The Word Work in F.M. Dostoevsky’s Texts: Lexicographical Notes

Abstract

The article analyzes the functioning of the word work in Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s texts. In the preface, taking into account the quantitative indicators, the common characteristic of this word distribution according with the genre affiliation of the texts is given, it is noted that generally this word meets 962 times, 362 times in literary works and more than a half of its use falls on letters. The meanings in which the word work is used are also given. Further, in the first and second part of the article the word work is considered in two works of fiction – Notes from the House of the Dead, where the maximum number of its uses is fixed, and Notes from the Underground, where the number of uses is minimal. As a result of the analysis the lexical groups for which the word work acts as a kind of attractor, as well as the types of contexts that it forms, are discovered, a wide variety of associative links that reveal the semantics of the word work showing the author's reflection on this word is observed. This allows us to identify the semantic characteristics highlighted by Dostoevsky when referring to the phenomenon of work in human life and the place of this phenomenon in the writer’s worldview, in his thesaurus, the center of which is MAN. The third part of the article considers the idiostyle use of the word combination hard labor in Dostoevsky’s letters.

Keywords

• dostoevsky
• writer’s language dictionary
• idiostyle
• the word work
• notes from the house of the dead
• notes from the underground
• word combination “hard labor” in dostoevsky’s letters