The report examines the problem of distinguishing between the national and the international in Russian paremiology. The reconstruction of the so-called «language picture of the world» (A.Vezhbitskaya and others) is aimed mainly at characterizing the national component of the Russian language, which is objectively justified by interest in specific features of vocabulary, phraseology and paremiology. At the same time, the international character of many paremias is underestimated, attributed to the «purely Russian» national color. The report suggests ways of eliminating this underestimation through a broad cross-language comparison.