UDC

811.161.1:82-32

Authors

Petrov Andrey Vasilyevich
Institute of Philology and Cross-Cultural Communication, Northern (Arctic) Federal University named after M.V. Lomonosov 7 Smolnyy Buyan St., Arkhangelsk, 163002, Russian Federation;
e-mail: avpetrov@atknet.ru

Abstract

The article compares two versions of the story Soldiers’ Wives (A Conversation) by N.K. Zhernakov, a writer from Arkhangelsk. This story is a fine sample of real-life northern dialectal speech; it is a dialogue of old peasant women – bearers of the northern dialect – without any remarks or comments from the author. There are two versions of this story, the Arkhangelsk and the Moscow one (according to the place of publication). A comparison of two versions of one work is of great interest as it allows one to peep into the writer’s study, evaluate his creative process and doubts and realize the juxtaposition between the writer’s intentions and editor’s alterations. While analysing, we focused on the semantics of the title as the most important way of expressing the author’s viewpoint and on the existence of a subtitle in one of the versions. We examined in detail the linguistic means of creating the images of the story’s protagonists – Fekla and Agafya – and the main narrator, Praskovya, a remarkable, strong and gifted person. Further, we compared the peculiarities of the use of lexical, phonetic and grammatical dialecticisms and other elements of spoken language in the two versions. We also provide a lexicographic description of the analysed linguistic units. Both versions of N.K. Zhernakov’s story Soldiers’ Wives (A Conversation) are of interest due to their content and form; they have considerable expressive potential, touch upon vital moral issues and reflect the specificity of the living northern folk speech.

Keywords

spoken language, fiction title, figurative language, semantization of dialecticisms

References

1. Galimov Sh.Z. Podvig Nikolaya Zhernakova [The Heroic Deed of Nikolay Zhernakov]. Dvina, 2004. no. 4, pp. 35–36.
   
2. Nikolina N.A. Filologicheskiy analiz teksta [Philological Text Analysis]. Moscow, 2003. 256 p.