<i>Toska</i> ‘Sorrow’ and its contextual «partners» in russian charms. I.

The article describes the main contexts of the word toska ‘sorrow’ and its derivatives in Russian charms, the correlation of these contexts with different functional types of charms (medical, love, cattle breeding, charms for power, etc.). Also the features of the sorrow image are formulated within these types with more or less certainty: its personification and subjectivity, material nature, allowing its physical elimination as an object, the correlations of sorrow and death, and finally the fiery nature of sorrow. The study of the word toska in Russian charms of different functional orientation revealed its five basic meanings: ‘illness’, ‘pain’, ‘mental illness of unclear etiology', ‘suffering in separation’ and ‘irresistible sadness in the absence of reciprocity’. It was found that the dialectal semantics of the Russian word toska and its derivatives fully correspond to its meanings in charms, while in the literary language the concrete physical meanings of the word toska are mostly lost.