About the book: 2001 / The purpose of this book is to show that Russian hermeneutics, which for the author is formed by Mikhail Bakhtin’s “metalinguistics” and “trans” -semantics" by Vladimir Toporov, is possible as an independent humanities science. The entire book consists of notes of different orders to five answers to the question of what the word said in one fairy tale means. The cross-cutting theme of the book is otherness, otherness according to the Russian language and folklore and the literature that continues folklore. Interpreting a word, we say what it means, but what is significant is different, special, exceptional; the word “think” means, first of all, “talking to oneself,” and “I myself” means something different in relation to people who are different to me; but the fool is also exemplary; the superfull number following the round one is the number of another, the island is its place, red is its color. And another is one, but also another, he is unique and not like everyone else, someone or no one, and there are three othernesses: the selfhood of each “I”, the otherness of all one’s own as one and the foreignness of someone else’s.