https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1688-2808
E-mail: berezovich@yandex.ru Tel.: +7 (343) 389-97-38
51, Lenin av., Ekaterinburg, 620000, Russian Federation DSc in Philology, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor, Head of the Department of Russian Language, General Linguistics and Verbal Communication, Ural Federal University
Olesya D. Surikova
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9526-7853
E-mail: surok62@mail.ru Tel.: +7 (343) 389-97-38
51, Lenin av., Ekaterinburg, 620000, Russian Federation PhD in Philology, Senior Research Fellow, Toponymic Laboratory of the Department of Russian Language, General Linguistics and Verbal Communication, Ural Federal University
18/2, Volkhonka str., Moscow, 121019, Russian Federation
Research Fellow, Department of Dialectology and Linguistic Geography, Vinogradov Russian Language Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences
Uri Shterngartz
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8158-5885
E-mail: yshterng0@gmail.com
Ekaterinburg, Russian Federation Independent researcher
The research for this article was carried out within the framework of the project “Regional Identity of Russia: Comparative Historical and Philological Studies,” funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia (topic number FEUZ‑2020-0056).
This article is devoted to the study of the gemstone name “widow’s stone,” which in the Russian tradition means alexandrite, and indicates the popular belief that a woman who wears jewelry with alexandrite will inevitably become a widow. Historical gemology considers that such superstitions arose on Russian soil in the twentieth century and concern the artificial imitation (or synthetic analogue) of alexandrite. A flood of inexpensive jewelry pieces with synthetic alexandrite led to the fact that many women owned them, and many of these were widowed during the bloody events of the first half of the twentieth century. The authors do not reject this version of the origin of the name, but suggest other possible motivations for it. They consider the “alexandrite (folkloric) plot” from the perspective of European mourning fashion (the semiotization of mourning through jewelry; mourning and memorial jewelry) as well as in the context of Russian history. The latter includes the connection of the stone with Emperor Alexander II; the semiotic gemological “standard” (red stones as bloody stones; alexandrite dichroism as a powerful impulse for symbolization); and the Russian lingo-cultural tradition (the caritive motivational model of widowhood in relation to various objects, based on the signs of dark color, non-parity, emptiness and abnormality). Such a comprehensive approach to the study of popular “gemonymy” allows us to include folk names for stones and related phenomena among the objects of ethnolinguistic research.
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