The paper is concerned with the most fundamental compositional divide to be found in lyrical discourse, consisting in that the latter one is normally split into an empirical part, presenting the author’s concrete experience, and a focal part, where the author discovers some signifi cant truth or/and changes her attitude towards the world. It is claimed in the paper that, more generally, one of the specifi c linguistic properties of focal fragments is their higher and/or specially underscored informativity, and, in particular, one of the means recruited to emphasize it is inverted word order.

Scribes of the oldest part of the manuscript posted their names in two notes. In the fi rst note the final letter of the scribe’s name is seriously damaged. It is generally believed that his name was Mičьka (Мичька). The author proves that the scribe’s name is a derivative from the suffi x –ko (Mičьko). In the second note the name of the scribe is heavily damaged in the initial part, which results in a number of interpretations. According to the author’s studies the name of the scribe was Potamij (Потамий, gr. PÒtamoj).

The article is devoted to personal nouns with suffi x -ant in Polish and Belarusian. The lexical and semantic analysis of the studied group of words showed that in both languages they belong to the literary variety of language, however, numerous nouns represent rare vocabulary, sometimes characterized stylistically. The overwhelming majority of names defi nes the names of active contractors of activities, less often – passive contractors, and least frequently – names of owners. In addition, the nomina masculina with suffi x -ant belong to the attributive names, defi ning people on the basis of their character traits, tendencies, and often vices. The s tudied lexis include archaic or colloquial derivatives. Among the specialist words, there were examples representing such fi elds as law and judiciary, economics and trade, religion and art, education and science.

The article is concerned with methods of translating V. Shukshin’s occasionalisms into English. The study material has been extracted from translations done by A. Bromfield, K.M. Cook, R. Daglish, W.G. Fiedorow, J. Givens, G. Gutsche, G.A. Hosking, D. Illiffe, L. Michael, H. Smith, N. Ward. Based on the analysis of the material the following means of conveying V. Shukshin’s occasionalisms can be distinguished: translation by substitution, translation by means modifying idiomatic expressions, applying semantic calquing, using a descriptive method to recreate occasionalisms, as well as lexical and grammatical transformations. Two of them can be considered fully equivalent ways of recreating the writer’s occasionalisms (translation by means modifying idiomatic expressions, semantic calquing), the rest, however, should be regarded as only partially accurate.

This article presents the concept of fate in the stories of the poet and literary sketches of twentieth-century Russian writer Jurij Dombrowski. The writer creates psychological portraits of Romantic poets, including George Byron, Alexander Gribojedov, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, focusing on selected episodes from their lives. In the article attempt is made to prove that the fate of the nineteenth-century artists serve as an excuse to explain the problems of contemporary author. Characteristics of historical fi gures are made through the prism of Dombrowski’s biography. The combination of biography and autobiography allows Dombrowski to present the subjective concept of the poet: a man condemned to loneliness and misunderstanding, confl icted with the epoch, trying to overcome the tragic dependence on historical conditions through art and creativity.

The author examines Ways of Russian Theology in Georges Florovsky works in the light of contemporary trends in epistomology and a modern understanding of intelligibility. In the 20th century attemt were undertaken to develop a project of theology that would address the current intellectual demands and at the same time be in the service of faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Saviour. The currently prevailing concept of teology as an ongoing interpretation of the event of Jesus as Christ and Word of God revealed in history, recognizes an interdependece between the fundamental Christian experience (Tradition) and the historical experience of “here and now”

The foregoing article is an attempt at answering the question, whether Fiodor Sologub is rightly called a eulogist of evil and an apologist of devil, as well as a God-iconoclast. For this purpose the author is trying to revise the hitherto views concerning the fi gure of God in the lyric of the Russian poet. In the effect of conducted studies it was established that the myth of Sologub, “the literary Jack the Ripper”, functioning well until today was based on unjust and often prejudicial opinions of persons from the symbolist’s generation, as well as of the later experts in literature, who ascribed to them the “crimes” committed by the protagonists of his novels (sadism, erotomania, necrophilia and Satanism). The key problem of God-iconoclasty in turn, as it has been revealed, is connected with the issue of literary mask, a play with the reader. On one hand, the poet’s God-iconoclasty is an attempt of “getting inscribed” in the creative tendency that predominated in the Russian literature of that time (the “diabolic symbolism”), on the other – it constitutes one of the stages in looking for God and the development of lyrical “I”, carrying autobiographical traits.

The author of the article analyses this phenomenon on the example of literature based discussions among researcher provided by V. Lepahin and M. Maslova. The main subject of discussion is a poem of Nikolay Gumilyov’s Andrei Rublev. In this particular case this had led to the fact that researchers were unable to see obvious connection with the Song of Solomon in the poem by Nikolai Gumilev and came to the false conclusion of incompetence Nikolai Gumilev in biblical matters. The article helps to understand some of the trends that are popular in modern Russian literary study.

The present article introduces a new approach to the Old Russian texts by revealing metrical patterns underlying seemingly prose texts of the chronicle Povest vremennykh let. These patterns proved to be a shared feature of Eastern Slavic oral epic traditions. Thus, ideas of Ivan Franko about metrical character of the chronicles and Ivan Nikiforov’s claim about metrical affi nities of Eastern Slavic epic traditions are developed and enriched by up to date linguistic as well as ethnomusicological observations. Metrical affi nities of certain fragments of the chronicle Povest vremennykh let and Eastern Slavic epic give new clues to the possible persistence of oral epic in written form and consequently broaden the range of Old Russian texts that can be regarded as epic. Poetical epic corpus, enlarged in this way, gives a new relevant context to Slovo o polku Igoreve, authenticity of which can be proven now with more certainty on the basis of metrical affi nities with the fragments of chronicle of presumably oral origin.

The author, putting the metaphor of “a living dead” to the interpretation, tries to find the common points in the creative output of both writers i.e. Pushkin and Kharms. Both writers, belonging to extremely different literary periods and using other medium, were interested in the most important matters, among others the matter of life and death. Paradoxical metaphor of “a living dead” may imply not only a person being physically exhausted but above all a person deprived of emotions, experience and human reactions, whose fate brings nothing else but the inevitability of death. However, the matter that links both Pushkin and Kharms is the concept of “a coincidence”, which rules human fate, which is unpredictable, hard to avoid and which is a tool at hands of the providence.

The author of the dissertation described two unpublished so far hand written musical Oktoihs (Znamenny chant) of the Old Believers from his private collection. Based on those manuscripts the author indicates the important codicological and paleographical features of musical writing of the Theodosian and Pomorian Old Believers. Furthermore, the author presents the structure of the Oktoih book used by the Old Believers and makes overview of the polish literature concerning the discussed issues. The aim of the dissertation is to encourage other collectors of ancient manuscripts to share their collections and elaborations with researchers.