“Chrez Vsyu Noch’ i Den’ Byl Velikoi Dozhd’ (Through the Whole Night and Day There Was a Great Rain)”: On the History of a Temporal Use of the Preposition Chrez (‘Through’)

The article is devoted to the history of the use of the preposition чрез in combination with the names of time intervals (night, day, morning, evening, with the names of seasons and the words year and time) in the accusative case, which indicate that some event took place during the whole of the named time interval. This construction is found in Old Slavonic; in Old Russian writing it is actively used in historical narrative. In the last quarter of the 17th century, as a result of the increase in translations from Polish, the preposition чрез received semantic development under the influence of the preposition przez; at the same time, the construction чрез A1 in the meaning “throughout A1” also became somewhat widespread. At the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, the use of this construction is characteristic of authors from the close entourage of Peter the Great. In one of the first codifications of the Russian language, V.A. Adodurov's essay “The First Foundations of the Russian Language” (1729–1731), this construction was described as “dissonant”. By the beginning of the 19th century, the frequency of use of the construction falls, as the first place is taken by the construction чрез/через with the name of the time interval in the role of A1, denoting “after A1”. At the same time, the construction was used until the beginning of the 19th century, and sporadically even later. This use of the preposition through has not been the subject of linguists' research so far.