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Abstract: Dictionaries which systematize lexis into certain thematic or semantic classes are widely used in teaching Russian as a foreign language. In Russian schools, such dictionaries can be used to build and expand learners’ vocabulary and to enable them to take a more theoretical approach to lexis as a system of interconnected classes of words. Ideographic dictionaries can also serve as valuable sources in linguistic, cultural, and cognitive studies of the ways language conceptualizes and categorizes the world. The most complex word classes in ideographic dictionaries are those reflecting the work of human mind ('Emotions', 'Speech', 'Intellect'). This article compares grids of ideographic dictionaries of the Russian language to reveal similarities and differences in the way these dictionaries present the lexis and to identify the causes of these differences. For instance, in word classes referring to personality traits and their manifestations in human behaviour there are such semantic constants as courage and cowardice, kindness and cruelty, sincerity and hypocrisy, politeness and impoliteness, integrity and deceitfulness. Along with the constants of human mind, some dictionaries also point out lexical units grouped into classes based on the degree of intensity of qualities (for example, passion or inertia) or relation to the norm (oddity, immoral behaviour). These classes demonstrate the asymmetry of the lexical system, which reflects intensive emotions and anomalies in behaviour.