The writings of Lyudmila Ulitskaya, one of the most popular contemporary Russian novelists, attracts lots of attention from both Russian and foreign literary critics and scholars. The author’s popularity is also confirmed by the fact that her works have been translated into more than 20 different languages. The main goal of this article is to provide an analysis of the spiritual dimension of the novel The Kukotsky Enigma. At its very essence, the main subject of the study is the plot, which focuses on the anthropological aspect in the context of the transcendental dimension as such, hagiographic motifs and biblical metaphorics. The article also discusses the synthetism of genetic elements appearing in the novel that allowed the writer to combine Christian, mythopoeic, axiological, soteriological and theological contexts. Furthermore, an attempt was made to analyse the characters, considering spiritual and moral values they represent. The intersection of two spheres – the Sacred and the profane – together with the loci associated with them constitute additional object of the research.

The subject of the analysis and interpretation of this article consists in philosophy and poetics of photography as a medium of memory in Maria Stepanova’s novel Pamyati Pamyati [In Memory of Memory]. Meanwhile, it is aimed at revealing a unique attitude of the novel’s author towards photography and its derivatives as a medium of memory and yet towards memory itself as a mandatory obligation in its essence for all the generations after the Holocaust. In a given context the notion of postmemory is binding and, hence, a separate part of the article is devoted to it. In view of the centuries-old and universal interest around the phenomenon of memory, mainly in the existential context, at the beginning of the article the emphasis is solely put on several selected aspects of it as articulated by Aristotle, Plato, Saint Augustine, Walter Benjamin and Paul Ricoeur. Respectively, the following terms are addressed by them: memoria, aisthesis, gesture of passage or picture – monument. In the article it has been shown that Stepanova is fascinated by the truth of time, the premonition of the Holocaust. She searched the shadows of the past on the faces and in the events captured in the pre-war film frames in such a way that one can experience his connection with that world, discover himself internally in that structure because, as she claims, her text is the novel about non-memory.

The article contains an analysis of Boris and Gleb novel written by a contemporary Russian writer Y. Buida. The analysis is realized in reference to certain postmodern tendencies in literature. The author emphasizes mainly the dialogic character of postmodernism and depicts particular features of the movement in post-Soviet culture. Specifically, the dialogic character of the novel is realized through multilayer interferences of culture codes which suit the idea of chaosmic reality by Deleuze and Guatarri. Correspondingly, the dialogue is also displayed by the eclecticism of genders and styles.

This article presents a picture of war in Mikhail Shishkin’s novel The Light and the Dark (2010). In the narrative, the author introduces a character who fought on the side of the Russian army during the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China (1898–1901). When describing the events of that period, Shishkin relied on numerous archival materials, especially the study by Dmitry Yanchevetsky At the Walls of Immovable China. As a military journalist who participated in the rebellion, this author blamed the Chinese people, disgruntled with the domination of other countries in their country, for the war. Shishkin, abundantly drawing on Yanchevetsky’s factual research, in his book reevaluates the historical events and condemns the aggression of the Eight-Nation Alliance on China. The writer compares this war to the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland in 1939 citing a term from Aleksandr Tvardovsky’s poem: “the infamous war”. Because Russia’s participation in quashing the Boxer Rebellion remains a little-known fact among Russian readers, it becomes a generalized representation of war in the novel: a universal one. Shishkin adopts a pacifist attitude here. He debunks the myth of war, which presupposes a sacralization of killing and a heroic death of soldiers. There are no glorious warriors on the battlefield, only corpses of anonymous soldiers, blood, the smell of rotting bodies, chopped off heads, flies, and dirt. In this novel, war is an evil that alters one’s perception of reality and emotional reactions and destroys elementary moral principles.

The aim of this article is to answer the question, “How Philaret Drozdov understood God’s holiness and human holiness and how both the ideas were displayed in his writings?” The research material constitutes selected homilies and a catechism. In the first place, the author discusses the definition of holiness and its understanding by the Orthodox Church with regard to the issue of deification. Also, he familiarizes the reader with the concept of holiness in its various aspects. Subsequently, the homilies and the catechism of Philaret Drozdov are analysed. The article shows the Moscow Metropolitan’s beliefs about the essence of human holiness as well as about the eschatological dimension of temporality and the pneumatological aspect of holiness, the issue of grace and a human seen as a vessel of God’s energy. The author proves that the Moscow Metropolitan continued in his works the traditions of the Church Fathers and creatively developed the most important assumptions of Orthodox anthropology and soteriology and, hence enriching Russian spiritual thought.

This article presents an overview of a literary sketch The Bathing Beaches on the Baltic Coast in the West Guberniyas… by Faddei Bulgarin (1789-1859), first published in Russian in 1827 (“Severnaya Pchela”, № 122-125) and in 1828 in Polish (“Kolumb”, vol. 1, № 4). The interpretive context for the story is founded on author’s journeys across the Baltic region and his stay in Karlov near Dorpat as well as development of the resorts by the Baltic Sea. Bulgarin’s sketch was the first description of Palanga (Polish: Połąga) as a seaside resort town. Among other elements of the writing the article discusses its composition and style, focusing primarily on a number of descriptive features concerning: the sea, the land, the nature, entertainments, local inhabitants and travellers and their customs.

Dmitriev-Mamonov is primarily known for his story that describes inhabitants of other planets. The story contains some controversial elements including an unflattering image of the clergy, heliocentrism, and the possibility of multiplicity of worlds. He also authored a Chronology and a free translation of part of the Psalter in which he included some of his theological views.

This article presents the essential information about the Polish language variety in Stubno, a village located about 20 km north-east of Przemyśl, close to the border with Ukraine. Until 1945, the village was inhabited by Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. A significant part of the paper is devoted to some passages authored by one M.W,. a woman who lived in Stubno in 1924-2004 and kept records in her personal journals from 1981 and until her death. In this case, her parents were Poles, but maternal grandparents were of Ukrainian descent. The author of the analysed texts received primary education only, worked on a farm and raised children and never left the village for long periods of time. Also, the notes contain a number of information concerning mostly farming and significant events of both the country’s and the world’s history. In addition, the texts include a language commentary on the most important phonetic, morphologic, word-formation, syntactic and lexical features of the local variety that occurred in the records. Furthermore, the notes provide answers to some questions about regional features of the Southern Kresy (present-day Ukraine) as reflected in the language of native inhabitants including the extent of the influence of Ukrainian, together with its local variety of the Nadsannia region.

This article analyses the history of researches on some aspects of the syntax of “small” numerals dva, tri, chetyre (two, three, four) undertaken in the 18th and 19th century Russian grammars. The main subject of the analysis is the views of the authors of these grammars regarding the syntactic structure of the combination of the above-named numerals with a noun. Particular attention is paid to the reasoning of the authors of the aforementioned grammars with reference to such combinations in which the numeral appears in the nominative/ accusative case. The nature of the relationship between the numeral in the nominative/ accusative and the noun was described by linguists in different ways. Furthermore, also the form of a noun in such a combination was interpreted in various ways. A widespread synchronous interpretation that the form of a noun which co-occurs with the numerals dva, tri, chetyre in the nominative or homonymous accusative is the singular genitive (dva stola – two tables), currently seen in both didactic and scientific modern linguistic studies, has been present in the literature since the 18th century. Nevertheless, in many works of the discussed period one can find completely different views on the problem (e.g. in the I. Ornatovsky’s or A. Vostokov’s grammars).

This article dwells upon paraphrase in which proper names function as both the object of nomination and the component in the model of its creation. The device is analysed as it occurs in the language of modern Ukrainian publicist discourse. Firstly, the topicality of the research consists in the fact that mass media encourage the expansion of the lexical stock of a language by establishing new language trends. Secondly, publicist discourse is considered to be particularly exposed to the use of paraphrase, and so it is worth studying the peculiarities of the way paraphrases function in mass media. The given article aims to show how proper names may act in the process of modelling paraphrase, where a proper noun can serve two functions: as an object of paraphrase and as a component of its modelling. The article revisits the materials from M. Stepanenko’s book Politychne s’ogodennja ukrai’ns’koi’ movy: aktual’nyj peryfrastykon: monografija (Current state of Ukrainian political discourse: paraphrase of today). The materials are supplemented with examples collected by the author of the article from recent online publications of Ukrainian press. The use of proper names as objects of paraphrase or elements of its structure testifies to their exceptional ability to model pragmatic meaning. Pragmatic information reflected in paraphrase draws attention to the most essential qualities of a subject, a phenomenon or a person – those most important qualities that help understand a specific situation, phenomenon, behaviour, etc. An effective way of modelling paraphrase is to use a precedent. Derivatives whose bases are precedent units better reflect the peculiarities of a given culture, the way of thinking and every nation’s perception of reality, the system of its worldview and value orientations. The creation of paraphrase with proper names as their constituents encourages the fulfilment of a range of functions, in particular nominative, decorative, euphemist, impressive, compressive, attractional and axiological ones. The analysis of the materials leads to the conclusion that the majority of proper names-driven paraphrase is primarily essential for a given text. However, as some of them may enter everyday vocabulary, the author of the article emphasises the need to constantly trace the paraphrase phenomena and their systematic lexicographic realisation.

This article researches the debatable issue in semasiology, particularly the origin of an idiom captured in four Slavic languages: Ukrainian zbyty z pantelyku, Russian sbit’ s pantalyku, Belarusian zbits’ z pantalyku, Polish zbić z pantałyku. The subject of analysis is fictional texts and lexicographical sources in which this phraseological unit first appeared. All etymological hypotheses developed by language experts during 19th-20th centuries were dedicated to the explanation of the word «pantelyk». The difficulty of revealing the figurative basis of the expression is due to the fact that this keyword does not belong to the Slavic vocabulary. This circumstance made it complicated to explain how the term «pantelyk» influenced the original figurative meaning of the idiom «seduce out of the right way». The new etymological version, offered by the article’s author, is that the idiom zbyty z pantelyku can be reconstructed as a semantic chain: throw off a course → seduce out of the right way → to throw into confusion → zbyty z pantelyku. The word «pantelyk», which wasn’t a part of any dialect, is a nonce formation or an occasional expression that emerged as a result of a burlesque travesty genre in the poem Eneyida by Ivan Kotlyarevsky.

The study analyzes the Ruthenian language of a remarkable bilingual print that appeared in the important Orthodox cultural center Ostrih in Church Slavonic and in Ruthenian “prosta mova” (“common language”) in 1607. It offers a critical evaluation of earlier studies and adds several new observations and theses.

Nowadays, the Polish Old Believers live in a language island. Language islands are detached from their ethnolinguistic roots and suffer a constant shortage of language structures. On the one hand, they acquire the language of the dominant group; on the other hand, it is important for them to preserve the language of their ancestors. The Old Believers’ Russian dialect has been influenced by the Polish language for over a century. As a result of the territorial proximity of the Old Believers’ homeland with the compact Belarusian language territory as well as exposure to Belarusian language and its dialects, “Polish” Old Believers’ speech bears many features characteristic for them. The main aim of this paper is to present the prepositions of space in the local dialect of Old Believers in Poland and to describe their characteristics. The “Polish” Old Believers’ narratives investigated in this paper contain many examples of use of the prepositions of space typical for their indigenous dialects as well as the Belarusian language and dialects. There are also many examples of use of such prepositions that can be considered as a result of Polish influence on the Russian dialect of Old Believers living in Poland.

In the first part of this article the author suggests a new etymology for the East Slavic adjective horošiĭ ʻgoodʼ (in Old Russian ʻbeautifulʼ) – from IE *ker(ə)- ʻburn, blazeʼ extended by the determinative -s-: richly attested *kor-s- > Proto Slavonic *xor-x- (> *xoršьjь) with the affective x-, like many other words. As proposed by many scholars, one of the variants of this root is present in Slavonic *krasa ʻbeautyʼ that corresponds to the original meaning of the adjective horošiĭ. The determinative -s- is commonly used for extending the root *ker(ə)-. The second part deals with three proper names in the (Old) Russian mythology and folklore that come, in the author’s opinion, from Iranic languages. The analysis of the early Old Russian written sources (The Ostromir’s Gospel and chronicles) allows to approve that the original form of the theonym Xors was Xorŭsŭ coming from the genitive form of the Iranian word for ‘sun’ in the truncated compound name (most likely, ‘son of the sun’ as a name of the deity of sunrise). The name of the tale bird Mogoveĭ/Magoveĭ corresponds to Avestan (Gath.) magavan-, adj. ‘belonging to the Zoroastrian community’, Old Indic maghá-van(t)- ‘generous; giver (also an epithet of Indra)’, Old Persian magav-, an adjective denoting a Median tribe whose representatives had got the rank of priests, ‘magic, magician’, Pāli maghavā, the name of Sakka. This name corresponds to another fairy bird name recorded on the same territory (in the basin of the Mezen, the region of Archangelsk) ‒ Vostrogot (Vostrogor) that continues Young Avestan a-srāvayaT.gāθā ‘not chanting the Gathas’; i.e., these two mythonyms form an opposition based on the semantic feature ‘initiated ‒ uninitiated (into the Zoroastrian doctrine and ritual)’.