Band 67, Heft 2

This article studies the poetics of historical reimagination in works by Guzel’ Iakhina and Sergei Lebedev, two contemporary Russian prose writers. The main tendencies in Russian official history politics and memory culture of the last decade form the backdrop for the study. I illustrate these tendencies by a case study analysis of the representation of Stalinist repressions in the history park Rossiia — moia istoriia (Russia — My History). The comparative reading of Iakhina’s and Lebedev’s novels seeks to determine the key poetic features of the two authors’ fictional treatment of the past, also assessing to what degree, and how, these treatments challenge, promote, or negotiate current official history politics and memory culture. The analysis discusses the two authors’ shared concerns but also reveals fundamental differences in their poetics. Whereas Iakhina’s fictional universe has distinct boundaries that confine the story to the time and space where it takes place, Lebedev’s novels deal with the past from the perspective of today. The contrasting narrative perspectives have implications for how the past is represented — or made present — and how the reader is drawn into the narrative.

The Soviet documentary movement during the first decades after the October Revolution was characterized by a variety of genres. They all tried to convey reliable information based on experience. Journalism, photography, poster art, book and newspaper distribution reached a broader audience and involved more authors than ever before. Correspondents explored all branches of everyday life all over the country, among them new vehicles. The considered reports by Tretiakov, Gromov and Karmen on aerosledge tests do also test the principles of factography: They vividly apply their eye-witness experiences and intermedial techniques for a convincing narrative of a user-friendly vehicle though they might have hardly survived the races. Moreover, they praise the technical fact as a concern of literature as well as of Sovietization. By that, they develop factography from documentary towards an illustrative pattern of technological enthusiasm which is also confirmed by documentary movies of that time. This pattern relies on the picture-based narrative of the path towards Socialism. Thus, factographic reports bridge Avant-garde and Social Realism.

In the article, relating to my earlier works, I discuss Julian Krzyżanowski’s reflections on the relationship between the joking text of Peregrynacja Maćkowa (1612) and Finkenritter (ca. 1560). Although there is no direct relationship between both texts, I show that they share a common traditional narrative form, and that they both belong to the humorous and joking literature.In this context, one can assume an indirect relationship between the texts, probably based on the oral or written knowledge of a number of motives, both in the case of the author of Finkenritter and the writer of Peregrynacja Maćkowa .The motives in question are highly characteristic of the Cocagne (Schlaraffenland) themes. These Cocagne themes constantly acquire a local and therefore different characteristic or quality.

This work aims to contribute to the analysis of the morphosyntactic processes of gender assignment and gender agreement in inflectional languages, through the study of gender variation in Russian. We will focus on the data of a special contact variety, Odessa Russian (OdR), and compare it to standard, dialectal, child Russian, as well as other contact varieties of Russian. OdR is a linguistic variety slightly decomplexified by non-native acquisition, which arises from a special language contact situation; it originated as a lingua franca , and was passed on later to successive generations of speakers as a native variety. Some of the most striking features of OdR are its divergences in gender assignment and agreement with respect to Standard Russian. The specific processes analysed in this paper are classified in three groups: (i) loss of a gender value (neuter gender), by virtue if a strategy of gender (re)assignment; (ii) transfer or ‘migration’ of gender according to the phonological shape of the words involved (masculine into feminine and feminine into masculine); interestingly, formal rules in this group of processes can sometimes prevail over semantic rules (i. e. over natural gender); and (iii) disruptions of gender agreement (associated with disruption of grammatical case), which can be interpreted as the simplification of the corresponding syntactic tree by eliminating uninterpretable gender features in the language. We will show that these processes go beyond mere substrata effects, and proceed according to more general processes that partially take place also in other (contact and non-contact) varieties of Russian. More specifically: (i) occasional changes in the assignment and agreement of gender are reminiscent of dialectal Russian, but are more widespread in OdR (closer to child language) than in those varieties; (ii) even if gender in OdR was not lost as a grammatical category, some productions point to a partial loss of gender features, reminding us of pidgins and heritage languages.

The demonstrative pronoun eto (‘this’) in copula position: problems of its syntactic status from the perspective of functional grammar. This article deals with the syntactic status of the Russian demonstrative pronoun ‘eto’ in the copula position. The authors present the concept dominant in the Russian grammatical tradition that the pronoun in such sentences is equivalent to an auxiliary verb and performs a copulative function. The main part of the article is devoted to a critical analysis of such treatment, taking into account several aspects: function, distribution, position, intonation, substitution, semantics and others. The authors provide evidence for the thesis that the demonstrative pronoun in sentences of this type is one of the two exponents of the duplicative construction N-Pron, which occupies the position of the actant-subject, depending on the zeroed verb predicate, and besides, it anaphorically refers to the noun in preposition (which in turn has the status of a parenthetical element). Characteristics of sentences of this type are discussed in a comparative way, with reference to other European languages.

This article is concerned with grammaticalization of prepositional elements in Slavic. It is argued that external prefixes are internal prefixes that underwent some grammaticalization process. After discussing the grammaticalization of the Slavic prefix po- it is shown that the Czech future po- differs from Russian and Polish non-future prefixes. Furthermore, it is proposed that the presence of future po- in grammatical systems of Czech, Slovak, Slovenian and Sorbian is a result of diachronic grammaticalization processes induced primarily by the German-Slavic language contact in the Holy Roman Empire.