Volume 65, Issue 3

In the mid-19 th century Vuk Stefanović Karadžić collected folk tales in the broader South-Slavic region and published them in a collection titled Serbian Folk Tales . Folk fairy tales make the major part of the collection. In this paper, the authors determine the folk fairy tale structure according to the methodology proposed by Vladimir Propp in the Morphology of the Folktale . The aim of the paper is to investigate, whether these fairy tales can be fully described using Propp’s Morphology. Propp’s model of the meta-folk fairy tale was developed inductively based on a rich, comprehensive, yet limited, corpus of Russian folk fairy tales, which opens up space for further testing of the proposed model. The hypothesis was set that the analyzed folk fairy tales completely conform to the plot structure of the meta-folk fairy tale with a maximum of 31 functions as proposed by Propp. The hypothesis is grounded in: 1. the time when the folktales were collected (mid-19 th century, the same time as the Russian collection analyzed by Propp) and 2. the similarity of the South Slavic peoples with the peoples of the Slavic East. However, after categorial and structural analyses of the corpus were performed, it was clear that the hypothesis could not be accepted in its entirety. In the analyzed folk fairy tales, no new functions were found as compared to the 31 functions identified by Propp, but some of these functions were altered as compared to those to be expected in folk tales. This alteration occurred not only regarding the changed order of functions, assimilation and cases of dual morphological meanings of functions, but also in terms of the fantastic category of the marvelous, which is the core feature of the fairy tale genre, whose nature was changed. The study identified the rationalization of some magical motifs, which partially mitigates the quality of the miraculous in the fairy tale and found out that, in some cases, the marvelous was mitigated and “shifted” towards the (merely) fantastic. This was achieved by introducing oniric elements. One of the important conclusions of our study of the fairy tale is that these fairy tales, although labeled as folk tales, feature significant authorial intervention.

The article considers the poetry of S. S. Averintsev. The analysis of its dominating thematic, generic and verse features allows us to see in this poetry a peculiar development of literary trends of the late 17 th /early 18 th centuries, which were connected with the transformation of autochthonous artistic sources and generated a whole range of original texts, including poetic ones (“Povest’ o Gore-Zlochastii”, Songs of P. Kvashnin-Samarin). On the basis of another historic correlation Averintsev’s poetry can be considered an attempt to present the classical tradition of Russian literature as a direct development of medieval verbal principles in their Moscow variant. This position was supported by the scholar’s philological conceptions and was also confirmed by the statements of a number of literary critics, as well as by the poetic practice of Olga Sedakova, which was close to that of Averintsev. The article explores the correlation of these perceptions with historical and literary facts.

The study is looking into the first creative period of the Bulgarian poet Teodor Trajanov based on his newly rediscovered works. They allow the description of the author as a conscious mediator between the Viennese and the Bulgarian modernity, who imports himself in the vernacular Bulgarian literary environment as a “modern poet” from Vienna. For the first time, the analysis discovers actual connections between the poetry of Trajanov and the specifics of the Viennese modernity as a cultural environment. On the basis of critical texts from the author, his views on modern works are described and defined in the spirit of the age as “decadent”. Trajanov is also the only Bulgarian literary figure, who fits the processes of the late Viennese modernism with his screenplay for a play in the Viennese Volksoper from 1914. The text considered lost by Trajanov researchers has been presented for the first time after its discovery by the author of the article, with the required contextual reconstruction. Here, the mediatory role of the poet between two modern European cultures of the beginning of the 20th century, as well as new perspectives not only for the exploration of Trajanov’s poetry but also for reconsidering the inception of the Bulgarian modernism, are considered.

During the past decennia, Vjekoslav Babukić’s Osnova slovnice slavjanske narěčja ilirskoga (Zagreb, 1836) has come to be widely regarded in Croatia as the first codification of a Štokavian-based standard language for all Croats and has enjoyed an accordingly privileged status. The present article is intended as a reminder that this grammar was undoubtedly written first and foremost as a foundation in order to create a common literary language for all South Slavs, at least for the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes. Such a broader view is firmly supported by the obvious “all-Slavic spirit” ( sveslavenski duh ) attributed to the text by Lj. Gaj already in 1836 and can further be substantiated by means of a short examination of Babukić’s peculiarly mixed metalanguage that combines Kajkavian-German-Latin and Serbian-Russian-Church Slavonic terms.