he article deals with the main English equivalents to the Russian constructions expressing positive emotive concepts (interest/ excitement, joy/delight/happiness, love). The lexico-semantic analysis is accomplished on the basis of English translations A. Chekhov’s plays made at different times by both famous and anonymous interpreters. The Russian lexemes expressing the positive emotive concepts are represented by different parts of speech (volnenie, volnovat’sya, vzvolnovanno; radost’, radostno, vesel’e, lubov’, lubit’, etc) and some set expressions. The author identifies the types of lexical variability of the English emotive lexemes in the translated texts corresponding to the original source. All English transformations are subdivided into 3 groups: 1) part-of-speech/syntactical-function-preserved-status (includes cases of correspondence between English and Russian adjectives/attributes, English and Russian verbs/predicates) 2) part-of-speech/syntactical-function-changed-status (includes cases of correspondence between Russian nouns and English verbs and vice versa), 3) set expressions and phrases with emotive semantics. Analysis of the positive emotive concepts as the most important components of the linguistic picture of the world both English and Russian enables to determine some common and distinguishing features of English and Russian mentalities. Keywords: Linguistic picture of the world, types of lexical variability, positive emotional concepts, translation transformations