Lishentsy of the XXI century. Notes on the Fate of Sovietisms in Contemporary Russian Language

The evolution of Sovietisms in contemporary Russian literary language was not as it seemed immediately after Gorbachev’s perestroika. Some Sovietisms have irrevocably become a part of passive lexicon as historicisms, while many other words belonging to this category have undergone semantic shifts and stylistic modifcations. The paper describes the evolution of Sovietisms in contemporary Russian language and presents the history of the word ‘lishenets’ (disenfranchised), one of the symbolic words of political and social life in Soviet Union. While its signifcance as a Soviet historicism can be considered as semantically peripheral, the functioning of this word in the contemporary Russian language demonstrates numerous dynamic processes that lead to important semantic shifts and the creation of new meanings. Some of these meanings draw upon the con - notation of a ‘social outcast’ entrenched in the semantics of this Sovietism. The research is carried out with NKRJ and additional materials of modern literature and mass media.