Literary discourse

Collocations such as liricheskaya/romanticheskaya lyubov', lit. 'lyrical/ romantic love', poeticheskoe/sentimental' noe

chuvstvo, lit. 'poetic/sentimental feeling', elegicheskaya grust', lit. 'elegiac sadness', have a cultural background associated

with different literary movements (Romanticism, Sentimentalism). Various 'cultural heroes', and their associated

behaviour, feelings and ideas, come to be stereotyped by a linguistic-cultural community and verbalized by means of

lexical collocations.

Thus, the notion of romantic love (Russ. romanticheskaya lyubov') can be historically associated with the first third of the

nineteenth century -- the Romantic period. What contemporary everyday linguistic meaning has absorbed from

Romanticism in terms of love obviously amounts to the connotation of romantic love as 'an elevated, idealistic emotion

associated with the young'. Just like pervaya lyubov″ (see above), the lexical collocations toska po rodine, lit. 'anguish for

the homeland', i.e. 'nostalgia', dorozhnaya toska, lit.'road misery', i.e. the acute discomfort one feels when making a long

and tedious journey along a Russian road, are phraseological clichйs from literary texts that describe an emotional state

experienced not only as a fact of reality but also as a fact of culture. Literary discourse gives emotions a kind of cultural

dimension. For instance, toska po rodine denotes not simply 'acute homesickness' but an emotion that has been thoroughly elaborated in the Russian literary tradition, especially when one recalls that many generations of Russians

have been forced into exile and that many still live outside their homeland (cf. Polish tesknic and English homesick,

analysed by Wierzbicka 1992).Of special interest are collocations referring to the prototypical personal name of a historical

character -- e.g. sal'ericheskaya zavist', lit. 'Salieri's envy', shekspirovskie strasti, lit. 'Shakespearian passions', vol'terova

ironiya, lit. 'Voltairian irony', platonicheskaya lyubov', lit. 'Platonic love'.Lexical collocations such as gore/sud'ba stuchitsya

v dom/v dver', lit. 'grief/fate knocks at the house/door', reflect the personification and individualization of human destiny

typical of Russian literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Here, Grief and Fate act as mythological personae,

while the house, the door, the knock at the door are cultural signs. The collocation proper could be regarded as a quasistandard

of the Path (see similar examples with life and death above).