In Dolgopyat’s works, the world appears as an inscrutable mystery in which the wonderful and supernatural is closely connected with the realistic and everyday. Probably the most important part of this universe is chronotope. In this article, I focus on the category of time in selected stories in which it comes to the foreground. „The heroes of the analyzed stories travel in time, stop time or look for an answer to the question of the originality of their experiences. After all, if one can go back in time, maybe the whole of life is a mere repetition of what has already happened?”. Transitions between various time levels open up the way to other worlds and variants of one’s own destiny. The magical properties of time show that the reality of the heroes is not limited to matter and does not fit into the rationalistic picture of the world. This confirms the affiliation of the works to magical realism.

This article deals with the issue of the means of conveying ethical reflection in mass literature. The material under analysis are Guzel Yakhina’s bestselling novels Zuleikha Opens her Eyes and My Children. The author concentrates on the motifs which express oddity and strangeness observed among the descriptions of the protagonists, events and situations. Considered also is oddity on the level of narrative which seems to be very similar to the artistic technique of defamiliarization. Analyses show that through contrast the discussed motives are in Yakhina’s novels strictly connected with commitment to others and also a responsibility for them. This connection broadens the horizons of ethics in popular and mass literature and opens up the perspective of ethical reading.

The lich‑ root as well as its marginal semantic lines are described here. The description is based upon folk and mythological images and also upon etymologic data, including the meaning of this root and its derivatives in Slavonic languages (chiefly in Russian and Ruthenian). The semantics is labelled as excess (superfluity), insufficiency (lack), harmfulness (damage), dash (Dutch courage) as well as being presented with the semantic signs and forms reflected in words. Presented is the possible semantic mechanism for the development and transition from the initial meanings to newer ones. We explain the logic of the association root in question with the old images of lot and moderation. Future research prospects for the lich‑ root as well as its semantic and morphological derivation are shown. This includes not only literary variants but equally dialectal and regional ones.

The film Bohdan Zynoviy Khmelnytsky by the Ukrainian director Mykola Mashchenko is little‑known in Poland. The director intended it to become a “bridge over the precipice” which divides both nations, but from the very beginning it was negatively perceived both by the audience and critics. The Ukrainian reception of Jerzy Hoffman’s With Fire and Sword, a movie referring to the same events from a common past, seems to be completely different entity. The work by the Polish artist remains of interest even twenty years after its release. The article is an attempt to determine the reasons for this situation. The author analyzes the artistic values of Mashchenko’s film, the characters’ performances and historiosophy, and, comparing those with Hoffman’s screening, looks for an answer to the question as to the motives for the contrasting reception of these films by Ukrainian society.

The article studies the problem of the Yekaterinoslav urban text formation in Russian literature. The image of the city in the poem by Alexander Pushkin Brothers‑Robbers is analysed; the real (historical) image of Yekaterinoslav is considered in correlation with the image depicted in the poem, determined are the functions of romanticist topoi in the creation of the Yekaterinoslav text, while revealed are the peculiar features of the formation of the urban myth within the Yekaterinoslav text itself. The process of shift from the image of a real Yekaterinoslav city to the image of the ideal (non‑material) one, from a “physical” image to the “metaphysical” is investigated. There is a process of poeticizing a small city in the work of art, representing the primary stage of forming a myth about the city. After analysing the correlation of the Yekaterinoslav myth with the aesthetic constants of romanticism (the motif of freedom and predatory liberty, images of the noble robber and rebellious character, the motif of rejection, correlation with the utopian tradition) we may conclude that within the poetics of the urban text Alexander Pushkin reinterprets and transforms the traditional categories of romanticist poetics. The author’s characterization of the robber character diminishes the romantic ideal, revealing the other, “trivial” nature and interpreting rebellion not as a rejection or desire for freedom, but as a crime. Such a twist in depicting the image of a rebellious character stipulates a different interpretation of the theme of freedom, transforming it into the theme of guilt and punishment. Thus, the motifs of rejection, rebellion and repentance, compositionally uniting the development and understanding of the theme of predatory liberty in the poem, are interpreted in the metaphysical image of the city. Such a function of the city image determines the peculiar narrative structure of the poem at the level of plot, composition and style.

The study looks into the wealth and earnings of the first Russian court poet of the 17th century, Simeon of Polotsk (1629‑1680). Simeon was in many respects a unique figure for 17th‑century Muscovy. His social status was far from common for besides being a regular hieromonk, at the same time he founded and managed a printing house supported by Tsar Aleksey Mikhajlovich (an institution that printed books without the license of the Moscow patriarch), and was probably the only monk to be accepted to the Tsar’s service as a poet and preacher. His private life and especially fortune are fascinating: residing in a house specially built for him on the territory of the Zaikonospasskiy monastery in Moscow, Simeon earned his living rather than live by the means provided by his monastery and by the end of life he had accumulated a great sum of Russian silver kopeks and golden chervonets comparable in worth to the money princes would have had for charitable donations at their funerals. When living in Moscow, Simeon received everything needed for his everyday life from the Tsar’s court: food, hay for his horse (provided by the Tsar as well), paper for writing. The supplement to the article discusses the date of Simeon’s relocation to Moscow from Polotsk and examines the circumstances under which he was accepted to the royal court.

The article is devoted to study of the structure of the artistic expanse in Marina Tsvetaeva’s autobiographical essay Mother and Music. This structure is rich and complex; containing the following elements: concrete-geographical, spatial-physical, archetypal, emotional-psychological, sacred‑spiritual as well as others. Each of them, to one degree or another, reflects the peculiarities of the writer’s worldview, her creative manner, as well as her subjective attitude to the objective phenomena of surrounding reality. In the holistic context of this essay, the author contrasts two grandiose Universes – the mother’s world with her music and the daughter’s world with her poetry. The relativity and variability of the relevant spatial, psychological and other parameters emphasize the absoluteness of those eternal values of existence, on which the masterly organized system of Tsvetaeva’s prose is based.

The author of the article deals with the subject of the Russian period of Tadeusz Miciński’s work (1873‑1918). The rationale here being the discovery of many ‘new’, previously unpublished articles by the writer. In turn, the context was published by G. Bobilewicz years ago: Tadeusz Miciński i Rosja. Szkic do tematu (2008). The author presents the state of research, discusses the previously unknown texts by the author of Nietota, and finally gives new facts about Miciński’s stay in Russia (from 1915‑1918). The author discusses the literary activity of Miciński from the First World War onwards. This encompasses largely journalistic texts: articles, manifestos, open letters, travel reports from the front and from the life of Polish soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front.

The purpose of the article is to study the origin and spread of the Carpathism koshara in Slavic and Balkan languages and within Carpathian dialects. The material used in the analysis comprises general, specialist and dialect dictionaries, as well as dialectological atlases and maps. The study has used methods of semantic and phonetic analysis of lexicographic sources, an interpretation of linguistic maps as well as etymological analysis. A comparative‑historical study of the word koshara allows one to determine such a development of meaning: “the result of weaving, something woven”. Then there was a transfer to capacity and, finally, specialization: “capacity for carrying things, basket”, “capacity for body, clothes”, “capacity for housing, house”, “housing for people”, “housing for animals”. The comparative‑historical research conducted involving broad dialectical material has allowed one to finally accept the еastern etymology of the word from the turс. koš, related to the verb košmak.

The text discusses parallels in the semantic development of the Proto‑Slavic lexemes * brudъ and bridъ – parallels which are common to East Slovak dialects, the Polish linguistic area and Eastern Slavic Languages (Ukrainian and Belarusian). The article features an analysis of these lexical units which are a part of the Polish language and appear in the Eastern Slovak dialect – one of the three basic groups of Slovak dialects, and which have a similar development to that observed in East Slavic Languages. The aim is to trace the semantic development of the words studied in the area in question, and the establishment of the nature of the interlinguistic relations which occur in the situations discussed.

The authors have collected an extensive file of peculiar multi-word units used by Poles living in the North‑eastern Kresy (Borderlands) region. An attempt is made to describe them in a formalized way, as presented by A. Bogusławski in his dictionary probes. The excerpt, however, is heterogeneous, excessively diverse in its formal, generic, functional and semantic terms, and requires the resolution of certain issues that concern not all the phrases, but those of particular generic groups. One such group is the comparative constructions lexicalized as X like Y. The article discusses the problem of the phrasematic status of comparisons, their characteristics in comparison with other groups of phrases and the difficulties faced by the researcher of Northern Kresy (Borderlands) comparative constructions. There is also a draft of several key word articles containing peculiar comparisons, e.g. ktoś kręci się jak wiewiórka w kole, ktoś pisze jak kura grzebie, coś potrzebne komuś jak kogutowi medalion, coś jest słabe jak wilcze oko.