The Polish word ‘niepamięć’ (oblivion) is defined by dictionaries as ‘forgetfulness’, ‘lack of remembrance’. In the last 25–30 years, its meaning has been extended and incorporated into the term ‘niepamięć zbiorowa’ (collective oblivion), which means ‘socially relevant phenomena suppressed from memory and/or not admitted to the collective memory of a community’. The author has analysed the contents of the Polish concept of ‘NIEPAMIĘĆ (zbiorowa)’ and asked whether one could find a lexical equivalent of Polish ‘niepamięć’ in Russian and an equivalent of the concept of ‘NIEPAMIĘĆ’ in Russian mentality. Providing a negative answer to these questions today, the author proposes that, instead of analysing individual words such as ‘niepamięć – забвение (zabveniye)’, one should analyse entire conceptual and lexical fields of memory in Polish and in Russian.

Taking as a starting point Vyacheslav Ivanov’s poem Eden – the epilogue of the 5th book of “metaphysical lyric poetry” Rosarium as well as his critical and philosophical works – the article proposes a culturological interpretation of the key topoi of the poet’s artistic thought: his poetic anthropology. The principal point in these considerations is conceptualisation of the category of paradise/Eden in Ivanov’s writings and the notion of happiness as “metaphysical and religious feeling” connected with a person’s spiritual life in its vertical dimension (relation man – three-personed God). Moreover, the article presents intertextual relationships between Ivanov’s poetry and cultural texts (St Augustine, Petrarch, and others) being the source of European understanding of the concepts: soul, memory, oblivion, paradise.