The aim of the article is to analyze Russian words transcribed into the Polish alphabet extracted from the texts of a Polish conservative-liberal author, S. Michalkiewicz, from the years 2003−2015. The lists of both correctly and incorrectly transcribed units are presented and the mistranscribed words are examined. The categories of transcription errors are provided along with the examples of words in which they occur. The results of the analysis may serve as a point of reference in further studies concerning adherence to the transcription rules of Russian performed on a larger number of texts written by a greater variety of authors.

Death is one of the key concepts present in the traditional image of the world. It means an end and is related to the process of wearing out and losing original properties. In folk anthropology, death is understood in terms of the transition from the earth world to the land of the dead, as the beginning of eternal existence. Death is one of the rites of passage and as such is correlated with other crucial moments of human existence, mainly with birth and marriage. Death is a common motif present in various genres of folklore. Researchers are interested in death predominantly because of its belief- and ritual-related image. The aim of the article is to analyse depictions of death in folk fablesand other kinds of prose works. Special emphasis is placed on the personifi cation of death as well as on its genesis and ontological status. The article also deals with the idea of death understood as both an event and a process, and it addresses death seen as a transcendental and unmaterialised force which determines a person’s life against his or her will.

This article describes the results of the pilot stage of qualitative fi eld research on Russian social memory in the second half of the 1980s. The aim of the research was to reveal what is the image of perestroika preserved in today’s social memory of those Russians who remember the events of those years. The main objective of the pilot stage was the identifi cation of the lexicon of terms and the set of concepts used to verbalize the memories of the perestroika period, as well as the caesuras and temporal characteristics related to the memory of this time. The results are outlined in the main topics, terms and concepts that pop up in conversations with respondents.

The author discusses the problem of reference of (nominal, verbal, adjectival groups, and adverbial) sentence components realized within coordinate relationships. Initially, the author refers to the theory of compactness as an explanation of the processes of generating coordinate constructions in the structure of simple sentences. There are evidences in favor of the thesis that the compactness theory does not explain coordination in semantic aspect. This applies not only to the structure with the main predicate with plural distribution (valence), but also to the entire range of coordination. The author distinguishes two types of references of coordinated phrases (in structure of a simple sentence): a distributional and a collective one. The constructional and semantic peculiarities of the expressions of both types have been described in relation to the contemporary Polish and Russian language.

The article shows that during the forming of grammatical category of gender in Indo-European languages, names of non-living objects and names of those animals whose sex is unimportant for humans were receiving grammatical meanings of gender on the basis of similarity or dissimilarity of designated objects with males or females. Such grammatical metaphors were based on the ideas of different peoples about some minor characteristics of persons of different sex, such as the difference between men and women with higher activity, greater size, strength and independence. By now, the metaphorical motivation of category of gender in the Russian language has survived only in certain nouns. These nouns are interrogative pronouns кто (masc.) ʻwhoʼ and что (neut.) ʻwhatʼ, paired nouns-synonyms, e. g. конь (masc.) ʻstrong horseʼ – лошадь (fem.) ʻordinary horseʼ, generic versions of nouns, e. g. ворон (masc.) ʻravenʼ – ворона (fem.) ʻcrowʼ, and nouns-occasionalisms used in speech oriented to expressiveness and creativity.

In this article, strategies and writing tricks (the trick of “defamiliarization”, imagery) which in Nabokov’s short story A Guide to Berlin serve to design the image of the city and simultaneously to explore the world of values (axiological map of Berlin/Eden) are being interpreted. The author of this article proves that the semantics of the title guide is connected with the strategy of transition from empirical observation and one “fragment of space” to expression of a situation in which the subject of speech has found himself. Moreover, it is shown that the subjectivity of the observer, his way of experiencing the world and his creative sensitivity seem crucial in the story, because he evaluates the surrounding reality and in the “act of individual creativity” builds upon it yet another space – an unusual, transformed one, close to the emigrant/the author of the guidebook. Attention is also paid to the differentiation of two ways of perceiving the world and two types of consciousness: the artist’s/narrator’s and his listener’s (“average consciousness”).

The article aims to prove that the narrative structure of The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz by Ilya Ehrenburg can be viewed as a starting point for understanding the overriding idea of the novel. In the material for interpretation among other things analysed what follows: the similarity between the narrative of the fi rst few chapters and the skaz narrative (Russian oral form of narrative) based on the defi nition of formal mimesis, the introduction to a “foreign word” narrative (the protagonist using reported speech and free indirect speech), the restriction of the storyteller’s role (which is the overriding element of the skaz narrative) and simultaneously putting the protagonist at the forefront, the language markers used in order to mask the convergence between the storyteller’s and the protagonist’s points of view. As a result, the article implies that the presence of a skaz storyteller allows analysing the fi gure of Lasik Roitschwantz not as a character from a book or of a certain type, but rather as a human being in a universal sense.

Vasyl Stus is the Ukrainian existential poet, who used aesthetic of surrealism and expressionism. This text presents surreal elements in the Vasyl Stus’s poems which are connected with the idea of hell. Author gives examples of different images of hell in European culture and literature and also analyzes the surrealist poems of Vasyl Stus from his book Merry Cemetery.

The article focuses on the term “train situation” created by Vyacheslav Kuricin, which is considered a metaphor of the work of the contemporary Russian writer Elena Dolgopyat. The proper analysis of Dolgopyat’s works is preceded by an introduction in which the definition of magical realism and its history in Russia is briefl y presented. The attitude of the Russian literary scholars to this phenomenon is presented as well. Next, the meanings of the figure of train in the writer’s stories are discussed. It is noteworthy that the features of magical realism (specific space-time construction, polyphonic narrative, fantastic elements perceived as something natural) are realized in her texts often through the image of a train. In works in which this picture does not exist, we deal with the „train situation”, which boils down to the combination in the presented world of various aspects of reality, unlimited by matter. The heroes live between different dimensions of reality, and combining into one cohesive whole of various space-times, ways of existence, realistic and fantastic elements allows to see the term of Kuricin also as a metaphor of all magical realism.

The article is an attempt to present Józef Czechowicz’s relationships with the early works of Oleh Olzhych from the Камінь (1932) and Бронза (1932) cycles, preceding his debut collection of poems entitled Рінь (1935). Oleh Kandyba’s poems became the subject of interest of Polish literary circles as early as in the 1930s. His poems were translated mostly by writers associated with the Kamena magazine based in Chełm, a group whose member was also Józef Czechowicz. Kandyba’s poetry, described as “tragic optimism,” is to a large extent analogous with the works of the poet from Lublin. Both authors include apocalyptic and Arcadian motifs in their poems. Their compositions, based on contrast, are accompanied by Biblical and classical motifs, in which the imagery of stone played a special role. Both Olzhych and Czechowicz took care over the clarity of their poetry and focused on the right choice of words. Poems provided them with a means of escape from the realities of war and constituted a kind of an appeal to the nation.

The article is a contribution to the methodology of reading and interpreting Dostoevsky’s famous novels. It owes its genesis to the refl ection upon the evolution of literary theory discourse in XX century and upon transformations in global (mainly Russian and Western) reception and modes of interpreting the oeuvre of the great Russian artist. The aim of the text is to prepare ground for reorienting Polish “dostoevskology” from the dominant reconstructive course onto the more creative, interpretative one. The order of my inquiries presents itself as follows. In the fi rst part of the article I focus on the questions of ideas, the protagonist and narrative techniques in Dostoevsky so that to highlight the specifi city of the writer’s approach to these issues. It will allow me to speak up for the minimum of methodological awareness which implies acknowledgment of the paradigm of polyphony, polysemy and complexity of Dostoevsky’s text. Perhaps it will also become possible to reveal some gaps in the hitherto existing state of research, debunk several stereotypes still functioning in Polish “dostoevskology”, and draw attention to still unrecognized interpretative clues in context of those crucial aspects of Dostoevsky’s work. In the second part I will reconstruct several most popular approaches to Dostoevsky’s text which differ in terms of understanding of what the relation between the reader and the text should comprise of. I will try to determine the benefi ts they can bring but also to sensitize to pitfalls they may entail. In the fi nal, third part of the study I will propose a project of a new interpretative approach which would rise to the challenge of Dostoevsky’s “spirit” as well as the spirit of his text the way it is construed by the most advanced contemporary critical studies and as I have learnt to perceive it.