Volume 63, Issue 1

The article sketches the potential of Siegfried Unseld Archive (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach) for research in Polish literature transfer to German-speaking countries. The study touches upon the methodological issues vital for archivists and for literary translation sociology. The author analyses the problem of proper presentation of documents, which helps to avoid ‘archive positivism.’ Within the scope of literary transfer historiography, the paper presents the ‘bibliogenesis’ of Polish literature translation into German in Suhrkamp Verlag. Based on comprehensive archive material, it shows the dynamics of publishing proposals, sketches the profiles of literary intermediaries, and includes the collected data into four case studies. The first refers to the figure of Siegfried Unseld as to an active agent in Polish-German literary transfer, the second discusses the function of Polish and German literary agencies, the third is a proposal of ‘exclusion historiography,’ namely incorporating not realised (though taken into consideration) publishing projects into the studies in reception, while the last one insights into an insufficiently researched aspect of foreign cultural policy connection with the publishing field.

Ivo Andrić was searching and finding material for his stories and novels in the past, especially in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which represents the central topos in his literary output. As noted in the explanation of the Nobel Committee, Andrić received in 1961 the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country”. The protagonists of Andrić’s stories and novels rarely include important historical personalities, and the most significant among them as a literary subject was Mehmed-paša Sokolović, the 16 th century Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. The way in which Andrić portrayed the character of Mehmed-paša Sokolović in the novel ‘The Bridge on the Drina’ ( Na Drini ćuprija ) reflects some of the fundamental premises of his approach to narration, including his profoundly humanist intentions. Andrić held that oral (and written) stories and legends contained the true history of the humanity, and that one could grasp from them the real meaning of that history. Accordingly, in portraying Sokolović’s character, being confronted with historical documents on the one hand, and folkloric material on the other, Andrić gave primacy to the latter, even at the cost of disagreement between historical fact and oral tradition. Moreover, Andrić did not seek “the meaning of history” of Mehmed-paša Sokolović and his bridge in the historical data from Sokolović’s impressive political career accomplished in the Ottoman Empire, but in the bridge which outlived him and started the legend about him. With the novel ‘The Bridge on the Drina’ he created a “literary history” about the creation and meaning of the Višegrad bridge on these grounds – a unique literary “legacy for Mehmed-paša’s legacy”, widening and deepening the legend of Mehmed-paša Sokolović.

This paper analyses the criticism of the position of women, the existing gender relations and marriage in women’s literature at the end of the 19th century, taking the examples of the novel Plein air (1897) by Croatian author Jagoda Truhelka (1864–1957) and of the short story Wieder die Alte (1886) by Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916). These authors, from the area of the then Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, in spite of different ethnicity, but also of different social status, published stories in the late 19th century where they discussed a similar topic. Both authors are concerned with the issue of women’s work and existence outside or inside civil marriage, but the endings of their works are completely different. While Truhelka’s heroine manages to realize a marriage of love, the heroine of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach becomes a victim of existing social relationships. Despite the sharp critique of patriarchy and the disruption of the stereotype of a woman as an angel in the home in Plein air , at the end of the novel there is a harmonization of interpersonal relations and the resolution of all existing conflicts, both at a personal and socio-political level. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach does not show such optimism in Wieder die Alte and her emancipated women are left alone to build their moral integrity into a life without male love. However, we can conclude Truhelka’s, as well as Ebner-Eschenbach’s heroine remain trapped between tradition and emancipation because of, or despite the fact that love shows (no) power in the tyranny of society.

The article issue is verbs functioning in the works of Old Russian writer Cyril Turovskij (the second half of the 12 th century). It is being considered in details for the first time on the base of the earliest source, Tolstovskij Sbornik (the second half of the 13 th century). Since Cyril’s homilies were addressed to a wide range of listeners and readers, they had to be based on clear and straightforward language forms related, however, to literary standards. The article describes following features of Cyril’s language: the earliest usage of “praesens historicum”; exclusive usage of aorist forms with additional endings ( начатъ type); distinctive character of aorist рѣша ; unusually broad usage of 2 Sg. aorist forms; usage of perfective imperfect forms and imperfects with additional endings; standardized usage of Future I forms; individual cases of imperative usage. A certain similarity of verbs functioning in Cyril’s homilies and The Tale of Igor’s Campaign is detected.

The present article deals with Croatian and Serbian terms that denote people with disabilities placing a particular focus on the structure of these terms and the frequency of their use in current language. The study is based on 398 articles about the XV Summer Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro published in the online issues of 19 Croatian and Serbian newspapers from September 2016. The texts reflect an increasing interest in the situation of people with disabilities in Croatia and Serbia. They show a growing tendency to use altern­ate, non-discriminatory terms instead of the formerly established ones. One example is the term “ invalid ”, which was common in the past, but is today replaced by “ osoba s / sa invaliditetom ”.

The object of the study is the construction [ возьми и + V imp ] and its variants in the function of a narrative imperative. Purely semantically, this construction can be considered a partial realization of [ взять и V], which permits various grammatical forms. It is not described separately in dictionaries but appears only in the zone of illustrative examples as a realization of the construction [ взять и + V]. Formally, [ возьми и + V imp ] as a narrative imperative is homonymous with the true imperative and occupies an intermediate position between the construction [ взять и V] and an ordinary imperative, something that cannot help but be reflected in its semantics. Studies and lexicographical sources have not treated questions concerning the filler of the V imp slot, but note only that it requires a perfective verb. Using materials from the main corpus of the RNC (Russian National Corpus) and the Sketch Engine subcorpus ruTenTen, the goal of the present investigation is to identify and empirically substantiate some usage preferences for filling this slot. The findings of the corpus analysis enable us to identify a number of such choices. There is a tendency to select verbs of speaking.

Despite the ever-growing number of studies about impersonal constructions, there is still no unanimity about which constructions actually fall under the label of impersonality. Consensus on how to define impersonals, even within one language, remains elusive in part because of the opposition between formal (subject-centred) and functional (agent-centred) approaches to impersonality, as outlined by Siewierska (2008). The paper attempts to combine both lines of reasoning. It suggests that the impersonal domain in Russian is represented by a network of constructions that are all related to one another by the formal marker of impersonality on the verb (i. e., third person singular neuter) and by semantic and pragmatic characteristics (namely, deviation from prototypical subject properties; Malchukov & Ogawa 2011).