The semantic connection between Russian words that tend to be used figuratively and the proverbs and sayings these words contribute to metaphorically is examined and illustrated with metaphors of human life. The motivational, formal-semantic relationship between metaphorical words and phraseologisms is found to be fairly common in Contemporary Russian and it is stressed that Russian instruction at both the secondary and tertiary levels should focus on both the structural-semantic and the aesthetic-expressive properties of phraseologisms. (Copyright 1997, Sociological Abstracts, Inc., all rights reserved.) (Z. Dubiel in LLBA 1997, vol. 31, n. 4)