Dostoevsky's atopons: on the Dictionary Project

The paper discusses the possibility of creating a dictionary of units that are difficult for the modern moderately educated reader to read and understand (atopons) in F.M. Dostoevsky's texts. The material for selection of this kind of lexical units was commentaries to various editions of Dostoevsky's works as well as the results of the experiment. The task was to identify the lexical and thematic areas in the texts of Dostoevsky that can lead to communication failure and their lexicographic representation. In accordance with the three-tiered structure of the language personality atopons are divided into atopons-agnonyms, atopons-cognemes and atopons-pragmemes. Atopons may be words that only Dostoevsky used (innovation, transliteration, etc.), lexical units not used in the modern Russian literary language, words that the modern reader can know in a different meaning, etc. Main attention is paid to atopons-agnonyms including individual author's formations, hapaxes. We suggest a classification of agnonyms and hapaxes. Agnonym classification is based on the allocation of thematic groups. One and the same lexical unit can belong to several lexical-thematic fields distributed at different levels of the structure of the language personality. These atopons include words with a specific subject matter: names of household items, plants, hairstyles, etc., including borrowed ones; names of items and parts of clothing, headwear, footwear, fabrics, yarn; names of wines, drinks and food; names of length, area, count, weight, etc. Hapaxes are a different type of agnonyms that are individual author's formations frequently classified as a language game. These words appear in the texts of Dostoevsky, but his contemporaries do not use them: zanevinno, zanedolgo, zaranshe, etc. This article lists the word-formation models of Dostoevsky's hapaxes. The dictionary description of the atopons is made by the following mandatory and optional parameters: 1) the word in its basic grammatical form or a set phrase; 2) definition; 3) illustration; 4) notes; 5) etymological reference; 6) examples from works by other authors of the 18th-19th centuries. At present, the work on the first part of The Dictionary of Dostoevsky's Atopons (The Dictionary of Agnonyms) is complete. It includes a description of about 900 units. The second and third parts of the Dictionary (on cognemes and pragmemes) with the total of about 1,000 units are in progress (with about 400 units processed).

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