Volume 58, Issue 4

In the second half of the 14th century, several anti-Latin treatises of the Byzantine theologians Gregory Palamas and Barlaam the Calabrian were translated from Greek into Church Slavonic. To understand these highly sophisticated, polemical texts properly, the reader must assess not only the propositional content but also the argumentative force of each separate statement. The translators had great difficulties preserving the subtle interplay of different argumentative positions found in the original treatises. This is illustrated by the interpretation of a particular passage (a patristic quotation adduced in support of the Orthodox view) and the analysis of the translation equivalents of εἴπερ ‘if really’: depending on the content of the conditional clause (conceded or merely assumed), the translator renders εἴπερ by понкже ‘because’ or λψθ ‘if’. The translation thus silences the voice, present in the Greek original, of somebody willing to suspend his disaccord with a theological statement in order to examine its logical consequences.

The present paper offers an analysis of the role and relevance of French linguistic models in the history of Russian argot research of the 19th century. These models were occasionally provided by fiction texts, in this case primarily by Victor Hugo’s novels, „Les Misérables“ (The Miserables) in particular. This paper is focused on the reconstruction of the philological reception of V. Hugo’s „Les Misérables“ in the novel of Vs. Krestovskij „Peterburgskie truščoby“ (The St. Petersburg Slums) and the unique importance of both texts for the genesis and development of argot research in Russia. The paper presents the key role of Krestovskij’s novel in the rooting of French linguistic models in Russian argot research of the 19th century.

The following article gives an analysis of the speech act of SAYING THANK in Russian and German from three different angles: Firstly, from a socio-cultural perspective which concerns the culture of SAYING THANK existing in both language communities. Secondly, from a pragmatic perspective which considers whether and how the situations in which Germans and Russians express SAYING THANK are different. And thirdly, from the linguistic-structural viewpoint which concerns the structure and function of the SAYING THANK expression in both languages; the Russian forms that realize this particular speech act are compared with the German ones.

The article deals with fundamental questions of etymology and especially with the history of the Slavic dialectical word ponyaga (‘backpack’). It is shown that contradictory meanings of the word in different dialects ( ponyaga is used in the sense of ‘bridle’ for reindeers as well as in the sense of ‘backpack’) can be explained with the common verbal sense ‘to take hold’, ‘to take’.

Spiritual themes in the 20th century Slovak poetry were influenced first of all by the aesthetic code of symbolism with a small exception in the 1930s when it was influenced by H.Bremond’s conception of pure poetry. Only in contemporary spiritual poetry the power of the symbolist code is weakening, and aesthetic impulses of avantguards and poststructuralist tendencies become a more distinctive source of inspiration. Against the background of the interpretation of two poetic texts - M. Rúfus: Vlastnoručný podpis, zb. Vážka, 1998 [The Handwritten Signature, coll. The Dragonfly], and Erik Jakub Groch: Sa, zb. Druhá naivita, 2005 [Self, coll. The Second Naïveté], the study focuses on important developmental impulses in literary thought, observing how in a certain period the power of one aesthetic code begins to weaken and leaves a space for a new one to succeed.

Prince Petr Kropotkin’s political anarchism is born from Russian literature. This study’s subject is both this birth of anarchism as well as its later avant-garde, anarchistic transformation. Applied anarchy is transformed, at least in theoretical writings, into an aesthetic anarchy in the graphic arts from 1910 to 1930. Wassily Kandinsky’s and Kazimir Malevič’s writings confirm this. Aesthetic anarchy leads from a destructive phase, seen in Malevič, to a new type of anarchistic art most clearly observed in Kandinsky. The anarchistic concepts of both are presented as two different variations of a deeply Russian avant-garde (Malevič) and a Russian emigre avant-garde (Kandinsky). The study also addresses the question of the transformation of non-verbal violence.