The author studied 40 pages (letters Д–Ж) of the Dokładny słownik rosyjsko-polski, written by the Ukrainian-born Russian P. Dubrowski and published in Warsaw in 1877. After a brief profile of the now nearly forgotten lexiographer, the author adds a few additional questions to the known critical remarks about the topic of study and discusses – in the context of the state of Polish language generally and of the Kresy in the nineteenth century – interesting findings refl ected in this dictionary in the areas of spelling, phonetics, flexion, syntax and lexis. She found that the Polish language presented in this Russian-English dictionary rather faithfully reflects the nineteenth-century instability of norms at all levels of the language, so that non-native speakers of the language were more inclined to choose recessive over expansive variants, occasionally those supported by analogous forms in Russian. In the author’s view, the prospect of a comprehensive, systematic exploration of this source is promising, especially regarding the possibility of extracting peculiar lexis from it, in particular so-called lexical agnonyms.
The authors analyse around 300 names with ideological components drawn out from a list of around 5,000 colonies, villages, hamlets, rural settlements and khutors located in the USSR, in which Germans lived in the 1920s and 30s. These oekonyms-sovieticisms can be classifi ed into three groups: 1) those derived from the names of individuals who had achieved renown (e.g. Ленинфельд, Подарок Ильича, Роза Люксембург, Марксфельд, Либкнехтдорф, Тельман, Клара Цеткин, Кировсфельд, Калининталь), 2) those commemorating phenomena and events linked with the Revolution and the era of Soviet rule (e.g. Красная Германия, Ротвейде, Ротер Штерн, Краснофельд, Октоберберг), 3) those referring to areas of production (e.g. Счастливый Труд, Культурный пахарь, Арбейтслибе).