Texts of Patriotic Songs as an Object of Analysis in Russian Language Lessons in High School

Abstract

The article discusses the possibility of using the texts of the Russian military patriotic song in the Russian language (native) lessons in order to form the civic identity of the student, to understand the connection between the language and the history of the people, the peculiarities of the Russian mentality, to enrich students’ ideas about the ways of expressing thoughts and feelings in words. Assuming that the genre, language and content-semantic aspects of the texts of Russian patriotic songs have a rich educational potential, the author emphasizes that their use reduces the shortage of patriotic texts in Russian language textbooks for high school. The author analyzes the possibilities of comparative linguistic and cognitive and axiological analysis of these texts and offers methodological recommendations regarding its implementation. The article emphasizes that the attention of students is drawn to the content core of Russian patriotic songs from different eras, the images of a warrior-soldier, native land, home, symbols that speak of the state and the Orthodox faith, adherence to the traditions of the fathers. An interesting aspect of the analysis of such texts can be the observation of the dynamics and continuity of language changes, which are reflected in the grammar and lexical structure of texts. Among the methods and devices of working on the texts of Russian patriotic songs, the author names close reading with marks, lexical analysis using dictionaries, observation of unusual syntactic constructions (figures of speech), creating associative chains, verbal drawing, highlighting national linguistic concepts, analyzing the figurative side of the text, creating their texts based on the author’s song text. As an example, the author proposes the texts of such military patriotic songs as “Soldier’s Song” by Fedor N. Glinka (1812), “The Holy War” by Vasily I. Lebedev-Kumach (1941), “Sky of the Slavs” by Konstantin E. Kinchev (2000) and others, and the methodology for working on them.