The works of Anna Vezhbitskaya have been in the center of attention of world and Russian science for almost forty years. In 1999, the publishing house "Languages of Slavic Culture" published a large monograph of the scientist "Semantic universals and description of languages". A new book published in the small series " Language. Semiotics. Culture" of the same publishing house, - "Understanding cultures through keywords" (Moscow, 2001), continues the cycle of linguoculturological research by A. Vezhbitskaya primarily in the field of semantics, but not only. The main points developed in her work are that different languages differ significantly from each other in their vocabulary, and this property reflects the differences in the value characteristics of cultural communities.

In the preface to the publication, its translator A.D. Shmelev reasonably writes that " A. Vezhbitskaya's book demonstrates that studying the vocabulary of a language gives us objective (italics ours. - O. N.) data that allows you to judge the basic values of the culture served by this language. A thorough linguistic analysis can serve as the basis for a rigorous (...) using a universal semantic metalanguage makes it possible to present the results of such a study in such a way that they are understandable even to people who do not belong to this culture and are not familiar with this language" (p.11). This remark of the author of the preface seems to us very significant also because the cultural components of a particular language have not yet been fully clarified (and in many cases even unknown). How do they affect the

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formation of society? What is the relationship between language components and cultural components? How do semantic "transformations" occur within the language system, and does this affect the movement of society itself? These and many other issues are solved by A. Vezhbitskaya on the pages of her book.

In the Introduction, the author draws attention to the fact that there are "linguistic-specific designations for special types of things" (p. 14). How they manifest themselves in a particular language is clearly seen from the example given:" (...) it is no accident, "she writes," that there is no word in the English language corresponding to the Russian verb christosovatsya, interpreted by the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary as " to exchange a three-fold kiss (as an Easter greeting)", (...) or that it does not contain a word corresponding to the Japanese word mai, which means a formal act when the future bride and her family meet for the first time with the future groom and his family" (p.14-15).

In the introductory part, the author also addresses other issues of the polylinguistic space: anthropology, cognitive linguistics, semantic metalanguage, etc. Here are the headings of some sections: "Words and cultures", " Different words, different ways of thinking?", "Cultural development and lexical composition of the language", "Word frequency and culture", "Key words and nuclear concepts of culture", "Linguistic and conceptual universals", etc.

Most Russian language researchers are interested in the examples and comments of Russian - Slavic correspondences in A. Vezhbitskaya's book, as well as how different meanings are penetrated into the cultural concepts of related and unrelated languages. The scientist gives the following example:" (...) the Russian word destiny expresses a historically transmitted idea of life, through which Russians communicate to each other about how people live, and on the basis of which their life attitudes develop. The word fate (a high-frequency word in Russian) not only indicates this inherited concept, but also provides a key to its understanding " (p. 44). In this sense, the scientist's ideas overlap with the views of N. I. Tolstoy and Yu. S. Stepanov, who considered folklore "attitudes" and semantic models of culture, as well as their influence on the linguistic "substratum of society".

In many ways, the second chapter of the book is informative and original - "Vocabulary as a key to the ethnosociology of culture: models of "friendship" in different cultures". From the sections of this part ("Druzhba-universal human properties", "The changing meaning of the English word friend"', "Models of" friendship "in Russian culture", "Models of" friendship "in Polish culture", " Mate-the key to Australia-

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Russian culture") the most significant place is occupied by the analysis of this model in Russian. And this is not accidental. As A. writes: Vezhbitskaya, referring to the data of the 1970s by the well-known sociologist I. Cohn, for example, "Americans put friendship on the tenth place in the list of values, whereas in a similar survey in Russia friendship was on the sixth place" (p.105).

The very property of native speech, according to the author of the book, suggests the presence of synonymous groups of different qualities, in one way or another expressing this model: friend, girlfriend, acquaintance, friend, comrade, etc. Interesting is the remark of A. Vezhbitskaya: "The Russian language has a particularly well-developed categorization of relations between people, not only in comparison with Western European languages, but also in comparison with other Slavic languages" (p. 106). Further, the author undertakes a semantic and cultural analysis of the words-models friend, girlfriend, friend, comrade, relatives, determines the degree of their frequency and usage. "It is interesting," she notes , "that the Russian friend is often used as a form of address, especially in letters that begin with such addresses as' Natasha, my friend 'and end with similar expressions of friendship, such as' your friend Andrey ' "(p.113). This functional motif is absent, for example, in English, where the phrase tu friend is also used as an appeal, but "its use is ironic, sarcastic or patronizing" (Ibid.). Interesting arguments of a foreign scientist about the word comrade and its semantic metamorphoses in the Soviet era. "So far, you've been approached, comrade," A. writes. Wierzbicka - this was a sign that you were "your own"; when you lost this title and the right to apply this title to others, it meant that you were excluded from the number of "your own"... " (p. 125). And further: "If it were necessary to name one word as the key word of the Soviet Russian language, it would probably be this particular word" (Ibid.). Although, we note that the author of the book is not at all inclined to overly "politicize" the meaning of this word-concept of our life and rightly distinguishes between its two shells. The first one, which was discussed above, was the most frequent in the Soviet era and followed such words as year, business, person, life, day. Another comrade, according to A. Vezhbitskaya, implies "collective identification": "Our word is proud "comrade" is dearer to us than all beautiful words " (p. 133).

It is worth noting, however, that the original word comrade was not as ideologized as it turned out later. In particular, it is recorded in the Central Russian language of the XVI-XVII centuries. and even earlier, from the XIV century, when it meant "companion", "participant", and in other Slavic languages it was synonymous with the words "apprentice", " community-

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vo " (see: Chernykh P. Ya. Istoriko-etymologicheskiy slovar sovremennogo russkogo yazyka [Historical and Etymological Dictionary of the modern Russian language], vol. 2, Moscow, 1993, p. 247).

Finally, the third chapter of A. Wierzbicka's book - on the word freedom in Latin, English, Russian, and Polish - is also of some interest from the point of view of fashionable studies of words as "cultural concepts"in recent years.

A. Vezhbitskaya's book is based on a lot of factual material and is remarkable in that it draws the attention of Russian readers to the specifics and color of individual words - models that exist in other languages, but function in them in different ways. Such an intersection of" conceptual "and" cultural " worlds testifies to the universal properties of language in general, where it is still used (especially in comparative typological and semantic studies). there are still a lot of white spots. To discover and explain them is a task that A. Vezhbitskaya also solved in the pages of her book.

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