Abstract
The article presents a manifold function of bilingualism in the works of Russian emigration writers and thinkers in Paris. The phenomenon of bilingualism and the role of someone else’s word are considered contextually, in connection with the Russian intellectual elite’s orientation towards the dialogue with French culture as part of Le Studio Franco-Russe. Examples of the occurrence of someone else’s/foreign word (including aphorisms) as a semantic subtext activator are analysed and interpreted in philosophical texts (N. Bierdiaev, V. Lossky) and in literary ones of the Nobel prize winner I. Bunin and G. Gazdanov, connected with “existential tradition”. The subject of detailed investigation is the sense-generating function of a quote in French from Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir in Gazdanov’s short story Счастье, which activates the overt or covert presence of the anthropological concept of happiness known in European culture (Pascal, Saint Augustine). Other intertextual traces are also found, making references to the European reflection on two types of cognition – on the value of feelings and emotions in cognizing the world and in interpersonal relations (Nietzsche, Jung).