20th – the Beginning of the 21st Century
The transfer of criminal subculture into every day’s awareness of
the common Russian population is exceptional for this country’s society at the
end of the 20 th and the beginning of the 21 st century. The reasons for this
phenomenon vary: Firstly, political and social changes of the last decades in
eastern Europe have left their marks on language. The freedom of press, which
had been eagerly anticipated, lead to the emergence of newer and broader
classes of society that express themselves in varieties of the substandard and
were now able to participate in public discourse. Secondly, the engagement with
the country’s history which encompasses deportations, gulag and stalinist
repressions, a topic which was promoted as “fashionable” in the 90s, lead to
the distribution of the criminal subcultures. This development facilitated the
emergence of countless scientific papers, novels and memoirs of repression
victims, dealing with the subject matter of prisons and camps. Expressions of
the prison, camp and thieves’ argot could enter the colloquial language not only
through the press and the performances of public figures, but also through the
mentioned literature, as well as though countless gangster films, television se-
ries about bandits and militias as well as criminal novels that have been read by
all social classes, sexes and age groups. With its high number of argotisms and
jargonisms, Russian poetry of the late 20 th century does not form an exception
of the described influence. This paper deals in detail with the usage of
the argotic lexis in modern Russian poetry which represents the transfer of the
criminal subculture into the poetic language.
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20th – the Beginning of the 21st Century // Критика и семиотика. 2019. № 1. Pp. 26–39. DOI: 10.25205/2307-1737-2019-1-26-39.