Folia Litteraria Rossica publishes original articles devoted to the cultures, languages, and literatures of Eastern Europe—from the Baltic to the Caucasus, from the Middle Ages to the present day—as well as studies on how this region is perceived in other parts of the world.
Issue 18 includes:
The Role of Purism in Anna Akhmatova’s Self-Portraits
Irina Y. Barclay
The aim of this article is the study of linguistic purism that is clearly displayed in ten self-portraits in the first collection of verses The Evening (1912) by Anna Akhmatova. She focuses on the development of pure language in her proposed aesthetics and politics, a process known as akmeism. The purists’ arguments of Akhmatova demonstrate not only the distinguishable traits of her voice, breath, and diction but also establishes new limits in the development and expression of Russian poetry in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The philological selection joined with future linguistic, cross-cultural, and etymological analyses, demonstrates Akhmatova’s choice of using ambiguous ordinary words of Russian origin and tones that were often used in the spoken Russian language and in the Guild of Poets in Saint Petersburg. For the first time, her aesthetic purification and choice of words and their spoken tones applied to the standard norms of modern Russian. The linguistic problematic, along with the results of this study, can be used in dictionaries of twentieth-century Russian poetry and in other philological studies focused on authors’ choices in poetry. The puristic views on the language of The Evening significantly expand the methodology for describing Akhmatova’s poetry.
Russian vs. Polish Constructions Expressing State
Małgorzata Borek
This article examines constructions expressing state in Russian and Polish. In Russian grammar, predicates denoting state are recognized as a distinct part of speech, which makes the use of such lexemes much broader than in Polish. Such predicates also show a notable ease of formation in both literary and colloquial speech. It is therefore worthwhile to consider how Polish equivalents render Russian predicates of state. Constructions with such predicates as совестно, обидно, досадно, любопытно, смешно, славно, and others often pose difficulties in translation into Polish. The study demonstrates that Russian exhibits a stronger tendency to synthesize state and evaluative meanings, whereas Polish more often keeps these two types of meanings separate. Polish also tends to employ different syntactic constructions, owing to the morphological specificity of lexemes that function as predicates. The author’s analysis draws on excerpts from Russian literary works included in the National Corpus of the Russian Language and their translations from the Polish Parallel Corpus.
Derivative Semantics of Numerical Substantives (First Russian Decade)
Piotr Czerwiński
This article examines formations such as двойка, тройка, десятка, двойня, тройня, четверня, пятерня, etc., with different suffixes. The author’s analysis involves both current and older or outdated material. The latter is derived from the dictionary of V.I. Dahl. The purpose of such a presentation has been to create a perspective from which to discover nominative and semantic mechanisms operating in the selected group of words, and to address their internal linguistic potential. The author is concerned with the frequency character of various formations and their stylistic features, and places particular emphasis on the outdated material, as it separates itself from the typical usage of modern words. The declared internal potential may reveal the features of new formations that are hidden in the language and do not always manifest themselves. The analysis involves three steps: Initially, the observed formations from единица to десятка are taken sequentially (structural form Rits(a) / Rk(a)), then formations such as двойня, тройня, четверня, пятерня (Rn'(a)), and finally, the remaining ones organized into structural groups with common suffixes. The article concludes by showing what unites such divisions, what distinguishes them, and how various nominative and semantic positions can be determined. Such a perspective opens up the possibility of further, more complete and more detailed analysis and involves referral to a more complete set of numerical substantives, including the formations that follow the first ten quantitative and ordinal units.
Image and Word: Visual and Verbal-Visual Synaesthetic Metaphors in Selected Internet Advertisements
Anna Ginter
Modern advertising, as a dynamic and multifaceted means of communication, employs a variety of techniques and sophisticated methods of persuasion to engage the audience’s senses and elicit the desired responses. One of the more intriguing artistic devices used in advertising is the synaesthetic metaphor. These complex linguistic constructs, which refer to various sensory modalities, offer a unique perspective on the interplay between image and text in the process of advertising communication. This paper introduces a classification of synaesthetic metaphors employed in Polish and Russian online advertisements and analyzes their role in the synergy between image and language on the basis of selected examples.
Grammatical Categories of Verb Tense and Verb Mood in Teaching Translation from Russian into Bulgarian
Vanya Ivanova
This article examines errors in verb tense and verb mood that occur in translations from Russian into Bulgarian. Focusing on literary translations produced by students of Russian from various Bulgarian and international universities, the study examines how closely the use of tense and mood in the translations adheres to that in the original texts. It aims to identify the most frequent errors in these two grammatical categories. The analysis compares the form and content of the translated texts with their originals. According to the findings, verb tense errors most often involve the use of the aorist tense instead of the imperfect or pluperfect; verb mood errors typically arise from using the retelling (non-testimony) mood instead of the indicative. The latter errors arise from the formal similarity between Russian past tense verb endings and Bulgarian verbs in the retelling mood.
The Vagueness of Vladimir Putin’s Narrative about the Russian-Ukraine Conflict
Michał Jankowicz
This article deals with Vladimir Putin’s use of vague narrative meanings linked with contemporary newspeak. The author’s focus is on the speech of the President of the Russian Federation regarding the commencement of the so-called special military operation of February 24, 2022. The aim of the article is to identify and analyse the signs of vagueness, a key feature of the Russian authorities’ newspeak. The author analyses the vocabulary used along with its connotations and determines the pragmatic functions of lexical units (ways of using words). The study confirms the hypothesis that Putin used vague semantics to create an ideologized image of reality. This vague language remains largely conditioned by the newspeak’s monovalence. By subordinating semantics to value judgments, the analysed speech offers a specific interpretation of reality that is more important than the meaning of words.
Chronotope as Generative Model of the Artistic Anthropology of Aging in Dmitry Lipskerov’s Play “Elena i Shturman” and the Short Story “Neznakomets”
Natalia Kaźmierczak
The present article seeks to interpret the artistic construction of the chronotope in selected works by Dmitry Lipskerov. The chronotope is examined as a structural and semantic layer that not only performs the function of organizing the narrative but also acquires the qualities of a closed and fluid continuum in which the past and the present merge into an indivisible whole, while the subjective perception of reality becomes fragmented and elusive. The spatiotemporal structure in Lipskerov’s texts is built as a reflection of the inner state of the characters who lose their sense of stability and the logical continuity of being. Within such an artistic model, time ceases to be linear, turning into a metaphor for aging, where memories and real events intertwine, creating an effect of cyclicality and enclosure of existence. This kind of spatiotemporal composition of the artistic world allows old age to be perceived as a process of losing ontological grounding and the disintegration of identity, in which corporeality takes on traits of alienation and simulation. The aging body in Lipskerov’s fictional world is seen as a sign of a disintegrating self rather than as a physical reality. The chronotope in the play Elena i Shturman and the short story Neznakomets is regarded as an instrument of philosophical reflection on old age, revealing the existential dimension of human experience and showing how the breakdown of temporal and spatial integrity in the artistic world reflects the crisis of personal being.
The Linguistic Image of Cognitive Processes in Polish Phraseology (a Cognitive-Metaphorical Perspective)
Agata Piasecka
The article reconstructs the linguistic image of cognitive processes in Polish based on a sample of fifty phraseological units. It adopts a cognitive-metaphorical perspective combined with a semantic-pragmatic analysis, allowing for the description of dominant conceptual schemas: THINKING IS EFFORT, THINKING IS A JOURNEY, THE MIND IS A CONTAINER, UNDERSTANDING IS LIGHT, and THINKING IS WAR. The analysis reveals how phraseological units denote intellectual activities (reasoning, memory, decision-making, idea generation), attributing to them spatial, material, dynamic, and conflictual dimensions. Particular attention is given to somatic metaphors – especially metaphorical representations of the head – as central conceptual material for both knowledge storage and the expression of emotional tensions. The novelty of the study lies in the typology of conceptual metaphors related to cognitive processes in Polish and the reconstruction of their evaluative dimension. The results indicate strong evaluative patterns regarding cognitive processes: intellectual competence is linguistically endorsed, whereas cognitive chaos and forgetting are devalued. The article includes a typology of metaphors, an index of analyzed units, and a discussion of the pragmatic functions of the phraseological expressions. The study is qualitative in nature; the selection of units was based on their representativeness in phraseological dictionaries.
The Images of Childhood in Yevhen Soya’s Creative Work before and after 2022
Kristina Vorontsova
This article explores the evolution of the images of childhood in the poetry of Yevhen Soya (Yessoya in social media) before and after 2022. The analysis draws on both published and unpublished poems, including material from the author’s social media and personal archives, and considers the biographical context, the generational experience of millennials, and the sociocultural shifts following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In Soya’s earlier work, childhood emerges as an idyllic and sacralized chronotope, characterized by nostalgia, the motif of the “eternal present,” and a turn inward toward personal memory and introspection. However, after 2022, this image undergoes a notable transformation, acquiring dimensions of trauma, existential rupture, and a longing for inner restoration. Particular attention is paid to Soya’s poetics as a generational voice of Russophone post-Soviet millennials, who face a sudden transition from a deferred or prolonged adolescence into a traumatized adulthood marked by the collapse of utopian visions of the future. His poetry thus becomes a testimony to the shifting lyrical gaze shaped by historical catastrophe, while the poet himself emerges as a representative of a new, generationally inflected perspective on memory, vulnerability, and resilience. Methodologically, the study draws on Bakhtin’s chronotope theory, while also referencing the works of Valerie Sanders, Henry Jenkins, and scholars, who wrote about childhood in poetry, such as Natalia Ryabtseva and Nadezhda Tropkina. This approach allows for the positioning of Soya’s poetry within both post-Soviet Russophone literary trends and a broader European literary tradition that interrogates the sacred and symbolic dimensions of childhood.
Word Familiarity and Its Accentual Characteristics
Joanna Woch
This article focuses on the pragmatic factor in determining word stress placement in contemporary Russian. The pragmatic factor refers to the speaker’s attitude – or that of a particular social or professional group – toward the words of their native language. On this basis, Russian vocabulary can be divided into familiar and unfamiliar words. Familiar words typically display a non-trivial accentual pattern, tending toward inflectional or mobile stress (accent paradigms B or C), while unfamiliar words generally exhibit fixed (immobile) stress on the stem or base (accent paradigm A). To explore the possible influence of the pragmatic factor in modern Russian, the study analyses the speech of Russian-speaking YouTubers. The findings reveal that the pragmatic factor affects borrowed Anglicisms and adjectives derived from English stems. The analysis further demonstrates that this influence is evident in loanwords and their derivatives, reflecting the ongoing process of linguistic assimilation – one of the most dynamic and productive trends in contemporary Russian.
Bartosz Juszczak, Językowo-kulturowy obraz przestrzeni miejskiej. Polsko-czesko-rosyjskie diachroniczne studium konfrontatywne [The Linguistic and Cultural Image of the Urban Space a Diachronic Polish-Czech-Russian Comparative Study], Atut, Wrocław 2021, pp. 230
Piotr Baleja
The review article concerns Bartosz Juszczak’s monograph Językowo-kulturowy obraz przestrzeni miejskiej. Polsko-czesko-rosyjskie diachroniczne studium konfrontatywne, Wrocław: ATUT, 2021, which constitutes a pioneering contribution to the fields of cultural linguistics and urban sociolinguistics. The author juxtaposes three urban centres – Warsaw, Brno, and Moscow – examining the processes through which their dialects evolved in the context of the social, political, and cultural transformations of the 19th and 20th centuries. The review highlights the interdisciplinary character of the project, which integrates linguistic, cultural, and memory-oriented analysis. The diachronic perspective and the use of lexicographic sources (Słownik gwary warszawskiej, Slovník nespisovné češtiny, Язык старой Москвы), which enables the presentation of language as a vehicle of collective memory and urban identity, are particularly noteworthy. The study’s methodological consistency is assessed positively, as it draws inspiration from the concept of the linguistic worldview and theories of spatial semiotics. The review concludes that Juszczak’s monograph fills a significant gap in research on the urban culture of the Slavic world, offering an original approach to the relationship between language, space, and cultural memory.
Yaroslav Hrytsak, Vadym Aristov, Halyna Kachur, Навігатор з історії України. Русь [Navigator on the History of Ukraine. Rus’], Publishing House “Portal”, Kyiv 2024, pp. 144
Zofia Aleksandra Brzozowska
The review article presents one of the ten volumes in the series published by the Kyiv-based publishing house “Portal,” titled Navigator on the History of Ukraine. The series offers concise introductions to various epochs in the history of Ukrainian lands, spanning from the earliest times to the present day. The volume under review is the fourth in the series and covers the period traditionally referred to in historiography as Pre-Mongol Rus’ or Kievan Rus’. The book describes events from the years 839 to 1240. Each chapter includes not only an overview of key political and military events but also addresses religious and ecclesiastical issues, as well as social, economic, legal, and cultural aspects (including language, literature, architecture, and art). The authors base their analysis on a highly diverse range of sources, incorporating local accounts alongside Byzantine, Arab, Western European, and Scandinavian texts, as well as findings from archaeological excavations. This approach enables the verification of many long-standing interpretations found in earlier syntheses of Rus’ history. The publication excellently organizes knowledge about Kievan Rus’ and thus may serve as an invaluable resource for anyone – students, university students, and history enthusiasts – wishing to explore this aspect of medieval European history.
Muslims on the Volga in the Viking Age. In the Footsteps of Ibn Fadlan, eds. J. Shepard, L. Treadwell, I.B. Tauris, London–New York–Oxford–New Delhi–Sydney 2023, pp. 404
Błażej Cecota
This monograph attempts to address the latest research into relations between Muslims and other Eastern European nations, as conducted in both the West and Russia. This book is an excellent example of a well-prepared collective publication, in which the individual contributions complement each other to form a unified whole. This is not a common practice in the era of collective publications, such as those under the Brill label, where the thematic, geographical or chronological scope is often too broad. Thanks to the editors, however, the monograph includes the findings of researchers from influential Western centres, as well as Russian archaeologists and historians. Their contribution is significant, not least because they regularly conduct research on the sites of events depicted in Ibn Fadlan’s account, and it would be difficult to write on this topic without considering their perspective.
Zofia A. Brzozowska, Mirosław J. Leszka, Nowogród Wielki. Historyczno-kulturowy przewodnik po średniowiecznej republice [Novgorod the Great. A Historical and Cultural Guide to the Medieval Republic], Lodz University Press, Łódź 2019, pp. 266
Zdzisław Pentek
The book Novgorod the Great. A Historical and Cultural Guide to the Medieval Republic by Zofia A. Brzozowska and Mirosław J. Leszka (1963–2024) is the result of a research project carried out between 2017 and 2019. It consists of a foreword, ten chapters, lists of Novgorodian rulers, bishops, and archbishops, and a comprehensive bibliography. The authors explore the history and political structure of the Novgorod Republic, focusing on the monuments of its capital, Novgorod the Great, arranged geographically. Their knowledge of written sources, especially the Novgorod First Chronicle, enabled them to reconstruct even lost or poorly preserved buildings. Field research helped verify historical accounts. The book discusses secular architecture and over forty churches, reflecting the city’s wealth and importance until its annexation by Moscow in 1478 and its devastation by Ivan IV’s troops in 1570. Detailed descriptions include the Kremlin (Detinets), the Market with nine churches, the Sophia Side with twelve churches, and the Market Side with nine. The final chapter presents seven sites from the surrounding area. Though not a traditional guidebook, the publication offers a panoramic view of medieval Novgorod’s architecture. Enhanced with maps, plans, and color photographs, most taken by Mirosław J. Leszka, it provides a valuable contribution to Polish scholarship on Eastern European history.
Report from the Scientific Conference. The 6th Sosnowiec Linguistic Forum
Bartłomiej Szynal
This text offers an account of a cyclically organized conference called the Sosnowiec Linguistic Forum. This conference enabled its participants, including students and PhD candidates, to share the results of their original research. While promoting a scholarly exchange of ideas, the event provides an opportunity to establish effective academic collaboration and confront different approaches to linguistic research. The report briefly characterizes papers delivered by the conference participants. While most of those papers focused on the comparative analysis of the respective elements of various languages, some were also concerned with the theory and practice of translation. The conference sessions were held in different sections. The presentation of each paper was followed by a discussion of its content involving both the paper’s author and the audience.
The journal presents interdisciplinary perspectives on the region’s heritage, its cultural memory, and linguistic transformations.
The issue is complemented by reviews of recent publications on the history and culture of Eastern Europe, as well as a report from the 6th Sosnowiec Linguistic Forum. We thank all Authors and Reviewers for their contribution to the development of the journal.
A link to the full issue of Folia Litteraria Rossica can be found HERE.
We invite you to read it.
