NEW SOCIOPOLITICAL REALITIES OF THE 1920S AS REFLECTED IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND LEXICOGRAPHY (ON THE BASIS OF SYLLABIC ACRONYMS)

Abstract

The present research is a part of a large-scale project aimed at a comprehensive study of early 20th century Russian short stories and based on the Russian Short Stories Corpus currently containing several thousand texts. A sample of 310 stories has been selected to serve as a testbed for the analysis of language and style of the epoch. The paper deals with syllable acronyms that became abundant after the October revolution of 1917 and were widely used in the Russian literature of the 1920s. In particular, its focus is on the acronyms that can be found in the above-mentioned sample of short stories. The paper aims to find out whether these particular acronyms have been captured by the major Russian dictionaries and, if so, in what form, i.e. as single units or via decomposition into constituents (derivative formants). The study has revealed that not all acronyms that were quite common in the 1920s have been included as single units in the comprehensive dictionaries of the Russian language. The dictionary policy to present the acronym constituents has its side effects or drawbacks associated with the polysemy of the formants, their variable spelling and alternative decomposition of the corresponding words. Besides, this policy is far from being comprehensively complete. Thus, the present case study highlights the general problems of the lexicographical description of a wide range of lexical units that are no longer in use and whose meaning has become unclear. Still their knowledge is needed by the scholars researching into the epoch, students of the Russian language (including foreign learners of Russian) and readers of the fiction of that period. The filling of this lexicographical gap should be on the agenda.