The article deals with the process of the shaping and of the evolution of the Russian literary language in ancient Russia. The author concludes that the Church Slavonic language and the folk-literary language as distinguished by V.V. Vinogradov are essentially the same: this is the Church Slavonic language of high or low norm.

The information capacity of the term is understood by the author as a conceptual-semantic structure, i.e. the volume values of the term “supplying” specific terminological information. A use of terminological information, correlated with the corresponding value of the term, depends directly on the communicative situation and context. The paper shows various ways of ensuring the adequate perception of the relevant terminological information.

The article provides an survey of the most significant memoirs by Mikhail Lermontov’s contemporaries, referring to different periods of his life and creative work. Memories or statements of contemporaries, containing an appraisal of the poet’s personality or his works are embedded into historical and literary context which allows to estimate their credibility. A considerable attention is paid to those episodes of Lermontov’s biography, that received controversial interpretation of both his contemporaries and later generations of scholars (for example, factual sources of V.A.Sollogub’s short story «Great world»; the events that brought to Lermontov’s duel with N.S.Martynov and a few others). The most prominent published works on Lermontov’s life and his creation work from the second half of the XIX century until recently are considered in the article.

Research directed to the works of Berdyaev Russian literature – articles from different years of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, A. Belyi, the book “The Philosophy of Dostoevsky” (1921). The focus of the thinker is to relate artistic and philosophical ideas about identity in the works of writers of the 19th – early 20th c. with the ideas of Christian anthropology. Through the antinomy of the Old Testament and evangelical views on the human, Christian and anti-Christian intentions in the artist’s work and the surrounding cultural and social environment Berdiaev approaches to understanding the features of individual artistic worlds considered authors, their spiritual and creative evolution. Conceptual bases of reflection Berdyaev Stock image of man in the literature stated in his book “The Meaning of Creativity” (1916), where the author proved the dominant anthropological own religious, aesthetic constructions.

The article considers chronotop’s specific features in famous Nabokov’s novels (“Speak, Memory”, “The Gift”, “Pale Fire”, etc.) that can be characterized as an extremely extended space-and-time perspective of the novels in order to ensure their philosophical depth and embody the unity of the author’s world outlook with its neoplatonic concept of the Otherworld as well as the concept of time as a fraudulent mirage of a human being (i.e. time doesn’t exist at all). Also the poetics of romanticism (with its double worlds and double heroes) is used to counterpose two of them: present one – the dull grey shadow emigreé world with its life as if beyond the grave and bright Nabokov’s Russia of his unforgettable youth and childhood which is depicted as a vivid live multicolored rainbow world full of beautiful butterflies, precious stones of his mother’s jewelry, holiday illuminations; also there are his charming beloved and the Motherland. These worlds are created due to various symbolic images and leit-motives moving from novel to novel and forming their implications with the underlying idea – the message of the author to the attentive reader. Also the metaphorical style of the narration, symbolic images and leit-motives form a system of labyrinthic ties and connections with the history of culture and the world literature and art – that is the multilayered ramifide intertextuality which attaches the poetic expressiveness and mere rhythmical organization to Nabokov’s novels.

The article deals with the aesthetic criteria, features and functions that allow to unite individual literary works in cycles. The principle of unity is presented as a main criterion allowing to form a cycle. The article discusses the realization of this principle as in a single literary work as well in cycles.

The author of the present article deals with the connection of comparative literary studies and area studies, their advantages and obstacles or pitfalls. The article begins with the analysis of various concepts of space and time in the literary artefact. He regards space as a constitutive element of the formation of the artefact. The danger of the application of area studies in general to comparative studies consists in the defocusing and obscuring of the philological textual kernel of literature in its comparative aspect.

This article deals with invariant repetitions of words (parts of speech, utterances) as a communicative means, in which the ratio of position of a speaker and a listener is reflected as well as how they qualify a situation. The article presents an algorithm of these parameters development and studies the possibilities of using these repetitions in a sounding text.

The article is an analysis of the actor’s work creating the verbal portrait of a famous historical figure (L. Lemke playing L. Trotsky), focusing on the communicative language means’ function in his speech. The comparison with the genuine archive audio recordings of Trotsky’s speeches is made. The article shows that the selection of communicative units in an actor’s speech serves two purposes – ensuring the recognition of the image of the famous orator and adding to his character certain features that are dictated by the film director’s interpretation of the role.

Saint Euphrosyne of Polotsk is one of the major female figures of the 12th century in Kievan Rus. Hagiographical texts written in the honour of her depict the nun as wise as well-educated; she is called to have copied religious books, maybe founded a studium and taught sisters in monastery. Anyway, since no literary document demonstrating her knowledge of books is today at our disposal, her cultural activity seems far from being sure, even if we take into consideration the problems in saving libraries and literary heritage linked to the tatar joke. Recent interesting icongraphic studies on the paintings of the Saviour church in Polotsk, founded by Euphrosyne, revealed unexpected evidence of her erudition, allowing to name the books that most likely were at her disposal. The paper aims to sum up the most significant results of these studies, commenting their cultural significance in Medieval Europe.

This article introduces the term and the concept of “philosophical metagenre” into scientific context and sets a conceptual apparatus for the analysis and interpretation of the artistic-philosophical literary work. Philosophical metagenre is a transhistorical and intergeneric artistic structure, the subject of which is the entire world and the man bearing the all essencial characteristics. The integrity and purpose of such structure is provided by substential character of subject-forming oppositions, by universal space-time continium ( always and everywhere), outpersonal subjective organisation, generalization of the artistic images, as well as of the subject made in the form of definition and cultural discourse. The peculiarities of its context functions, the essence of the author position are analysed on the material of I.A. Bunin’s miniature “The hunchbacks’s romance”.

Nowdays the study of poetic language involves the research of the subconscious components. We have the great variety of organoleptic characteristics in these researches, but we neither possess a thesaurus to indicate suggestive phenomena, nor the tools for their analysis. It is necessary to use the tools and thesaurus of the science, which has already been developing the theory of the subconscious for more than fifty years, such as psycholinguistics and neuropsychology. Thus the concept of VAK analysis is the study of auditory, visual and kinaesthetic predicates and images (olfactory and gustatory predicates have been including in kinaesthetic system). The study of the most part (about 500) of Mandelstam’s verses according to the VAK system has allowed us to establish that in his lyrics kinesthetic predicates have dominated. The system we use to experience and to represent the world is called our primary representational system. O. Mandelstam represents the world primarily kinaesthetically. The share of kinesthetic predicates in the poetic text of O. Mandelstam is 75% which is an incredibly high. Some people actually do use two or more systems absolutely simultaneously. But poetic language of Mandelstam has represented almost pure kinesthetic code.

This essay analyzes the idea of nation in the work of the Croatian writer Antun Gustav Matoš (1873–1914). The idea of nation occupies the central position not only in his political essays and feuilletons, but also in the aesthetic representations of personal and collective identity. It is argued that the idea is developing in three models: political, cultural, and primordial. Matoš’s political model doesn’t refer to the ethnical aspect of the formation of the nation, but rather to the idea of its citizens’ or territorial constructiveness. Namely the national idea is formed by those who lives within the certain territory, regardless of their ethnic, racial, or any other form of belonging. This model was developed by Matoš in close reference to the eponymous Renan’s essay ‘What is a Nation?’ (1882). He worked out the cultural national model empirically, namely by observing differences between Zagreb and Belgrade. This model is closely connected with ethno-symbolism of Anthony Smith, is based on the idea of cultural identity in its relation to myths, symbols, values, and traditions of certain community. The third, and the deepest layer of Matoš’s idea of nation is related to the nature elements, i.e. it is connected with the geographical space and landscape. The end of this essay offers a short review of Matoš’s aesthetic representations of the idea of nation in poetry and in prose, and argues that Matoš bypassed ideology by using literary such strategies as humor, grotesque, intertextuality, and Art nouveau’s decorativeness.

The article deals with the content of professional training “Theory and Methods of Training Russian as a Foreign Language” in comparison with the content of the course of Russian as a Foreign Language. The aim of the article – to help distant students to work with materials of the retraining program.

This article considers specifics of precedent names as a language phenomena in the aspect of teaching Russian as a foreign language. The author states that describing such phenomena in a linguocultural dictionary, created for foreign students, is an important part of studying precedent names. The author also suggests some basic principles of introduction of the relevant material in a dictionary, as well as the principles of its presentation in the process of teaching Russian as a foreign language.

Key factors of the choice of “characters” in the early Merezhkovskiy’s critical works and the protagonist of his first novel are considered in the article. The author demonstrates that metaphors of the fine arts unite essays of the book “Constant Companions” devoted to various writers. The investigator also points out the aesthetic world view as an essential feature connecting Julian the Apostate, the main character of the novel, with its author, a representative of the epoch on the verge of the 19–20th.

This article deals with the word stock of private letters written in an Old Germanic language, Old Frisian, is introduced also most notable word-building trends identi¬fied in the investigated data are presented. The phenomenon of “frisianizing” borrowed words is touched upon in this paper as well. Other specific features of Old Frisian illus¬trated here are dialectological differences and word form distortion cases, as well as the process of elision. One third of the Old Frisian word stock are compound words, therefore special atten¬tion is paid to compounding as a lexical tool used to produce new concept denotations. In terms of compounding, the most numerous and representative word classes are re¬searched: nouns, verbs and adverbs.

The article introduces to the analysis of the intertextual implication of M. Katz’s film “The Desert” (1991) in the aspect of its interaction with the literary original – the novel “Judas Iscariot” of L. Andreev and some other literary (“Eleazar” by L. Andreev, “The Master and Margarita” by M. Bulgakov) and religious (New Testament, The Revelation to John) sources. Due to its complex technique of production it becomes possible to include the novel of the great Russian writer of XX century into a wide religious, philosophical and cultural contexts. At the same time, the deputy director of “The Desert” creates his own interpretation of the main idea of L. Andreev’s masterpiece. This interpretation is based on the skillful and clever work with the intertextual layer of the screen version.The combination of staging and documental elements helps the film to embody the expressive poetics of the novel and to regard the story of Judas’s betrayal from different points of view.

The basic hypothesis of the paper is that the works of V. Nabokov and M. Zoshchenko might be compared at least from two perspectives. Albeit being completely different in terms of writing techniques both authors used certain stylistic masks. Nabokov considered such camouflage as a means of hiding his true identity behind the figure of his representative – a gifted protagonist – and infiltrated into the text only as an “anthropomorphic god”. Zoshchenko tried to refresh Russian literary tradition and was deeply interested in new “folk” voices that сropped out after the Revolution of 1917. Above all, both writers created autobiographical narratives with strong metaliterary undercurrent (‘Other Shores’ and ‘Before Sunrise’). In order to reveal the meaning of their lives, the authors referred to fundamentally opposite strategies. While Nabokov counted on exclusively creative comprehension of his fate that was organized as a piece of art, Zoschenko believed in scientific, i. e. psychophysiological, methods of self-interpretation. We assume that these approaches are significant not only for these writers be regarded as the hallmarks of Russian and World literature of the 20th century – in its interference with the concepts from related fields of knowledge.

From the linguistic, historical an culturological point of view, Latvian anthroponimics is of great interest: the key feature lies within the government policy and various confessions of Latvia, that influenced on the list of Latvian personal names. Only a small amount of pre-Christian names has survived, that results in the lack of richness of the list of Latvian national personal names. The same problem relates to the literary and historical monuments. Nevertheless, this area of Latvian anthroponimics is very importante as it helps the better understanding of the customs and beliefs of ancient Latvians. This article presents the structural and semantic analysis of Latvian personal names. The main semantic groups of Latvian national personal names were analysed and classified on the basis of literary sources.

The article reveals the role of folklore in the process of formation of Macedonian literature in Macedonian language. Poetry and literary criticism of nationally major writers of the 20th century Koco Racin (1908–1943) and Blaže Koneski (1921–1993) have been being analyzed as the process of functioning of folklore poetics. And the use of motifs, genres, images, metrics, epithets and metaphors in literature has been uncovered as well. It is shown that folk poetry served as a constant source of enrichment of Macedonian literature.