“Our Everything”: Pushkin and Not Only Him

Abstract

The article examines the semantics of the idiom nashe vsyo (‘our everything’), which entered the Russian cultural and linguistic consciousness and speech as a reflex of the Apollon A. Grigoriev’s statement: “Pushkin is our everything”. The study, conducted on the basis of the Russian National Corpus (taking into account the data of the Main, Newspaper and the Social networks Corpuses) by the corpus method using the techniques of socio-cultural, linguacultural and contextual-semantic analysis, allowed the author to identify the range of meanings of the idiom and determine the models of its structural transformation. Having studied the texts of the 18th‑19th centuries, the author discovers stable combinations nashe vsyo, nash ves,, nashe vsyo X in the syntactic function of defining the subject of speech and suggests that they could serve as a prototype of the idiom in its predicative meaning, which was first recorded in the Grigoriev’s aphorism. The history of the study of the semantics of the idiom is highlighted, attention is drawn to its lexicographic fixation. The article analyzes the reflexes of the idiom in different types of modern discourse (fiction, journalism, social networks, memes and demotivators, Internet folklore). The author comes to the conclusion that all these reflexes are somehow connected with the Pushkin myth and the concepts of “Russia”, “people”, “soul”, “literature”, “language”, “speech”, “genius”, “pride”, “necessity” emphasized by Grigoriev as a first narrator. Contextual-semantic analysis allowed to identify the meanings of “Pushkin”, “genius”, “outstanding talent”, “something important, significant, essential for the speaker”, which are connected with the idiom nashe vsyo ‘our everything’ today. The author also analyzes the structural and semantic transformations of the idiom, the most common of which are “Pushkin is our X” and “X is our everything”.

Keywords:

Pushkin, Pushkin myth, Internet folklore, nashe vsyo (‘our everything’), idioms, structural-semantic transformations, increase in meanings in context, corpus analysis