Symbolization of paper in the Russian language and culture

The relevance of the linguistic-cultural description of the symbolization of paper is due to the extremely high significance of this phenomenon in institutional and personal communication, its multifaced evaluative characteristics, its influence on the development of society and civilization. The considered paper symbolization is understood as the development of associative evaluative potential of the corresponding concept. It is realized in the Russian linguistic consciousness in the following directions: a document that determines the fate of a person; creativity requiring inspiration; short-lived and easily inflammable material. The material of the study includes the data of explanatory, encyclopedic, and associative dictionaries, examples from Russian National Corpus, proverbs, sayings, aphorisms, and poetic texts. The authors used methods of semantic, contextual, interpretative, and linguistic-cultural analysis. The aim of the study is to determine the conceptual, figurative-perceptual, and evaluative characteristics of the concept “paper”, to show the symbolization of paper in the artistic text. The study showed that the collective and individual consciousness has extremely negative attitude to documents and laws restricting the freedom of people. The evaluation of creativity is reduced to proclamation of its super value, inadmissibility of imitation. Understanding short-lived nature of any paper material requires careful handling. For symbolization, the functional characteristics of paper appear to be more significant than physical ones. The prospects of the study are further linguistic-cultural study of paper symbolization in modern communication tools.