The officials behind the Soviet onomasticon development campaign chose desktop calendars, a publicly available and widely circulated printed medium, to serve as a vehicle for the propagation of the new revolutionary anthroponomy. The paper looks into the masculine names recommended for general use by Universal Desktop Calendars issued by the State Publishing House in 1924–29. Mimicking the Russian Orthodox Church Calendars, its editors proposed their readers from up to six (in 1924–1926) to three (in 1927–1929) masculine names for each day. Based on a comprehensive analysis of the total body of the existing calendar material, the paper proceeds to classify the proper names by their actual source, including: Orthodox Church calendars, Catholic canons, antique mythology, later world literature and folklore sources, celebrated names of the past, toponyms, the Slavic name corpus, and, of course, ideologized sovietisms. The general picture of the sovietisized name list is accompanied with a description of its five-year dynamics refl ecting annually introduced modifications.

The author analyses neologisms of M. Sholokhov in relation to their translation into the German language. Then the quality of the translation is determined. In order to evaluate the translations three criteria are adopted: the degree of semantic closeness between the newly created units and their translation equivalents, their expressiveness and vividness. Based on these criteria the author evaluates the accuracy of the German translations.

Bogumił Jasinowski (1883–1969), a Polish philosopher and specialist in Russian culture, was also interested in the issues of Gnosticism and Manichaeism. Although he had dealt with this subject for around forty years, however he did not devote any separate publication to it. For this reason, the author of this paper has to reconstruct Jasinowski’s views on mentioned issue on the basis of his texts on Russian and philosophical topics. The Polish philosopher regarded Gnosticism and Manichaeism as one of the most important phenomena in the history of religion, and particularly in the history of Christianity. Jasinowski, using the original method, juxtaposed Gnosticism with Neoplatonism and with Indian philosophical and religious systems; he also proposed his own characteristics of Gnosticism. For the Polish philosopher, the Gnostic and Manichaean worldview was the important factor in interpreting Russian spirituality and culture, and even such a phenomenon as the Bolshevik Revolution. This interpretation caused a polemic on the part of Marian Zdziechowski and Nikolay Lossky.

On the example of selected works by Oksana Zabuzhko, Volodymyr Lys, and Vasyl Shklar, I discuss the narrations of memory and ways of writing about history in Ukrainian contemporary prose. Historical topics concerning the traumatic experiences of the twentieth century appear in Ukrainian prose along with the regaining of independence and develop after 2000. The authors refer primarily to those issues which in the Soviet era were silenced, erased, censored. An important place in literary narratives of memory is occupied by the threads of OUN-UPA fi ghts, the Ukrainian-Bolshevik war, UNR times, Soviet terror, Great Hunger, the demythologization of World War II is also important, as well as an uncensored description of post-war Soviet reality. In the text, I do not carry out a detailed analysis of selected novels, but only highlight the main problems and ways in which authors write about history.

The article is a presentation of the subject of a lawyer in the Russian literature of two eras – the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. The object of comparative analysis are two literary texts: the first is the story by Leo Tolstoy – “Father Sergius” (1911), the second is a novel by the modern Russian writer – Evgeny Vodolazkin, which entitled “Laurus” (2012). The author of the article concludes that the multifariousness of the life of lawyers in both writers underlines their life experience on the way to holiness. An important element of the characters’ description is their sinfulness, in particular the fi ght against their own pride and human passion. In the case of Leo Tolstoy, the image of his literary right-wing was influenced by the writer’s views on the essence of holiness and the complex human-God relationship. In their portraits of heroes striving for spiritual perfection, both Tolstoy and Vodolazkin show a connection with the genre of hagiography.

The aim of the article is to analyze Russian words transcribed into the Polish alphabet extracted from the texts of a Polish conservative-liberal author, S. Michalkiewicz, from the years 2003−2015. The lists of both correctly and incorrectly transcribed units are presented and the mistranscribed words are examined. The categories of transcription errors are provided along with the examples of words in which they occur. The results of the analysis may serve as a point of reference in further studies concerning adherence to the transcription rules of Russian performed on a larger number of texts written by a greater variety of authors.

Death is one of the key concepts present in the traditional image of the world. It means an end and is related to the process of wearing out and losing original properties. In folk anthropology, death is understood in terms of the transition from the earth world to the land of the dead, as the beginning of eternal existence. Death is one of the rites of passage and as such is correlated with other crucial moments of human existence, mainly with birth and marriage. Death is a common motif present in various genres of folklore. Researchers are interested in death predominantly because of its belief- and ritual-related image. The aim of the article is to analyse depictions of death in folk fablesand other kinds of prose works. Special emphasis is placed on the personifi cation of death as well as on its genesis and ontological status. The article also deals with the idea of death understood as both an event and a process, and it addresses death seen as a transcendental and unmaterialised force which determines a person’s life against his or her will.

This article describes the results of the pilot stage of qualitative fi eld research on Russian social memory in the second half of the 1980s. The aim of the research was to reveal what is the image of perestroika preserved in today’s social memory of those Russians who remember the events of those years. The main objective of the pilot stage was the identifi cation of the lexicon of terms and the set of concepts used to verbalize the memories of the perestroika period, as well as the caesuras and temporal characteristics related to the memory of this time. The results are outlined in the main topics, terms and concepts that pop up in conversations with respondents.

The author discusses the problem of reference of (nominal, verbal, adjectival groups, and adverbial) sentence components realized within coordinate relationships. Initially, the author refers to the theory of compactness as an explanation of the processes of generating coordinate constructions in the structure of simple sentences. There are evidences in favor of the thesis that the compactness theory does not explain coordination in semantic aspect. This applies not only to the structure with the main predicate with plural distribution (valence), but also to the entire range of coordination. The author distinguishes two types of references of coordinated phrases (in structure of a simple sentence): a distributional and a collective one. The constructional and semantic peculiarities of the expressions of both types have been described in relation to the contemporary Polish and Russian language.

The article shows that during the forming of grammatical category of gender in Indo-European languages, names of non-living objects and names of those animals whose sex is unimportant for humans were receiving grammatical meanings of gender on the basis of similarity or dissimilarity of designated objects with males or females. Such grammatical metaphors were based on the ideas of different peoples about some minor characteristics of persons of different sex, such as the difference between men and women with higher activity, greater size, strength and independence. By now, the metaphorical motivation of category of gender in the Russian language has survived only in certain nouns. These nouns are interrogative pronouns кто (masc.) ʻwhoʼ and что (neut.) ʻwhatʼ, paired nouns-synonyms, e. g. конь (masc.) ʻstrong horseʼ – лошадь (fem.) ʻordinary horseʼ, generic versions of nouns, e. g. ворон (masc.) ʻravenʼ – ворона (fem.) ʻcrowʼ, and nouns-occasionalisms used in speech oriented to expressiveness and creativity.