“MEMORIES” BY V. V. VERESAEV AS A LINGUISTIC AND LINGUO-DIDACTIC SOURCE

The article considers V. V. Veresaev’s “Memories” from the point of view of its linguistic characteristics and from the position of possible use in didactic manuals on the Russian language and stylistics for schoolchildren. Being a valuable source of observations on the transformations of the national language and literary style at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries, the text of “Memories” by Veresaev can serve both purely scientific and educational purposes. It fits into the tradition of Russian biographical narration about a child and a teenager, established by L. N. Tolstoy and continued by classic writers of the second half of the century before last (S. T. Aksakov, N. G. Garin-Mikhaylovsky, etc.). The text complies with all the canons of the genre and is designed using traditional compositional techniques and linguistic means of accurately reproducing the psychological characteristics of the narrator of children and adolescents. Its vocabulary reflects the social characteristics of the provincial noble intelligentsia of pre-revolutionary Russia, the peculiarities of the regional variety of the Russian language, intelligentsia colloquialism and many vivid speech features of 1870–1880s. Veresaev's individual style reflects not only his social background and high level of education, but also the specifics of his literary activity, which began quite early. Doing a lot of translations, the writer honed the syntactic features of his creative writing skill. That is why the linguistic design of “Memories” is characterized by a variety of constructive features, frequent use of rhetorical colours and their combinations, purposeful variation of word order. The normative nature of the lexical and grammatical design of Veresaev's text makes it a potential source of educational tasks for modern schoolchildren. The unobtrusive didacticism of the style, the entertaining content, the historical and local history component of “Memories” allows their individual compositional fragments to be successfully included in the educational process.