Every natural language reflects a particular way of perceiving the structure of the world—or a “linguistic picture of the world.” The totality of worldviews embedded in the meaning of various words and expressions of a given language forms a unified system of views that, without anyone noticing, is adopted by all native speakers of that language.
This book is devoted to reconstructing such a system of representations laid down in the Russian language. It includes articles by three authors in which they analyze key words of the Russian linguistic picture of the world—such as soul, fate, longing, happiness, separation, justice, offense, reproach, to gather, to get to, to try, it turned out, it happened, and others. These words are called “key” because they provide a “key” for understanding the Russian linguistic picture of the world. At the same time, they are linguistically specific: that is, their meanings contain conceptual configurations that do not exist in a fully formed way in other languages (the comparison is made with the most common languages of Western Europe).
The works collected in this book were written between 1994 and 2003. They are united by a shared set of the most important methodological principles, while differing in genre and style and, in part, in the metalanguage used. The articles are grouped into thematic sections corresponding to fragments of the Russian linguistic picture of the world.
An article by Anna Wierzbicka is included in the Appendix, whose ideas substantially trace the research direction presented in this book.