The work is devoted to the analysis of quite rare kind of wedding speeches occurring in a ceremony of the part of Vologda province in the end 19th – early 20th century. The author considers features of functioning of the text in a wedding ceremony, national terminology, the territory of distribution, poetic features, a ratio of all-Russian and regional components in the texts. It is shown that by means of these texts the party of the bride implicitly declared about her physical and emotional preparedness for marriage because the themes of female physical beauty, health, portliness, youth, fertility, complaisance, etc. are emphasized in these texts.

The Polish language in Lithuania, Belorussia and Ukraine has been researched from many points of view, but it needs further studying. New material is required: records, letters, diaries, treatises, especially for researching standard Polish of the 20th century in its regional variant spoken by magnats, middle nobility, petty nobility living in villages, and by inteligentsia of cities and small towns. Also there are needed new methodological approaches to studying essential features of Polish mentioned above, which will take into account the frequent (common) traits as well as relict ones. The examination of these features will create a good base for distinguishing separate areas of the Polish language in Lithuania and Belorussia. The characteristic of vocabulary requests confrontation of words among others in synonymic pairs: native and foreign ones in register and in text, preferably based on computer text corps. To ascertain code mixing (also to find the homogenous/mixed character of the texts) it is necessary to apply both a panchronic approach (which regards all foreign elements), and a synchronic one (leaving out those foreign elements, which entered the grammatical or lexical systems of Polish). The paper proposes some ways for solving these problems

The following article is devoted to the process of adapting loanwords into the Russian language in the first half of 17th century. The material which was subject to analysis was extracted from the first, handwritten editions of Russian opinion journalism, written from 1600 to 1650. The purpose of the article is to present the process of absorbing loanwords on the phonetic and morphological level, and to record changes in word genders and resonance variants in the words internalized into Russian either originating directly from another language or passed on through one from other languages

The article deals with the adaptation of Belorussian and Russian affixes in Polish dialects of Braslaw region. The author singles out certain models of af fixal adaptation on the basis of phonetic, morphological and semantic or phonomorphological equivalence. Collected vocabulary provides many examples where we can observe the assimilation of foreign elements into the native system of the multilingual population. Modifications of borrowings in this way indicate the vitality of the systemic word-formative rules of the Polish language in the speakers’ consciousness.

The article is dedicated to philosophical and religious aspects of the work of Russian writer and thinker Mary (Skobcowa). The aim is to investigate the key concepts that shaped her writings such as the problem of creativity, asceticism, the problem of the person. Particular attention was paid to the religious roots of her works. Her ideas are examined in the context of the theological thought of the twentieth century. Mother Mary synthesized the Sergiei Bulgakhov’s ‘philosophical system’ and the existentialist analysis of Nikolai Berdiayev. Special attention was paid to a critical rethinking of nineteenth-century Russian monastic tradition as well as polemic in the academic tradition of the early twentieth century.

The aim of this article is a translation in the nation-creating function. From the middle of 18th century Ukrainian writers want to improve position of Ukrainian language in the state, show his uniqueness. Their method to achieved the object was translation masterpices of European literature into Ukrainian. This was evidence that Ukrainian language is independent language and could exist.

The purpose of this paper is an attempt to reflect on the beginnings of Ukrainian modernism. The article is an analysis of the “Open letter to Ukrainian writers” by Mykola Voronyi and his polemics with a well-known Ukrainian writer, Ivan Franko. This letter, which was published in the journal “Literaturno-Naukowy Wisnyk” in 1901, is a very important document of the epoch, bearing the mark of a literary manifesto. This little note made the Ukrainian intelligentsia aware of the crisis of so-called narodnytstvo poetics and the need for far-reaching modernization of Ukrainian literature. The writer postulated the rejection of adopted schemes in favour of the latest European trends in literature. The attempt to implement the program demands was an edition of Mykola Voronyi’s literary collection, “From the Valleys and Above the Clouds”, which has also been analyzed and discussed in this paper. The author concludes that the “Open letter to Ukrainian writers” can be considered one of the first manifestations of Ukrainian modernism

The 2014/2015 revolution at the Kiev Maidan (and elsewhere in Ukraine) made a wide-ranging impact on the literature. In this paper I analyse diaries devoted to the events of the dignity revolution. I have selected three texts written in three different languages: “ Приватний щоденник ” by Marija Matios (in Ukrainian). “ Дневник Майдана ” by Adrjej Kurkov (in Russian) and “Ogień Majdanu. Dziennik rewolucji 22.11.2013– 22.02.2014” (in Polish). These texts are highly interesting mostly because they allow looking at the Maidan through the eyes of witnesses. Because of that we do not receive mere facts, but a testimony which tells us most about the people involved, represented by the specific author reporting their experiences, impressions, emotions, and thoughts. It is characteristic for the personal document literature that it is positioned somewhere between the events being described and the internal experiences, judgements and preferences of the author. It is shaped by their knowledge, experience, and moral code. These texts often con- centrate on the fates of specific individuals, their behaviours, the reasons and consequences thereof. They differ both in terms of the form and the motivations of the authors. They are all, however, rather unique, because they speak of the events of most recent history which so violently cut through the daily lives of Ukrainian citizens.

The article presents the results of the analysis of “The Register of Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki” – a document from the second half of the 16th century. It is precisely at this period that the present day three-part naming system: name – patronymic – surname was being established in Muscovy. The author attempts to prove that at this time the social status of a man could have been deduced from the formal exponents of his name: the number of its constituents, the structure of its patronymic, the fact that the name belongs to non-calendar or Christian names, and also from certain derivational markers.

The theme of the article is the concept of credentials based on the data from general and terminological dictionaries. It contains a proposal for a Russian-Polish entry article with the name of this diplomatic document (entry article as a part of a translation dictionary within the project “Diplomacy and politics. Russian-Polish dictionary survey”). The author explains the history of this term in both languages, focusing on the dissimilarity of its grammatical form both in Russian and Polish monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, which is especially visible while comparing dictionary and textual data. The material derived from Russian and Polish parallel texts (autonomous, independent of each other) is described according to the recommendations adopted for translation dictionaries – providing their users with the practical information on the usage of units (their syntactic requirements and usage conditions). The analysis also devotes ample attention to the socalled undescribed translated items (equivalents not recorded so far in Russian-Polish/ Polish-Russian lexicography). The discussion of numerous bilingual dictionaries justifi es the claim that a considerable part of collected units can be regarded as undescribed translated items (undescribed equivalents).