“The Tribune of Strastnoy Boulevard”: The language personality of the publicist Mikhail Katkov

The article attempts to analyze the language personality of the authoritative conservative publicist Mikhail Katkov, who in 1863-1887 was the editor-publisher of the influential newspaper Moskovskie Vedomosti. The relevance of the stated problem is due to the growing interest in modern science in the study of the conservative press of the second half of the 19th century, its influence on public consciousness and the formation of ideological attitudes of the audience. The scientific novelty of the research consists in the introduction of new, previously unexplored material into scholarly discourse, in the analysis of Katkov’s journalistic texts for the purpose of studying the structure and content of his language personality. The methodological basis of the study consists of works of Yu.N. Karaulov, W. von Humboldt, V.V. Vinogradov, E.D. Polivanov, M.M. Bakhtin, G.I. Bogin, V.A. Maslova, V.V. Ledeneva, T.V. Shmeleva. The level model of language personality proposed by Yu.N. Karaulov was implemented in the study of Katkov’s language personality in the form of a comprehensive analysis of all three components: lexicon, thesaurus, and pragmaticon. The analysis of the thesaurus allowed us to demonstrate how Katkov’s views were embodied in the concepts he implemented, the hierarchy of these concepts, as a result of the publicist’s political preferences. The article presents a full range of language tools and techniques, with special attention paid to metaphor, which allowed us to conclude that Katkov’s texts generated a type of journalistic metaphor new for that time, the main function of which is evaluation. A detailed study of the thesaurus and the lexicon that embodies its features allowed us to conclude that the highest level of Katkov’s language personality - the pragmatist - reflects the national specifics and features of the publicist’s linguistic and axiological picture of the world. In the course of the analysis, it became obvious that a large role in Katkov’s texts, and therefore in the structure of his language personality, is played by various means of syntax. First of all, this represents such an important feature of Katkov as the logical presentation. The main functional type of text used by Katkov is reasoning; the syntactic forms and structures used by the publicist implement a variety of strategies and tactics of persuasion, which allows us to consider his language personality as the quintessence of oratorical skill. It is revealed that the language personality of Katkov reflects the peculiarities of his worldview, scientific and logical thinking, moral and ethical ideas, political views, national and cultural mentality. The linguostylistic and pragmatic analysis of the texts of Katkov’s publications allowed us to conclude that his language personality is characterized by a variety of linguistic representations and a variety of possibilities in the expression of meanings, which was one of the reasons for such a strong influence of his journalistic texts on the audience. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Keywords

Authors

References