LEXICAL MEANS OF REFLECTING THE RUSSIAN MENTALITY IN THE TEXTBOOKS ON RUSSIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

The paper deals with the issue of representing the Russian mentality in the texts of Russian as a foreign language`s textbooks. When teaching Russian, through the language foreigners learn about the historically determined cultural codes of the people, the peculiarities of the national character and speech behaviour of Russian people. As a result of the study, the authors summarized the main features of the Russian mentality presented in 25 scientific works, analyzed the texts of 50 manuals on Russian as a foreign language, determined the means of reflecting the Russian mentality, and indicated the national features broadcast in educational texts. As the analysis showed, the texts of the Russian as a foreign language present the following features of the Russian mentality: hard work, laziness / passivity, caution in conducting business, ability to contemplate, love of freedom and fatalism, maximalism in expressing feelings and emotions, sociability, approval of cognitive activity, value of relationships. These qualities are translated through stable expressions of a metaphorical nature, stable expressions with nationally significant lexemes: longing, fate, soul, will; lexical and grammatical techniques (antithesis, anaphora, deixis, predicates, nominatives). As a basic method, a method of complex linguistic description was used, including methods of generalization, interpretation and classification of language facts. The results obtained during the analysis may be used in the development of new textbooks on Russian as a foreign language, more specifically aimed at developing the socio-cultural competence of students.