The article examines the features of the playwright’s artistic manner in the area of displaying vivid colloquial signals against the background of the traditional bookish basis of the characters’ speech using the mid-19th-century play “An Old Friend Is Better than Two New Ones” as an example. The dialogues between the representatives of the Moscow bourgeoisie, the dressmaker Olin’ka and her mother, and the speech of the merchant Gustomesov, replete with expressive examples of colloquial vocabulary and phraseology, enrich the traditional composition of the lexical and grammatical means of the Russian literary language. The article provides fairly lengthy texts of the characters’ speech with graphic highlighting of lexical, lexical and grammatical, and stable colloquial and bookish means of different etiology, colloquial, dialectal, neutral-bookish, and distorted-bookish, close to colloquial speech, with their subsequent interpretation. It is concluded that the colloquial elements of the language of the characters in this play by the playwright, skillfully presented by the author in the form of signals, still remain accessible to the understanding of the modern public and, with their freshness and vivid imagery, are capable of bringing aesthetic pleasure to the reader.
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