Volume 56, Issue 1 -

The poetry of Karel Hynek Mácha, the main representative of Czech romanticism, is written in a deeply elegiac mode, thus standing opposite to the literary production of Czech National Revival with its clear tendency to the idyllic model. Mácha’s elegism was, first of all, influenced by German, English, and Polish romanticism, but has its roots also in the poetry of early Czech National Revival. The paper follows the beginnings and early development of Czech elegy from Thám’s and Puchmajer’s almanacs up to František Turinský’s sentimental elegies and Jan Kollár’s endeavours for a national elegy.

This paper investigates Mandel’shtam’s „Разговор о Данте“ both as a piece of literature and as a poetological work. It is argued that the structure of the text allows for an insight in some of the rather abstract notions, first and foremost the notion of “poetical matter” (“poeticheskaia materiia”). Mandel’shtam’s idiosyncratic discussion of Dante’s “Divine comedy”, it is argued, highlights the way in which reality leaves its traits or rather is integrated in a literary text in such a way that it can be brought to life again, at least by an active reader. Apart from the interplay between reality and poetry, the text’s imagery opens a deeper understanding of Mandel’shtam’s poetics in his later poems, i. e. the poems of the 1930s.

Juliusz Słowacki’s play “Mazepa” (1840) does not have much in common with the famous Mazepa-texts of World literature, such as G. Byron’s “Mazeppa” (1819), V. Hugo’s poem of the same title (1829) and A. Pushkin’s “Poltava” (1829); and it does not show any greater affinities to the author’s earlier plays, like “Balladyna” and “Lilla Weneda”, or to his later plays like “Ksiądz Marek” and “Sen srebrny Salomei”. Ne­vertheless, for a better understanding of his “Mazepa” , this play should to be read in a larger context, including as well Słowacki’s own works, as well the texts of World literature on Mazepa. A crucial question for that kind of contextualization is a new understanding of the central problem of that play. If we read “Mazepa” as a tragedy of delusion, defraud and betrayal, we can very well compare this play with Słowacki’s later works “Ksiądz Marek” and “Sen srebrny Salomei”, which are – still more than “Mazepa” – located in the historical context of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict. But this kind of interpretation leads to a wider range of comparison: Pushkin’s “Poltava” does not only have a similar constellation of acting persons like Słowacki’s plays (a double love triangle), but is based on delusion and betrayal in various forms, too. There is, however one great difference when comparing it with Słowacki’s “Mazepa”: in this play the main hero is not at trickster at all, while in Pushkin’s poem he is the one who betrays in private as well as in political life an therefore has to fail. Słowacki’s Mazepa survives, because he is an honest man, Pushkin’s Mazepa perishes, because he is a traitor. It turns out that both of the authors, Słowacki and Pushkin, in connection with the historical person of Mazepa, seem to condemn betrayal as a means of political agitation. Setting Słowacki’s play in the larger context of Eastern Slavonic Mazepa-tradition, it is to be seen as a polemic with as well as an affirmation of Pushkin’s point of view, without any regard to the fact if Słowacki had known “Poltava” or not.

The article analyses the strategies used by Croatian female authors for writing about the myth of motherhood in the first half of the 20th century. The focus is on the representative literary works and relations between traditional role expectations and attempts to offer alternative models for women’s lives. The paper also deals with the problem of female identity marked by the masculine domination and social repression in the patriar­chal culture. The female writers’ underlying issues are discussed on the basis of a combination of close tex­tual reading and topic-based analysis. In the conclusion, the paper emphasizes the brave criticism of the myth of motherhood as one of the main characteristics of the Croatian female authors’ writings in the first half of the 20th century.

The paper presents the periphrastic construction comprising the verb mieć ‘to have’ and a passive participle. The construction has been recently spreading in colloquial Polish, broadening its employment to include passive participles of imperfective and intransitive verbs. Although formally resembling the periphrastic perfect in European languages, the construction does not constitute an emerging new term of the tense opposition; rather it is a means to indicate the subject of mieć as affected by the action or process stated by the passive participle, irrespective of the identity of the agent of this action or process.

The present study is concerned with contact-induced German–Slavic linguistic transfer occurring in several Slavic languages. It investigates the relevance of the so-called size factor which implies that the amount of transfer depends on the size of the speakers’ community. The central hypothesis the paper calls into question is, thus, as follows: the smaller the community, the greater the amount of linguistic transfer. After analyzing several linguistic variables (modals, definite article, habeo-factum constructions, dual), it is found that direct correlation between the size of the speakers’ community and the amount of linguistic transfer cannot be confirmed. A reason for varying amounts of transfer might, however, be the role of purism which, on its part, seems to be dependent on the size factor, at least to a certain degree.

This paper investigates the morphological and semantic structure of Polish onomastic derivatives, which became both a medium of journalistic expression and a weapon used in political fight after the year 1989. It is argued that the majority of these eponyms are created by means of foreign affixes, which is seen as a sign of progressing internationalization of Slavic languages, increasingly relying on non-native affixes and derivational patterns. Moreover, the role of the pragmatic context in encoding and decoding these novel coinages is highlighted.

The article identifies orthographic, lexical and textual Serbisms in the western Bulgarian Curzon Gospel (c. 1354) and proposes three plasts of Serbian influence on the manuscript: Serbian-type spellings of specific words traceable to the hypothetical common ancestor for the Curzon Gospel and its two close relatives, the western Bulgarian Dobrejšo and Banica gospels; sporadic Serbian orthographic and lexical features, and textual parallels with Serbian long lectionary gospels, in the Curzon Gospel’s independent first half of Matthew; and sporadic Serbian-type orthographic features, and hypercorrections of perceived Serbian spellings found in the Curzon Gospel alone that were transmitted from its immediate antigraph.

Zusammenfassung Boeckh, Katrin, Serbien – Montenegro. Geschichte und Gegenwart. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet; Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft München, 2009.