The paper investigates a distinguishing feature of the Russian during initial period of the literary language formation that is redundancy of the lexical-semantic system. The article analyzes the causes and describes the manifestations of such redundancy on the super-text level (synonymy, the features of which in this period are the very broad nature of the phenomenon, frequent doubleness and the variability) and the textual level (in the form of pleonastic names, tautological combinations with redundant dependent word, amplifying combinations of single-root lexemes, formula combinations of business writing and private correspondence, which contain repeated etiquette information).