The article examines the semantic dominants – the titles of individual parts of Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov’s novella “The Life of Alexandra Ivanovna”, which are a vivid linguistic means of expressing the author's viewpoint. The aim of the study is to carry out a philological analysis of the dominant lexemes in a contextual environment, identifying their place and role in the narrative structure of the literary text, and revealing the conceptual contents of the piece of writing.The article characterizes the lexemes carriage–cab–droshky–cart, that name means of transportation around the city, reflect the deteriorating financial situation of the main character and form a gradation.The dominants under analysis not only bare their direct meaningin the text of the novella, but also receive a metaphoricalinterpretation: they become a symbol of a social status of the young woman at different periods of her life.The dominant lexeme carriage, which is the title of the first chapter of the work, is actively used further in the subsequent parts of the story, creating in the text semantic oppositions with other dominant lexemes of the general gradation series: carriage–cab; carriage–droshky; carriage–cart. The article concludes that the semantic dominants contribute to the development of the plot, create the dynamics of characters and events, and combine individual parts of the work into a common fictional narration. They have large semantic capacity and form a close semantic interaction with the lexical and phraseological environment. Dominant lexemes are involved in the formation of text modality, the creation of stylistic figures (gradations and antitheses), and are also a means of the author's irony and philosophical generalizations.