The article examines the speeches of characters from six old translated works from the point of view of artistic axiology, which implies the identification of unusual expressive subject, pictorial and figurative descriptions and interpretation of moods of authors of the works reflected in them. Through the analysis of the characters’ emotional statements, Josephus Flavius’s History of the Jewish War is revealed as the work of a caring historian, The Revelation of Abraham and The Testament of Levchin are revealed as optimistic apocrypha, the chronographic Alexandria reveals the severity of a scribe, The Tale of Akir the Wise reveals gloom, and Stephanites and Ikhnilat reveals a hostile attitude towards the world. The examination of methods of creating severe and skeptical eloquence in the most old translated works led to a preliminary conclusion about the laconic diversity of authorial moods introduced into Russian medieval literature of the 11^th–15^th centuries.