Volume 65, Issue 1

The love story of the Přemyslid duke Oldřich (1012–1033, 1034) and the peasant girl Božena Křesinová, who became his second wife, was a popular subject in the Bohemian chronicles of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. The story’s social and national connotations (Božena being a lower class Czech girl) may have been one of the main factors of its renewed popularity in Czech literature and art since the end of the 18 th century. Especially the Czech National Revival gave birth to several works dealing with this topic, such as ballads, romances, dramas, operas and paintings. An absolutely different way of treating the subject was presented by Adolf Heyduk (1835–1923), a representative of the ‘May School’ (Májovci). In his idyll Oldřich a Božena (1879), Heyduk largely ignored the story’s national and social implications and focussed on the love theme. Thus he was also in line with the Májovci poetics being directed against the revivalists’ strictly nationalist and patriotic orientation in literature and culture. Heyduk, moreover, strengthened the work’s symbolic and psychological dimensions, especially in an abundance of nature scenes and in Božena’s songs giving an insight into the girl’s hopes, dreams and latent desires. The work thus gains a new aesthetic quality bringing Oldřich a Božena close to modernistic conceptions.

The study is focused on the reception of the then-popular Dialogues of the Dead / Conversations by Syrian philosopher and rhetorician Lucian of Samosata (120 AD-180 AD) in Czech literature on the turn of the 18 th and 19 th centuries, with occasional insight into the intermediary French and German reception. Thanks to their linguistic refinement, Lucian’s dialogues quickly became a popular reading for the learning of Greek at the time, and in the 18 th century, they contributed significantly to the development of journalism. This tendency was also present in the revivalist journal Hlasatel český during the period of 1806–1808 when it featured translations of several of Lucian’s dialogues alongside Jungmann’s conversation On the Czech Tongue (1808). The said conversations evoke the form of Lucianesque dialogues of the dead, which was to be the model of antiquity for the Czech classicism of the time, and they fill this form with thoughts of enlightenment and contemporary nationalism while capitalizing on the models of contemporary educational practices at Prague universities.

The Polnische Bibliothek, founded by the German Institute for Polish Culture in Darmstadt, financed by Robert Bosch Foundation and published by the Suhrkamp Publishing House, remains a unique attempt at presenting Polish literature in the German book market. This paper focuses on the historical, political and cultural background of the series and the conflicts at the backstage of its initiation. The analysis, based mostly on the so far unpublished archival correspondence of the publishing house has two aims: on the one hand, a historiographic description of the so far unknown processes of Polish literature transfer lies at its centre, on the other, it addresses the need for appropriate conceptualisations of such phenomena. The study is framed in the category of Histoire croisée in this case applied to an analysis of translation production. Activities of all the actors involved, the conflicts and solutions to them constitute the starting point. These generate an argumentation space which offers insights into the history of production of the series that had since its beginning been marked by conflicting expectations.

It has often been claimed that the journalist Platonov reproduced the idea of ‘immortality’ which belonged to the soviet topos of ‘new man’ and that the poet Platonov contradicted the journalist by making this idea ridiculous. Such an overly complicated understanding of Platonov’s work can be replaced by a simpler explanation: An analysis of several of his texts shows that the young and the elder Platonov, the poet and the journalist were unanimously in favour of a certain concept of ‘immortality’, that simply did not fit into the then-mainstream topos of ‘new man’. This first part of the study explains how Platonov rejected the fantastic notion of ‘immortality’ that dominated the corresponding discussions in soviet intellectual life in the decade after 1917. The second part analyses Platonov’s relationship to the stalinist version of ‘new man’ and its specific variant of ‘immortality’.

This paper investigates the position of Polish color adjectives in their attributive function in the noun phrase. In general, Polish attributive adjectives may precede the noun (AN) or follow it (NA). There is rich literature on this issue, especially on the motivation for AN or NA order in particular semantic classes of adjectives or types of adjective-noun constructions. However, most of the contributions are theoretical in nature and account for only a part of linguistic reality but fail to capture the entire scope of data. One of the reasons for this might be that, so far, no systematic empirical analysis of this specific syntactical phenomenon has been conducted. This paper presents the results from a corpus analysis (NKJP) of 203 noun-with-color-adjective constructions and their AN/NA distributions. These constructions were classified based on the color adjective’s function (qualifying, classificatory, or part of an idiom). The results show that, regardless of its respective function, Polish color adjectives typically tend to appear in the AN order.

The present paper is dedicated to evidentiality in the argumentative discourse in the communicative-pragmatic aspect (using the example of German, Russian and Kazakh). The paper contributes to the research of deeper and fundamental issues of a speaker’s point of view in constructing an argumentation. The linguistic features of evidentiality in German, Russian and Kazakh are empirically determined and contrastively investigated. The evidential markings allow the speaker to remain credible and reliable in his arguments.