Siberia in the small genres of Russian folklore

The article proposes an analysis of proverbs, sayings and set folk comparisons reflecting concepts about Siberia, captured by the Russian colloquial language and its dialects. Each of these types of small folklore has its own structural and semantic specifics, which imposes an imprint on the picture of the “Siberian world”. Proverbs characterize both the positive (characteristic of the wealth of the interior and the nature of Siberia, the courage of the Siberians, etc.), and negative (severe climate, distance from the mainland Russia, Siberia as the place of exile, etc.) stereotypes. Proverbs reproduce the characteristics of Siberia more diffusely, but no less vividly, especially focusing on the characterization of people - both Siberians and non-Siberian inhabitants, and positive features are much more inferior to the negative or playful-ironic ones. Set folk comparisons associated with Siberia are few, and also mainly concentrate on the playful-ironic characterization of people. The expressive and evaluative semantics of paremiology relating to Siberia depends not only and not so much on the component composition of the corresponding linguistic units but on the linguistic features of the latter. Three types of fixed units of small Russian folklore found a specialized and maximally complete description in A Big Dictionary of Russian Sayings (edited by V.M. Mokienko and T.G. Nikitina), A Big Dictionary of Russian Comparisons (edited by V.M. Mokienko and T.G. Nikitina) and A Big Dictionary of Russian Proverbs (edited by V.M. Mokienko, T.G. Nikitina and E.K. Nikolaeva). In compiling these lexicographic collections of Russian paremiology, the authors consistently took into account the structural and semantic specificity of each of these three types of paremias. The main purpose of this dictionary was, in the spirit of the Larin School of Lexicography, the most complete and source-specific description of Russian proverbs, sayings and folk comparisons. At the same time, the areal characteristics of each described unit were marked with a scrupulously accurate and detailed reference to the source of the material. Materials of the Siberian folk dialects in this dictionary occupy a special place, for they have received a thorough lexicographic description. Representations of Siberia, imprinted in the mirror of small folklore, should not be naturally absolutized, for the high degree of connotation of phraseology makes the corresponding linguistic units semantically subjective. At the same time, such semantic subjectivity allows reproducing typical language stereotypes associated with the vast territory, which helped “Russian power to grow” (M.V. Lomonosov), including the power of the native language.

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