The paper focuses on Osip Mandelstam's Tristia cycle of poems, who proceeded to express the condition of a wronged person in the form of a lament, regret. The key principle of a poetic lament consisted in a contrast, which is why the authors of elegies opted for adopting a linear order, placing the consolatio as the final sequence. Mandelstam puts this linearity into question as an advocate of Bergson's notion of discontinuity of time, allowing to perceive a diversity of phenomena in their systemic manifestations as totally discrete, and yet – also in their wholeness. The linkage between the poet’s output and the philosophy of death, as revealed in Tristia, does not eliminate the notion of consolation, which reflects well Mandelstam's project of creating the language of joy, his vision of the world as a cultural whole, or his pet project of “universal domestication”. This is meant to shift attention to the so-called “things”, that may offer comfort derived from within the very act of experiencing beauty in its sensual dimension. The notion of gentleness is also essential, as it may well offer consolation as an indispensable component of being.

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the image of a garnet bracelet in the story of the same name by Aleksandr Kuprin. The grant bracelet is considered as a complex, multidimensional image with intentionally contradictory semantics. This is a kind of amulet of Zheltkov, along with which he gives his life to Princess Vera. Red and yellow garnet stones symbolize the near death of the donor, and the power of his love, and eternal life. The giving of the bracelet at the same time symbolizes the conclusion of a mystical marriage between its owner and Vera Sheina. Complex symbolic meanings arise due to references to various texts and plots, especially the myth of Pluto and Persephone (the parallel is based on the homonymy of garnet-mineral and pomegranate-fruit in Russian). In the symbolis of Kuprin's story, a kinship with the poetics of Russian symbolism is traced.

The article is a case study of human behaviour against the background of political, economic and cultural changes in the 1990s in the countries of the former USSR based on the example of the life of insects depicted by Victor Pelevin. The writer in his book The Life of Insects reduces all human life to the world of insects, constantly trying to find themselves. Pelevin by means of grotesque and allegory, touches upon the issues of human life and the use of culture by the authorities to educate the Soviet people, depriving them of their personal consciousness and independence. The picture presented by the author makes the reader wonder whether people who are deprived of their own consciousness deserve to live?

The current of minor literatures – developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on the basis of an analysis of Franz Kafka's works – is a kind of breakthrough in the modern and post-modern interpretation of literary texts. Its basic aspect is the minority, expressed in various ways, determined by the social exclusion of the artist, set within the framework of a dominant foreign culture, the emanation of which is primarily language. This immanent feature affects all levels of a literary work, leading to the creation of a specific apparatus. One of the most interesting representatives of this current is Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky – a Russian writer from a Polish noble family. The writer's work – focused mainly on criticism of the central category of logos – is based on a set of philosophical concepts that transfer reflections to a paradigm different from the modernist or socialist realist tradition. One of the key objects of analysis in such an approach is the question of sound and the reception of music itself. The author of the article presents the concept of sound philosophy present in Krzhizhanovsky’s works, which at the same time characterizes the whole current of minor literatures and – similarly to other sign systems – introduces a distinction between minor and dominant elements.

The article examines the relationship between Russians and Stalinism through the Polish lens. The analysis centers around the issues of remembrance and oblivion, two thought processes that are merely superficially contradictory. The author is interested in problems of “power over memory” and “erasing memory” characteristic of non-democratic orders. Within the scope of interest, there is also the cultivation of the heroic myth associated with World War II, including the attitude towards Stalin-the-Victor. Another point of focus is the Russian society’s remembrance/forgetfulness regarding Stalin’s Great Terror and the atrocity of Gulags, as well as its collective reluctance towards founding a national community on the remembrance of Stalinist repressions. The author refers to many authors, among which there are Jacek Hugo-Bader, Mariusz Wilk and Wacław Radziwinowicz.

The subject of the presented article is Bulgarian, Polish and Russian emotive verbs, treated in perspective of syntactic valence. The author examines the grammatical forms of propositional argument in the sentences with emotive verbs that represent pre- dicate-argument structure P (x, q). All forms are divided into several types: observance, compression and splitting. The author shows that in this area we have to deal with analog reflection of propositional structure, or more or less compression of proposition argument, or its dismemberment and doubling syntactic position. The author takes into account the regularity of the implementation of each grammatical form, quoting the relevant quantitative data.

The article analyzes the implementation of dialogicality in the artistic discourse referring to dialogue as a form of explication of dialogicity in text communication, as a special type of speech interaction which serves as the most relevant means of verbalizing the speaker’s communicative intentions and is represented by a question/answer complex of stimulus/reaction exchange. Based on the voluminous factual material, the explication of dialogic intentions is traced in two typological registers of communication: tolerant and a-tolerant; it is indicated that, on the one hand, the addressant/addressee continuum of speech interaction conveys a be-nevolent atmosphere and expresses the modality of interlocutors’ mutual understanding and tolerant attitude about themselves being realized through various modal-intentional utterances, primarily interrogative, and stimulating and optative constructions, the use of which contributes to the progress of the communicative process; on the other hand, there is a-tolerant register – a natural phenomenon that reflects the imbalance in relations between communicating parties, the principled incompatibility of views, a conflict in general, represented by counter-questions, echo-questions, evil wishes incentive imperatives, invectives, etc.

The text of the Sigismund III sentence in the disputes of Kiev burghers with castle craftsmen about refusing them to participate in «munitio a conditio» of the city, the castle burghers under threat of a fine (500 kopecks of the Lithuanian hryvnas) forced to perform fortification works and participation in raising funds in the public order for the defense of the city is published. The decree was issued on February 28, 1622 in Warsaw in Polish. It was included in the collection of letters confirming the Magdeburg Law of Kyiv (from 1544 to 1659) by Polish rulers. Collection of privileges copied at the beginning of the XVIII century for the own needs of Burmese Koz’ma Krychevetc. It was translated from Polish and Latin into Ukrainian by sotnyks A. Trotcyna and M.Yagelnytskyi. The monumental book is stored in the Central State Historical Archive of Kyiv. In the article the linguistic features of the monumental book on the graphic, phonetic and morphological levels are analyzed. Variants in writing that are caused by the written tradition of that time, the lack of normalization of old and new forms, the writers’ idiolect and the influence of Polish and, less often, the Church Slavonic language. The vocabulary has been characterized from the point of view of its origin, the presence of a large number of Polonisms, Latinisms and Germanisms has been noted. In the text translators often used words-doublets and synonyms for clarification of a number of concepts.

The purpose of the article is to analyze the concept of translation strategy, which is a relatively under discussed topic in translation theory studies. The idea of translator’s strategy use can be put forward mainly on the basis of the analysis of the translated work within a skopos-based research position, according to which a translator’s strategy is a part of conscious action organized by the translation’s purpose and conditioned by the situational context. The current study takes under scrutiny the Russian translation of a publication about Poland’s history after regaining independence. The analysis shows translators’ tendency to exoticise their translation while the textual data enable us to reconstruct translators’ motivations and ways of shaping translated units. At the same time, the study highlights the consequences of adopted strategies and presents limitations as well as drawbacks connected with exoticisation of translation.

The borrowed lexis from the Polish language contained in the Russian-Ukrainian dictionaries of the early twentieth century is analyzed in the article. Its state and prevalence in the modern Ukrainian language is being clarified. Polonisms that are now out of use or on the periphery of the Ukrainian literary language have been investigated. Examples of actualized words were considered.

The article elucidates the conception of “Concise Ukrainian-Polish dictionary of set expressions: lexical equivalents, phraseologisms, proverbs and sayings” which implements an international Polish-Ukrainian project. The Council of Europe is known to devote much attention to the problems of the development of languages, their improvement and, correspondingly, to the development of linguistics, in particular, its applied branch, which includes lexicography. The dictionary under analysis represents: 1) the status of set expressions which, being widespread in the examined lingual cultures, reflect the mentality of the nation, its history, national specificity etc., 2) principles and procedures of semantic transformations of set stable lingual units by means of the cognate Slavonic language. The conception of the Ukrainian-Polish phraseological dictionary has been realized in the history of Ukrainian and Polish phraseography for the first time. The conception is based on 1) the detailed analysis of the theoretical and practical experience of compiling dictionary of this type; b) thorough outline of the system of headwords with the heterogeneous status of: 1) the representation of the mentality of the nation, its ethnographic features., norms of etiquette, ethics, psychology, theme (ideographic aspect) etc.; 2) structure, semantics and pragmatics; 3) specificity of functions and style. The conception of the dictionary is based on the methodological foundation of anthropocentrism and main phraseographic principles of bilingual dictionaries aiming at the most adequate representation of a corresponding lingual units by means of another language. The dictionary will contribute to the further research in the sphere of contrastive Ukrainian- -Polish linguistics and phraseograpical theory.