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In the article the functioning of the words besschastye “misfortune” and besschastny “unfortunate” is studied in the texts of different genres of Russian folklore (in proverbs and sayings, riddles, chastushka-ditties, charms, folktales, spiritual poems, bylina epics, historical and lyric songs, laments), as well as in literary texts and live on-the-air speech fragments. These lexical itemes with dialect (besschastye) or mainly dialect (besschastny) appearance are of high frequency only in the northern Russian lamentation. They almost never occur in the texts of the other folklore genres or appear in lamentation contexts (the fact can be considered as a result of the inter-genre borrowing from lamentation discourse). The prevalence of the words besschastye and besschastny in lamentation language can be explained by three factors. The first — semantic — factor is the importance of the concept of “besschastye” (“misfortune”) for lamentations’ conceptual system that desperately need the exponents for the base genre opposition “fortune — misfortune”. There in the lamentations besschastny characteristic is ubiquitous: it can be applied to pronouns, nouns indicating family and social status or their substitution nominations, names of periods and time intervals (like day, youth), to the names of human actions and events that happen to people, things that surround them, to the names of parts and organs of the human body and so on. The second — structural — factor causing the activity of the lexemes besschastye and besschastny in lamentation is the fact of their participation in the figure of amplification and their functioning as permanent sympathetic epithets. The third factor actualizes etymological relations of these words. Besschastye the noun is derived from the shastye by means of prefix with depriving significance (“bez-“ — “non- “) from the the word schastye ‘fortune, happiness’ rising to Proto-Savic *sъ and *čęstь ‘chast’, part’) can mean not only ‘lack of happiness’ but also ‘lack of a part’ that is associated with specific ideas about the share / the quantas in rites of transition.
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