Biblical Expressions in A. N. Ostrovsky’s Plays

Abstract

In 2023, Russia celebrates the 200th anniversary of Alexander N. Ostrovsky, the famous playwright who portrayed Russia in the epoch of serfdom. The author used the method of continuous sampling to harvest lexical intertextualisms from A. N. Ostrovsky’s plays, as well as the methods of linguistic culturological analysis, interpretation, linguacultural commentary, and systematizing to describe the material. Biblical expressions in A. N. Ostrovsky’s plays are numerous but remain understudied. However, they play an important semantic and linguacultural role in that they render the text a bookish style. Some personages demonstrate the symbolism of biblical words as dominants of their worldview. Quite often, biblical expressions are incomprehensible, archaic, or semantically random, thus revealing poor education. The article focuses on one-lexeme biblical expressions. They could be divided into two groups: 1) proper names, e.g., Jared, Herod, Judas, Lazarus, etc., and related phraseological units, e.g., to sing Lazarus, i.e. to lament or complain; 2) common nouns with a special symbolism in the text, e.g., expanse, vigil, fasting, abstinence, covenant, grace, goodness, bounty, ordeal, brimstone, etc. Each example is provided with comments on their biblical source and the functional characteristics in the context.

Keywords

• a. n. ostrovsky
• dramaturgy
• play
• the speech of the characters
• winged words
• precedent text
• biblicalism
• phryazeologism