I. YAKOVLEV CHUVASH STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY BULLETIN

Russian proverb, mismatching, desire, expectation, result of activity, irony

Violation of the unwritten law of common sense is one of the topical themes for proverbs, developed in many units, showing the situation of discrepancy between the expected action or deed and the final state of affairs. The ideas reflected in proverbs about the reasons for possible discrepancies have not been analyzed separately so far. The article deals with about 200 proverbs extracted from basic paremia sources. The applied method of linguistic and cultural analysis makes it possible to identify cases of inconsistency between what the subject is thinking or planning and what his/her intention ends up with, and how it is regarded by native speakers of the Russian language and culture. Many of the cases presented in the proverbs are doubtful from the point of view of ordinary human logic – mainly in the part of the reasons that prevented the realization of the planned thing and are presented by the subject as serious and seemingly credible. As a result of the analysis, 4 main groups of proverbs were singled out depending on the nature of the reasons named. The range of the named factors is quite wide – from lack of money, which can really prevent the realization of the goal, and lack of appropriate conditions and circumstances, without which any dreams look simply ridiculous, to carelessness and simple laziness, by which they try to justify inactivity. Such cases of inconsistency between the subject’s intention and the lack of the expected result are framed in a jokingly ironic manner, and the one who is characterized by such a paremia is given an implicitly expressed negative evaluation, since the true reasons are often replaced by excuses.

Селиверстова Елена Ивановна – доктор филологических наук, профессор кафедры русского языка для гуманитарных и естественных факультетов Санкт-Петербургского государственного университета, г. Санкт-Петербург, Россия, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2020-0061, e.seliverstova@spbu.ru

Чжао И – аспирант кафедры русского языка как иностранного и методики его преподавания Санкт-Петербургского государственного университета, г. Санкт-Петербург, Россия, http://orcid.org/0009-0008-7197-0799, st091267@student.spbu.ru