2014 Vol. 5 №1

This article considers the radical changes in the functioning of literary lexis in the Russian language of the early 21st century, namely the causes and consequences of the semantic devaluation of the noun пафос and its syntactic derivate, the adjective пафосный, whose semantic transformation is explained by the speech expansion of glamorous lifestyle as an aggressive subculture.

This article presents a gender portrait of a man as seen in modern “male” Russian chanson. Two types of such portrait are identified: the lyrical one that is reconstructed on the basis of the songwriter’s self-expression and the objective one that develops when the songwriter looks at a man as another. In these circumstances, a man appears as a philosopher striving to comprehend life and his place in it.