Scents in the Russian Literature of the 20th Century (A Case Study Based on Russian National Corpus)

The paper aims to study scents in the Russian literature of the 20th century. In the research literature on the topic theoretical gap and a narrow focus on the study of one particular author or work were identified. To partly fill this gap, for this research was used the method of corpus analysis (Russian National Corpus), which allows to analyse texts from a large time period in the same time. As a result of the study, specific characteristics of scent and aroma transmission and most often adjectives used in the description of olfactory inclusions were found. Also, a categorization of objects was carried out, which showed that the most common aromas in the Russian literature of the 20th century were various plants and flowers, for smells it were food objects. The work also includes an associative experiment in the study of scents of abstract definitions, aimed at identifying correlation between examples from the literature and respondents’ answers.