Focusing on the period of unprecedented infl uence of popular science in Yugoslavia following the Second World War, the article examines a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches to linking science and Marxist philosophy of science against the backdrop of the dramatic political and cultural changes that were taking place in early socialist Yugoslavia.

The “Tetradi perevodčika” Journal was founded in 1958 and appeared almost regularly from 1963 to 1989. Its aim was to host readers in an ideal translator’s atelier, seen as an opportunity for theoretical reflection and discussion on concrete matters arising from everyday translation practice. This paper intends to trace the main lines of development of the lively theoretical-practical debate that animated Soviet culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The social and political transformations Russia underwent in the 20th century were also reflected in the sphere of imagery. This also refers to the imagery of movement and means of transport. The process of linking the imagery of means of transportation with the political doctrine in force is mostly visible in the period of Soviet rule, in particular in the interwar period when the foundations of this rule were laid. Then, aviation was to become one of the strongly ideologized means of transport. The ideologization process occurred at various levels, starting from onomastic procedures through advertising and linking aviation and Soviet rule within artistic and literary conceptualisations. In Soviet culture, an aeroplane or a rocket were not merely means of transport but the means by which the expansion of communist ideology globally was supposed to be facilitated.

The article contains an analysis of Boris and Gleb novel written by a contemporary Russian writer Y. Buida. The analysis is realized in reference to certain postmodern tendencies in literature. The author emphasizes mainly the dialogic character of postmodernism and depicts particular features of the movement in post-Soviet culture. Specifically, the dialogic character of the novel is realized through multilayer interferences of culture codes which suit the idea of chaosmic reality by Deleuze and Guatarri. Correspondingly, the dialogue is also displayed by the eclecticism of genders and styles.

The paper describes the political use of symbols of childhood and orphanhood in the current policy of the Russian authorities. At the beginning of the Bolshevik regime, homeless children (bezprizorni) became a subject of interest for the security apparatus organized by F. Dzerzhinsky. At that time, A. Makarenko developed his innovative pedagogical approach. These activities were designed to create a “new Soviet man”. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia again faced the problem of homeless children. After several years, however, children and orphans are now being used as a symbol of vulnerability in the government policy of the Kremlin. As an answer to the so-called “Magnitsky Act”, the Russian authorities implemented the “DimaYakovlev law” prohibiting adoptions of Russian children to the United States. In addition to this, the child as a symbol of innocence and vulnerability is an invariant element in the policy of the Russian authorities. This combines symbolism associated with bravery, dedication and sacrifice, allowing justification of the current political course of power in Russia.

The aim of this study is to analyse the geopolitical position of independent Poland after World War I and the state of her relations with neighbour states, and the policy of building alliances with France and Romania. In view of border conflicts with Lithuania and Czechoslovakia as well as the constant German and Soviet threat, the reborn Polish state was forced to seek for allies in the West. The alliances with France and Romania could not however reduce the danger for Poland emerging from Soviet-German cooperation basing on the treaty of Rapallo from 1922. Also the treaty of Locarno from 1925 in which Polish borders were left without guarantee was seen as a failure of Polish diplomacy. The inconvenient geopolitical position of Poland, and the aggressive policy of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union resulted in the Hitler-Stalin Pact from 23rd of August 1939 and the partition of Poland.

The article examines the English version of some poems by the Russian writer Nina Iskrenko (1951– 1995), included in the collection The Right to Err (Washington 1995) and translated by the American poet John High. Considering High’s observations in the introduction of the work, I will analyze the translation process as an existential dialogue between two intersecting poetics, leading to the liberation of language from any ideological connotations.

The incarceration of those determined to be security risks was a common feature of the wartime regimes of most European belligerents throughout the Great War. Yet, especially in several of the Habsburg successor states, internment and politicised incarceration continued as the war morphed into smaller wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions. This paper traces the social history of political incarceration in Hungary between approximately 1914–1924, with special attention to the post‑armistice period, during which wartime emergency laws were extended or revised to deal with political upheaval and renewed regional warfare. Within this framework, the paper focuses on the experience of one woman, a university‑educated teacher, who became a leading leftist educator and was imprisoned for her role in the Hungarian Republic of Councils (also called the Hungarian Soviet Republic) in 1920. She left Hungary for the Soviet Union in the 1920s as part of a prisoner exchange, and she remained there until the end of World War Two. She later returned to Hungary, and in 1953, published a memoir about her experiences during World War One and its aftermath. Using a gendered analysis to move from the larger context to the individual experience helps reveal continuity and change from Hungary’s Great War to its “war after war,” as well as the systematic and improvised nature of carceral deprivation and violence against female political prisoners. It also shows how the gendered memories of the Long World War One inflected the post‑1945 socialist party’s ideological mobilisation of women, putting forward an example of socialist womanhood that simultaneously challenged and reinforced the categories of prisoners and activists.

This paper is dedicated to a study of the religious layer in I. Ilf and E. Petrov’s novel The Twelve Chairs. The analysis provided leads to a deeper understanding of the novel as a travesty. First of all, the few existing works devoted to the problem of biblical referencing in The Twelve Chairs are listed and summarised. Secondly, these existing works will be supplemented with previously unmentioned and unstudied allusions. Following on from the religious aspects considered are: the novel’s title, the parallel between Jesus and Ostap Bender, the character of Fedor Vostrikov, the story of the ‘hussar‑monk’ and several biblical allusions contained in The Twelve Chairs. Finally, in the last part of our research, all the religious motifs are classified in order to further an understanding of the authors’ attitude towards the Bible. In conclusion, we determine the nature of the perception of the Bible in The Twelve Chairs.

This paper traces the interconnection of Soviet ideology and development of the ponyatiye term (понятие, Rus., back translation – concept) in the humanitarian sciences of the USSR, particularly in Soviet linguistics of the 20th century. Analyzing scientific literature of the Soviet epoch, as well as works written by the Marxist-Leninist founding fathers, the author demonstrates that interpretation of the term was limited by the theory of dialectic materialism and the ideological needs of an authoritative socio-political system. This system was interested in denying the capacity of language to participate in the construction of concepts and deprive the mind of critical attention. It was objectionable also to declare the subjectivity and variability of the categorization process because it was not allowed to question the monopoly of dominant ideological beliefs and the efficiency of Soviet propaganda. At the same time, in American and European cognitive linguistics scholars were forming a new theory of categorization and gradually reinterpreting the notion of concept which, as well as ponyatiye, is used to denote the results of categorization. Its subjective variability, interference with sensory images and capacity to be constructed was accepted. There are reasons to assert that the term понятие did not undergo the same transformation as the term concept in the English linguistic tradition because of the ideological restrictions. It was the term kontsept (концепт, Rus., back translation – concept) that absorbed features which were rejected by the term ponyatiye because of dialectic materialism. This new term came into Soviet and post-Soviet linguistics at exactly the time of the collapse of the USSR and the decline of Marxist ideology. In the author’s opinion, this coincidence in chronology is indirect proof of the conclusion that ideological factors affected the term ponyatiye in Soviet and Russian linguistics.

The paper discusses Jerzy Passendorfer’s Day of Exculpation as movie about Polish-Soviet brotherhood of arms. By learning the history of its production and comparing various versions of its screenplay, shooting script and the fi lm itself one can see contexts and ways of creating an image of Polish-Soviet relations.

The Heptachor (Гептахор) studio was a leading early 20 ^th-century Russian modern dance school committed to a revival of the art of dance and the development of new forms of musical movement and new concepts of artistic creation. In the years 1914–1934, it was the centre of the Musical Movement dance school, experimenting with a wide range of artistic, educational and therapeutic practices. The aim of the article is, first, to present the history of the Heptachor studio on the basis of the recollections and memoirs of its co-founder Stephanida Rudneva, contemporary documents and archive materials, and, second, to analyze the typical creative process narratives included in those sources.

Professor Tadeusz Kowalski (1889–1948) was in correspondence with scholars from practically all over the world. He had an active interest in the developments of Oriental studies in the Soviet Union. He valued the publications he received from the USSR as well as all contacts he had with Russian researchers. He sought to cooperate with Alexander Samoylovich (1880–1938) – one of the most eminent Turkologists in the Soviet Union. This goal had been partially achieved. The archives of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kraków now hold, catalogued under ref. no. K III-4, j. 174, just three letters from the Russian Turkologist. These materials, despite their small number, are an engrossing source of knowledge on the state of Soviet Turkish studies in the mid-1920s and the Soviet Oriental studies community. As the author managed to determine, these letters are all the more precious as the branch of the archives at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St.-Petersburg, where the legacy of professor Samoylovich is kept, has no copies. Interestingly, there are no surviving copies of the letters from professor Kowalski to the Russian Turkologist. This article aims to analyse the contents of the letters written by Alexander Samoylovich, the Soviet Turkologist, to professor Tadeusz Kowalski, and determine the purpose and direction in which Turkish studies were developing in the USSR in the period described in these sources.

This jubilee article commemorating the centenary of the Battle of Warsaw (1920) is an attempt to examine the presentation of this decisive battle of the Polish-Soviet War. Also known as the 'Miracle at the Vistula', it became one of the most popular foundation myths of the reborn Polish state, shaped and fed to the public opinion by both historiography and personal accounts of its participants. This article focuses on a series of dramatic battlefield reports in the mass circulation daily 'Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny'.

This article discusses the unknown circumstances of Stanisław Rembek’s debut as a poet. Stanisław Rembek is the author of highly acclaimed novels about the Polish--Soviet War of 1919–1920 and short stories about the January 1863 Uprising. But practi-cally nobody knows that he made his debut as a with ‘O polski Żołnierzu!’ [‘O Polish Soldier!’], published in the college magazine Razem [ Together] in Piotrków. The poem displays a strong influence of Romanticism; the Romantic attitudes and intellectual legacy would later be discussed and infrequently scoffed at by the characters of his novels.