The works of Fyodor Sologub, unlike most Russian symbolists, such as Alexander Blok, are described by researchers and contemporary writers (Vladyslav Khodasevich and others) as ‘static’, alien to the idea of path, evolution. The aim of the article is to break this academic stereotype and thought patterns about the author of The Little Demon. Analysis of the research material: critical literary statements and selected poems by the poet, allows us to notice his spiritual and aesthetic evolution. Firstly: in fulfilling his artistic vision, Sologub not only does not “tread water” (“topchetsya na odnom meste”, as Leo Shestov stated), but, as Maria Cymborska‑Leboda writes, his poetic thought remains in motion, i.e. there are noticeable ‘points’ on his artistic way, to which he reaches. Thus, in the words of the mentioned researcher, in a certain sense, like Blok, he is a ‘path poet’, while remaining faithful to himself – his ‘sweet dream’ (paradise). Secondly: the interpretation of the symbol of the ‘path’ and related concepts that fit within the semantic field of the poet’s works point to the biblical sources of his thinking – the author’s lyrical subject often takes the form of a pilgrim, a wanderer traversing the ‘desert of life’, struggling with the world (мироборчество), he conducts a dialogue, often turning into a dispute with the Creator (богоборчество). This dialogue, subjected to reflection in the article, is interpreted as one of the manifestations of the spiritual growth of the lyrical hero and the poet himself (the vertical and existential dimension of the concept – homo viator).

The articles attempts at the reconstruction of the image of America in letters and memoirs of Dmytro Chyzhevs’kyy, Yuriy Shevel’ov, and Wiktor Weintraub, East‑European scholars who after WWII greatly contributed to the formation of the image of Slavic civilization in the West. They immigrated to the US in late 1940s – early 1950s expecting Harvard to be the site for their further academic endeavours since the after – WW II Europe could not satisfy their academic needs. Interaction with the American academic community developed differently for each scholar, which had its impact on their further careers. Impressions from America and Harvard in particular in their correspondence generally testifies to the their hopes and expectations, while memoirs contain a balanced or even distanced re‑evaluation of those. Historical context within which these writings are viewed suggests that for each scholar the image of America was dynamic and different due to their age, personality, character, previous immigrant life experience, and their cultural background and academic worldview. Unlike Chyzhevs’kyy, these factors suited well Shevel’ov and Weintraub in terms of adjustment to the reality and expectations of the New World. Further study of these scholars’ biographies from this perspective seems particularly topical under the circumstances of recent reformatting of the Slavic Studies as a discipline.

The article reveals the peculiarities of the urban text in Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories. The image of Odessa is analyzed as a poetological dominant of the cycle. The originality of the artistic image and the text of Odessa is considered as the relationship between the semantic setting in the social and cultural focus, the historical image of the city and its perception in the minds of townspeople. Thus, the author focuses on the space locus that serves as a marker of the Odessa text and identifies the city of Odessa (Moldavanka, Peresyp, Privoz), the images of the Odessa landscape in their symbolic interpretation and the image of Odessa man as closely related components of the artistic structure of the cycle and the Odessa text itself. Analysis of the stories distinguishes that the meaning‑forming and structure‑forming functions of the Odessa topoi are subordinated to a single goal – to create and typify the image of Odessa man. What is important is not the city itself as a socio‑cultural organism, but its perception in the urban consciousness. The key fact to reveal the specifics of the Odessa text and the Odessa consciousness is the idea of the decline – the collapse of the communal and tribal consciousness as the decline of the Odessa ethnos realized in the conflict of personal and social principles, the inverse comprehension of Rabelaisian corporality motif, the images of the sunset landscape and in the irony, which discredits as false both the gang life romance and the appearing concept of a new world. The city depicted by I. Babel on the threshold of the 1917 revolution is interpreted as a city at the decline of culture. The writer depicts the end or the decline of old Odessa through the end of Odessa man and the collapse of the Odessa ethnos. Thus, in I. Babel’s Odessa cycle, there is a transformation of the traditional image of sunny Odessa into the image of a city fallen into decline. The features of the image of Odessa man regarded as indications of the declining culture are determined in the article.

The paper focuses on artifact denominations – compound idiomatic phrases that encode the information on a person’s anthropometric characteristics (those of body, virtues, behavior, etc.) in artifact‑naming items (based on the Ukrainian, Polish and English languages). The study elaborates on the system of significative and denotative descriptors – two‑component entities that represent a metaphoric mapping of the source (significative descriptors) and target (denotative descriptors) domains. The significative descriptors are reduced to the classes of the artifact signifiers; among those are the classes of clothes, household articles, food, weapon, facilities, transport and symbols. The denotative descriptors represent the classes of the artifact signified; among those are the classes of a person’s social, value‑based and semiotic characteristics. The ultimate goal of the study is to characterize regular relations between the two classes of descriptors in the contrasted languages. The analysis provided in the paper proceeds from the assumption that any artifact‑naming process takes place on the basis of extended stereotyping – a cognitive mechanism that provides for the encoding of additional, complementary senses in artifact‑naming items. The study concludes that artifact‑naming processes in the Ukrainian, Polish and English languages respond to the communities’ demands for representing a person’s internal, spiritual world within the concept of external material objects (artifacts). The analysis reveals the tendency of artifact designations towards a social, axiological and semiotic conceptualization of a person’s artifact world.

The article substantiates the importance of using an interdisciplinary approach to the study of language personality. A variety of scientific concepts about the content, level model and structural‑component composition of the linguistic persona are demonstrated; information on the formation of this phenomenon in the field of related humanities, in particular in the relationship of linguistics, literature, psycholinguistics, psychology, medicine. Within the framework of psycholinguistics, classifications of language personality depending on normative or specific speech are distinguished. Traced is the migration of the term ‘accentuation’ from medicine to linguistics.

The article characterises the artistic language of Vasily Shukshin, laying special emphasis on the role of dialectisms in his short stories, as well as in literature in general. However, the main focus of the article is to point out and analyse the types of equivalents that were used in the Polish renditions by the following translators: I. Bajkowska, Z. Gadzinianka, J. Landesberg, K. Latoniowa, T. G. Lipszyc, E. Niepokólczycka, J. Olszowska, I. Piotrowska, B. Reszko, D. Rymsza‑Zalewska, I. Szpak, A. Wolnicka. Translators utilise various translation equivalents but they do not fully recreate the qualities of the original units. Translators predominantly tend to convey the denotative meaning. As a result translations lose the local flavour of a Siberian village.

Since modern Slavic studies lack a uniform concept of the Ukrainian redaction of the Church Slavonic language, this article analyzes the major achievements of Ukrainian linguistics in the study of this phenomenon. Applying the method of linguistic historiography, the author describes the emergence of a national concept, according to which written sources – reflecting the features of the Ukrainian language from different periods of its formation – attest to the existence of a single Ukrainian redaction. The development of views on the Church Slavonic language is evidenced by the works of M. Maksymovych, I. Ohienko, G.Y. Shevelov, V. Nimchuk. Today different schools are primarily concerned with the quantitative interpretation of particular features of the Ukrainian redaction. Such an interpretation is largely premised on the 19th‑century Russian philological tradition which does not take into consideration the historical differentiation of East Slavic. Burdened with problematic terms like Russian, such an approach remains in contrast with Ukrainian linguistics, which accepts the existence of the Ukrainian redaction of Church Slavonic since the times of Kyivan Rus’.

Since the end of the 2010s, there has been an autofiction boom in Russian prose. The heroes of this literary cross‑genre are artistic projections of the authors, similar while at the same time not similar to their creators. This article presents the female protagonists of two of the most notable autofiction novels of recent years – There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union (2017) by Olga Breininger and Wound (2021) by Oksana Vasyakina. In addition, the article describes the different life path trajectories of the young heroines. If the journey of Breininger’s artistic projection leads to self‑destruction, then the wanderings of Vasyakina’s artistic projection lead her home.

The article deals with the problems of prevention in the preservation and development of idioms in the multilingual territory between the Dniester and the Danube rivers, based on the sociolinguistic situation of the region, the language and educational policy in the area and their dynamics, and a search for a solution. The goal involves modeling forecasts (possible development vectors) of the ethnolinguistic situation within the investigated area, in order to be able to avoid negative scenarios, but to move along the path of its harmonious development, to find tools and measures for its constructive management. It is considered that the problems preventing the preservation of this continuum’s linguistic diversity, as well as the development of idioms in a multilingual environment, are caused by both internal (problems of effective implementation of the language and educational policy of Ukraine) and external factors. In order to ensure the preservation and development of the area’s idioms, some negative, unfavorable scenarios in the development of the ethnolinguistic and political situation were modeled. In our opinion, a number of measures should be taken to prevent the ethno‑linguistic situation from developing along such destructive vectors. First of all, it is necessary to form, in some ways reanimate, a positive image of the Ukrainian Language, at least – it should not be perceived by minorities as an imposed language. If the Ukrainian authorities do not have an understanding of this necessity, the European Union could influence the resolution of many partial issues with the linguistic life of the region.

The article deals with the history of competition and standardization between the variants од‑/ від‑ (both as preposition and prefix) in the Ukrainian language. Historically they are related to different groups of dialects. In the southwestern dialectal zone, with the exception of the northern dialects of the Volyn and Carpathian areas, the variant від‑ prevails, while the variant од‑ is predominant in the north of the country. The variant од‑ was typical for standard Ukrainian of the 19th‑early 20th century. After a period of competition with від‑ it lost out because of the artificial limitation of its use. This happened in the early 20th century due to the desire to employ forms that would give the literary language a national character, since the від‑ variant is notably different from both Polish and Russian. The history of од‑/ від‑ competition is investigated on the material of dictionaries, 1920s’ grammars and modern linguistic research. The history of од‑/ від‑ preposition and prefix variants was researched as well within the Ukrainian language corpus, which includes texts from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Shown are the points of variation related to regional and chronological properties, to authors’ individual preferences and to certain lexemes.