The article emphasizes the importance of studying the vocabulary of written documents for a better understanding of the development of the Russian literary language. The author gives a brief overview of Pismovnik by N. G. Kurganov written in the second half of the 18th century and analyses language material that refl ects the interaction between the bookish and colloquial forms of the Russian language of the period. The author isolates groups of learned words in Kratkie zamislovatie povesti included in the part Prisovokuplenie II of Pismovik, paying particular attention to the features of their use in a literary text. The paper also focuses on the notion of “vulgar” (prostonarodny)
vocabulary in the 18th century, as well as on the reasons of its vague defi nition at that time. By revealing “vulgar” words in Kratkie zamislovatie povesti the author shows that these words were not regarded as rude. The investigation into the particularities of such kind of words in the studied text leads to conclude that the combination of bookish and colloquial lexical units is governed by the principle of relevance. The author suggests that these observations may support the hypothesis
claiming the absence of a strict distinction between bookish and colloquial language in the 18th century.