Abstract
The article examines the linguistic features of 18th century fortune-telling books published in Moscow and St. Petersburg and representing “mass literature” at the time of the emergence of the book market and the rapid development of secular (civil) book printing in Russia. The vocabulary of dream books, as a rule, does not fall into the field of study of linguists and is not recorded in the academic dictionaries of the 18th century, although it reflects the main processes taking place in the Russian literary language of this time, and often more vividly and more clearly: for example, active word creation, caused by tracing foreign words and mastering borrowings, and the pragmatic setting of these publications to a specific addressee. In the traditions of the enlightened 18th century, the language of dream books claims to be “intellectually”: they actively use scientific terminology, book words and expressions, new words are created, including neo-Slavicisms. At the same time, there are also numerous colloquial, folklore units. The article notes that in the texts of enigmatic books, these multi-style elements do not enter into a “stylistic conflict”, that the pragmatic status of such publications (commercial product in the book market) justifies their coexistence.
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