Аңдатпа
In modern Turkological science, it is relevant to study the language of Turkic written legacies written by various graphic systems as Runic, Uighur, Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic. In this context, Kazakh legacies written in Cyrillic at the end of the XIX – early XX century have not been sufficiently studied to date. The article examines how the Turkic peoples, including Kazakhs, adopted Cyrillic script around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the first Cyrillic Kazakh ABC books, self-help books, dictionaries, and other landmarks were published by P.M. Melioransky, N.I. Ilminsky, M.A. Terentyev, V.V. Katarinsky, L. Budagov, and others. I. Altynsarin, A. Baitursynov, T. Bokin, Zh. Kusherbayev, M. Mashanov, and others were among the Kazakh intellectuals who actively started using the Cyrillic alphabet at that time as the enlighteners of the nation. Among Cyrillic publications bilingual dictionaries held a unique position, providing a glimpse into the Kazakhs' way of life during a particular historical period. Due to the fact that they contained both linguistic and ethno-cultural knowledge. The article is devoted to one such dictionary, in particular the «Kyrgyz-Russian Dictionary», which was released in 1897 in Orenburg by B.A. Breslin's publishing company. The unnamed dictionary was created using N.I. Ilminsky's dictionary, «Materials for the study of the Kyrgyz dialect» (Kazan, 1861) that was expanded upon and amended with the help of the Kazakh intellectuals. The article examines the polysemy of these dictionary's words. The polysemous meanings of this dictionary are exposed, together with their lexical and semantic variations, on the basis of the notions of polysemy. This also reveals the continuity of this dictionary polysemous meanings with the lexemes of the contemporary Kazakh language.