Volume 70, Issue 4

Michail Bulgakovʼs classic Master i Margarita , experts agree, still lacks successful transfer into comic-form. One of the main reasons may be the unfished novelʼs high structural-thematical complexity (if not over-complexity) – given through two functional parts of almost equal length, four different, partly intermingled storylines, a host of inevitable (“incontourables”, Parfenov) great scenes, and lots of open and subtextual allusions. There are, however, successful Russian, English, German and further fragmentary adaptations. The – tangible in the fragmentary adaptations – idea of somewhat looser handling of the complexity and density in Bulgakovʼs novel is also evident in Bettina Eggerʼs clearly successful (“highly recommended”) French album Moscou Endiablé , a graphic narrative combining research on the creation (contexts) of the novel with a large amount of modified fragmentary adaptations. This study, for the first time, analyses the album which profits from Eggerʼs rare twofold – artistic and philological (slavistic, comparative) – competence. Next to a discussion of the album’s lay out as a whole, a small choice of chapters and passages, among them Eggerʼs verbal-pictorial invention of a nightmare (“Le Procès”) concerning the “destruction of the author” (Bulgakov) in Stalin’s Russia is discussed more thoroughly. The study, among others, shows the meaning-making potential of graphic narrative, i. e. the possibility of enriching philological research. It also shows the political actuality of both Bulgakovʼs novel and Eggerʼs album.

The Viennese Czechs represent the largest and closest enclave of the Czech language to its original homeland. Their specificity lies especially in the fact that they consciously and systematically preserve their “national identity”. This article presents the selected results of a questionnaire-based investigation (February to May 2022), which is the output of a joint Czech-Austrian project entitled “Reflections on the Czech Language and Broader Czech Awareness in Viennese Czechs”. The principal aim of this text is to present the findings of these questionnaire components, which track more broadly defined aspects of cultural and social identity in relation to contemporary concepts of transculturality/interculturality. Therefore, it offers insight into the self-concept and self-perception among the multilingual and multicultural respondents. It is an analysis of items that can strongly clarify respondents’ views and reveal a range of feelings, opinions, and perspectives on national or personal identity issues.

This study examines the dynamics of cultural exchanges between Slovenia and Montenegro through the lens of translation activities before, during and after the Yugoslav period (1918–2023). It seeks to understand how historical and political changes have influenced book translation between the two languages and what these trends reveal about intercultural communication and exchange in the region. Based on data from the Slovenian and Montenegrin COBIB bibliographic databases, our research revealed a significant divergence in translation activity, with 179 translations of Slovenian authors and 56 translations of Montenegrin authors. The data was also analysed by type of literature (prose, poetry, drama, non-fiction), by target readers (adults, children and young adults) and by three important historical periods (1918–1945, 1946–1990 and 1991–2023). The analysis revealed a strong contrast in the translation of non-fiction books. The greatest imbalance and an obvious predominance of Slovenian authors concerns the translation of specialised monographs and especially the genre of textbooks. Finally, the analysis of translation flows revealed a moderate increase in the second, Yugoslav period (1946–1990), and a significant increase in the third period (1991–2023) following Slovenia’s declaration of independence and its accession to the EU.

This article examines gender stereotypes in the selected entries referring to marital status in a computer-generated thesaurus of synonyms and semantically related words called Kontext.io. This thesaurus is very popular in Croatia – in fact, it is the most popular local online thesaurus used in the country. We specifically focus on its Croatian section, which is derived from a large web corpus of Croatian, comprising 1.4 billion words, using a natural language processing (NLP) model based on word embeddings. The analyzed entries from the thesaurus include: udana/udata (married feminine ), oženjen (married masculine ), razvedena (divorced feminine ), razveden (divorced masculine ), udovica (widow) and udovac (widower). We first categorize the synonyms and semantically related terms from these entries into various semantic fields. We then critically analyze gender bias according to the fields, using the framework of critical lexicography and critical discourse analysis. The results point to presence of gender bias in the analyzed entries.