Article

Name: Transfers of Criminal Subculture into Russian Poetry at the End of the 20th – the Beginning of the 21st Century

Authors: A. Bierich

Trier University, Germany

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: transfer, criminal subculture, Argot, types of Argotisms, contemporary Poetry, stylistic use of argotisms

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