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Abstract:

The “Dictionary of the Language of Russian Poetry (20^th century)” gives an opportunity to take a closer look at Mayakovsky’s poetic language in the context of a certain epoch. The dictionary is a summary explanatory concordance, which contains poetic lines of ten outstanding poets of the Silver Age: I. Annensky, A. Akhmatova, A. Blok, S. Yesenin, M. Kuzmin, O. Mandelstam, V. Mayakovsky, B. Pasternak, V. Khlebnikov, M. Tsvetaeva. The dictionary not only presents a cross-section of the poetic usage of a certain era, but also gives it in a linguistically analyzed form, which makes the dictionary an informative source for both researchers and non-specialist readers. Cultural, encyclopedic, historical and other comments on illustrative contexts, along with the necessary linguistic information about the word, consists an important part of the dictionary. It was Mayakovsky who was the most attentive to the new realities of the era, such as advertising and cinema. The poet widely introduces new vocabulary into the poetic text (electric advertising, peretyazhka ‘banner’, film camera, cinematography ‘cinema / movie theater’, Sovkino), comprehends and evaluates these realities both positively, associating them with novelty or technical progress, and negatively, ironically.