but, on the contrary, have been further developed through structural and lexical variation, or have undergone other changes - in the semantic interpretation of the proverb, the terms of its use, etc. Comparison of the paroemic fund presented in the sources of the 18th century – the collections of the Petrovsky Gallery, V. N. Tatishchev, A. I. Bogdanov, P. F. Simoni, with the data of collections of proverbs of a later time – V. I. Dahl, I. M. Snegirev and others – firstly, allows you to see the results of the selection by native Russians of the most striking of the available and semantically capacious units. Secondly, it allows you to detect phenomena of variation in paroemias and try to identify the appearance of various types of variants and their ability to adapt to changing language conditions. Thirdly, cases of reduction of the variable paradigm of paroemia and crystallization of its meaning in the form of the most substantively and formally successful version of the saying. As the analysis shows, some features accompany the process of «survival» of paroemias: some expressions persist to this day in the form already known in the 18th century (The child does not cry – the mother does not understand (Squeaking wheel gets the oil)), others disappear over time (They want brightly, but they squeeze their hands). New components appear in proverbs that specify the image (The old one will not spoil the furrows – The old horse will not spoil the furrow) and clarifying their semantics (Old [raven] does not cut past), there are deviations from the original form in the grammatical form of components (Do not hold one hundred rubles, but hold one hundred friends → Do not have one hundred rubles, but have one hundred friends) and the syntactic structure of the whole (On a beat you get two unbeaten ones → For the beat, two unbeaten are given (Threatened men live long)), etc.
Keywords: proverb, the era of Peter the Great and modernity, variant, motive, idea, semantic development, stability.

Full text of the article (PDF)

For citation: Seliverstova, EI 2023, ‘The Fate of the Proverb Ideas and Motives of Peter the Great’s Era: Stability and Variation’, Tula Scientific Bulletin. History. Linguistics, issue 1 (13), pp. 110–117, http://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2023-1-110-117 (in Russ.)

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