The phraseology of Courage and Cowardice in the Modern Russian Lan-guage and in A.S. Pushkin’s Works

The article is devoted to phrases with the semantic components ‘courage’ and ‘cowardice’. The aim of the study was to determine the features of semantics and functioning of these phraseological units in everyday speech and fiction. To achieve this goal, the methods of lexical and stylistic analysis were used. The material was explanatory and phraseological dictionaries of the Russian language, as well as poetic and prose texts by A.S. Pushkin. In the work, an attempt to identify and systematize phraseological units that define a person based on the feature of courage/cowardice was made for the first time. Phraseological units were selected and systematized on the basis of their dictionary definitions. The presented material allowed us to conclude that in the Russian language, phraseological units characterizing a person from the point of view of courage / cowardice represent a large group (68 units). Almost half of them denote a person’s psychoemotional state and include somatisms. Most of the idioms considered relate to colloquial speech and they posses are a high degree of imagery and expressiveness.