Band 64, Heft 3

Milan Rúfus (1928–2009) is one of the most received Slovak poets in the German-speaking world. Hitherto 150 of his poems have been translated into German and published in 14 anthologies as well as two single volumes. His reception in the German language area is presented chronologically, taking into consideration the respective occasions and literary coherences. Moreover, the linguistic solutions of the German translations and their relation to the original as well as among each other will be examined by considering selected examples.

Little is known about the life and literary creations of Eugen Gagarin. This article deals with the facts known so far and explores archive material to expand and partially correct them. The writer Evgenij Andreevich Gagarin (1905‒1948) was born in the province of Arkhangelʼsk (Archangelʼskaja gubernija) and emigrated to Germany in 1933, where he started writing. Until his tragic accidental death in 1948 he wrote various oeuvres in German and in Russian, including the 1948 novel Vozvraščenie Korneta (‘The Return of the Cornet’), which bears autobiographical features. First published in Russia in 1991, it initiated the acquisition of his works in Russia. This article seeks to contributes to the academic analysis of Gagarin’s Œuvre by systematizing and completing the biographical data on Eugen Gagarin and his family, as well as the information on the publications of Gagarinʼs works.

Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1833) has been considered not just the work of the period of Pushkin’s best and greatest lyrical output, but the starting-point of the classic nineteenth-century Russian novel. As this article strongly insists, the novel evokes the so-called ‘Russianness,’ which reminds us of what has typically been known as Russian or the Russian soul, as well as Russian types of emotional response reflected in the literary figure. The most important question this article addresses is the idea of Russianness encoded into the heroine, Tatyana, in particular. More concretely speaking, it is our main concern to investigate Tatyana’s identity as expressed through the motif of the Russian soul and its relationship with the structural uniqueness of the novel. The purpose of the present study then is to explore the extent to which this structural peculiarity is found throughout the text as well as how this question is associated with the characterization of the heroine, Tatyana. Fundamentally, the relationship between the text’s structural peculiarity and the character’s identity, in terms of thematic composition, will be at the center of our arguments.

The article is devoted to the complex analysis on the phenomenon власть (‘power’) as a part of the Russian phraseological worldview. The most important social conscience spheres of the phenomenon власть are defined: politics, economics, sociology, psychology and philosophy. Accordingly, the five most significant micro-concepts, i. e. the particular cognitive fields (‘power in politics’, ‘power in economics’, ‘power in society’, ‘power in psychology’, ‘power in philosophy’) as well as macroconcept (the common cognitive field) власть are described; phraseological units objectifying this phenomenon are singled out; the phraseosemantic field власть is built on the basis of meaningfulness of certain semantic features for the phenomenon characterization and for the common understanding of the concept власть in the Russian phraseology; the integral and differentiating features of the cognitive and phraseosemantic fields are revealed. The research is based on both linguistic data and on material from politics, economics, sociology, psychology, philosophy and cultural studies. Thus, the issues analyzed in the article are viewed in terms of the contemporary integral paradigm of cross-disciplinary scientific knowledge. As a result, the syncretic essence of the concept власть that includes two opposite and incompatible principles господство (‘supremacy’) and подчинение (‘submission’) are brought out. The national and cultural specificity of the Russian phraseosemantic worldview and the peculiarities of the Russian linguistic society in the aspect of the phenomenon власть (‘power’) are established.

The majority of German Russians, who had settled in Germany in the 1990 s, were long considered conformist up to January 2016 where Russian media services and officials exploited the criminal case of Lisa F. in Berlin. A few right wing AfD party activists gathered several thousand Russian speakers to protest against the German refugee policy. Even though the activist’s mobilizing narrative can easily be deconstructed as a political myth with little consensus within the German Russian population, German mass media have since generalized this heterogeneous group as troublemakers with divided loyalties and as a potential threat to the federal elections of 2017. Although German Russian lobby organisations heavily criticised these mass media representations, they are likely to stand the chance of finally establishing their migration history as a part of general knowledge.

Although the theory of distinctive features, developed in SPE by Chomsky & Halle (1968) and later on reformed by Sagey (1986) and McCarthy (1988), provides a general description of phonemes from an articulatory point of view, it displays significant uncertainties when employed for Russian. These could be summarized in two points: first, which feature leads to a distinctive palatalization correlation of the phonemes and, second, which feature triggers the phonological processes of palatalization and depalatalization assimilation. In this work, these issues are discussed and clarified by means of the feature-geometric description of the two processes for Russian. Then, a differentiated description of the named phonological processes from a feature-geometric point of view is suggested and a differentiated phoneme inventory of Russian is developed.