Academician V. V. Vinogradov: A Philologist in a Situation of Hardships

Academician V. V. Vinogradov’s correspondence, which was written during his exile in Vyatka (1934–1936), provides a valuable opportunity to explore new aspects of the personality of this distinguished philologist and to reflect on the history of Soviet and Russian scholarship. The aim of the study is to identify the constants of the linguistic personality of a philologist who found himself in a situation of academic isolation during his exile. To achieve their objective, the authors employ the strategy of slow reading of politically censored texts. They utilise a multifaceted approach, encompassing genre, linguistic-cognitive, and linguistic-axiological analysis of dialogical and monological compositional units of messages addressed to N. M. Malysheva, the scholar’s wife, also studying deliberate authorial statements and stylistically marked verbal means. The analysis of Vinogradov’s epistolary practices discloses his normocentric linguistic personality, evident in his adherence to the conventions of the epistolary genre. Additionally, it reveals his mentally determined other-centrism, manifested in a strategically focused attention on the intended recipient. It has been established that the monological compositional blocks of the letters verbalise the personalism of the linguistic personality of the exiled philologist, who possessed a philosophical mind, an extraordinary intellectual aptitude, and the ability to resist official ideological dogmas through speech. The reliance on the precedent fund of Russian linguistic culture, the pervasive figure of identity between life and work, and the use of verbs such as read, think, write, and work in a performative function are indicative of the formation of a personal axiosphere and a corresponding axiological lexicon. The analysis interprets the functional load of nonce words, individual metaphors, irony, and comparisons realised in the texts of letters, which mark the creative component of the scholar’s linguistic personality.