The officials behind the Soviet onomasticon development campaign chose desktop calendars, a publicly available and widely circulated printed medium, to serve as a vehicle for the propagation of the new revolutionary anthroponomy. The paper looks into the masculine names recommended for general use by Universal Desktop Calendars issued by the State Publishing House in 1924–29. Mimicking the Russian Orthodox Church Calendars, its editors proposed their readers from up to six (in 1924–1926) to three (in 1927–1929) masculine names for each day. Based on a comprehensive analysis of the total body of the existing calendar material, the paper proceeds to classify the proper names by their actual source, including: Orthodox Church calendars, Catholic canons, antique mythology, later world literature and folklore sources, celebrated names of the past, toponyms, the Slavic name corpus, and, of course, ideologized sovietisms. The general picture of the sovietisized name list is accompanied with a description of its five-year dynamics refl ecting annually introduced modifications.

In 1964, “Pol’sha” magazine published three poems by Wisława Szymborska with a note: “translated by Anna Akhmatova”. As it was to turn out later, Akhmatova had only authored one of the translations, turning the other two poems over to Anatoly Nayman as a means for him to earn some income. The present paper supports this opinion by findings from my analysis of Akhmatova’s archive materials, viz. draft translations of the poems. The drafts of For wine ( Przy winie) reflect three phases in her translation work, while those for Ballad ( Ballada) and The Hungry Camp at Yaslo ( Obóz głodowy pod Jasłem) are only limited to corrections that merely “smooth out” the translator’s poetic style.