The article examines the range of abusive vocabulary in Nikolay S. Leskov’s novel “Soboritians” and story “Islanders” and Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s novel “The Bro­thers Karamazov” as one of the characteristic features of the authors’ idiolect. It reveals a correlation between expletives and the types of characters in these works and suggests that their use is governed by strict determinism. The functions of abusive words are marked. It reveals that the analyzed literary works by Leskov and Dostoevsky are marked by the predominance of the expletives scoundrel, fool, beast, jester (ʻpodletsʼ, ʻdurakʼ, tvar’ ʼ, ʻshutʼ) among others. Attention is also paid to the high frequency of the word ʻdevilʼ (ʻtchyortʼ). The analyzed material confirms the hypothesis of the relationship between the frequency of expletives and types of linguistic identity. The inability of identifying oneself with any class or social group, a kind of social schizophrenia that leads to swearing, aggression and a nervous, often split personality, creates a special type of linguistic identity – Homo Increpans (“Swearing Man”). The idea reaffirms that Nikolay S. Leskov and Fyodor M. Dostoevsky themselves belong to the Homo Increpans archetype as well: the active use of abusive words in texts of different genres, not just fiction, typifies their idiostyle to a great extent. For the purpose of comparison of the use of invective features by different authors the concept of associative field of the text is given and the fragments of such kind of fields in Nikolay S. Leskov’s novel “Soboritians” and story “Islanders” and Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov” are introduced.