The article is devoted to describing Elizabethan England (its home and foreign policy) and to discarding popular myths concerning this epoch. Special attention is given to religious persecutions and to discussing little-known facts of William Shakespeare’s biography testifying to his connections with the Catholic underground – the subject of heated debates in modern Shakespearology.

The article discusses spelling problems arising from the necessity to fix a new combination of rare words in written speech. And it shows how to analyze spelling rules and analogous cases, introducing an algorithm for solving new problems.

The article studies and systematizes religious motifs in Igor Chinnov’s poems. A correlation is drawn between the expression of Chinnov’s lyrical self and the evolution of his poetic style.

Drawing on Émile Durkheim’s concept of a teacherʼs multidimensional reference, the article examines French teachers’ linguistic ideology within the context of professional identity problems and teaching discourse. A teacher’s reference can be individual or collective, it may regard a teacher as a member of a professional group in a specific country at a certain moment. It is argued that professional identity is non-uniform, it is determined by the dichotomy of values associated with teaching – theory and practice. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept, the article draws a distinction between spontaneous speech, abstract and classifying texts (doxa), representing practical experience (habitus). The paper studies varying genres – from assertive and explanatory discourses to survey-based texts. Assertive discourse forges the idea of progress, stadiality and breaks up with a previous experience. Spontaneous speech makes a previous experience prevalent, collective or individual. This experience cannot be put into stadial perspective and serves to save a memory of timeless values. A discrepancy in these vectors has logical and systemic natures. It influences the multiple choice of course-books, methods and teaching techniques, and finally determines the teacher’s idea, word, and action.

This article discusses problems confronted by translators of Chekhov’s ‛Uncle Vanja’ into Croatian. The section on national specifics of translation talks about ways of putting across Russian diminutives, first names, middle names, and facts of everyday life. Interpreting the latter, translators tend to use approximate translation techniques. The analysis of transferring phraseological units shows that, despite the similarities between Slavic languages, corresponding equivalents are found for most FU’s, with a few exceptions. Special emphasis is laid on translation of the author’s notes. It is argued that the first and the last translations of ‛Uncle Vanja’ show changes to Chekhov’s drama style. The article also discusses inaccuracies in translation and lexical and syntactic transformations as aspects of translation studies.

The article traces back the 70 years of Russian opera stagings in Macedonia, laying emphasis on their frequency, dynamics, and artistic value. It is argued that there were three sets of problems along the way – repertoire strategies of the Macedonian National Opera House, ʽOpera Evenings in Mayʼ composition, and life values and beliefs of Macedonian opera performers, and the problems are studied historically and chronologically.

The article comprises various kinds of Russian Emigrè activities (1910–1960) in the field of research, education, translation and editing the works of Russian literature in the Great Britain and the USA, as well as diverse creative contacts with academic and literary circles there.

In the Shakespeare studies there exist some widely popular preconceptions, which for all their untenability are extremely reluctant to die out. Among these shibboleths one finds the pronouncement that as no irrefutable evidence concerning Shakespeare’s religious affiliations has ever been introduced, it is methodologically wrong to enter upon any description of his life and works from this viewpoint. The present article offers a discussion of the two incontrovertible facts of Shakespeare’s biography (his writing “The Phoenix and the Turtle” in or about 1601 and his buying the Gatehouse in Blackfriars in 1613) in their interconnection, in their relation to the activities of the Catholic recusants during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and in their objective significance for Shakespearology. The missing links here are the Jesuit Father John Gerard, the Catholic martyr St Anne Line and the two recusant families – the Fostescues and the Robinsons.

Professor, Doctor of Philology R.P. Usikova is widely known as a specialist in Macedonian language studies. This paper describes the less known aspect of her work as the founder and head of the only University department of Slavic languages in our country for students and post-graduate students (not-philologist), specializing in the issues of Slavic countries. R.P. Usikova was head of the department for 17 years.
R.P. Usikova had a significant role in authoring teams that made educational and instructional materials for students of humanities faculties, studying Slavic languages, especially Bulgarian.

In the article methods of marking body names with the help of deictic indicators in the Macedonian language are considered. The grammatical markers (articles and pronouns) are the most “transparent” way of marking how close one or another category to the center of the “internal” human space.

The article deals the problems of translating into Russian the main components of the national-cultural content of the play by the Macedonian playwright Goran Stefanovsky “Јаnе Zadrogaz” (transl. into Russian by T.P. Popova). The ways and means of translating of quotations from Macedonian folklore (nursery counting rhymes and conditional languages) and the the necessity of transformations are considered. Interpretation of the play is based on structural-semiotic and semiotic-cultural analysis. The historical, cultural and genre features of this play are considered, which is based on folklore and ethnographic sources and could be considered as hard-to-get ones. The author made deep analysis of the primary sources: folklore, ethnographic, dialectological materials assembled by the famous collector of Macedonian folk art Marco Cepenkov, and his “Autobiography”.

This article is an attempt to demonstrate the social deictic features of personal pronouns in the Macedonian language, i.e. as far as social deixis is manifested by personal pronouns. Thus, the concept of “social deixis” in linguistics is treated, the reasons for the emergence of social deixis and the influence of social factors in the selection of certain personal pronouns are regarded, and special attention to the scope of their use is paid. Besides this the article comprises the way, we will depict how the social deixis is regulated in the speech act, as well the pragmatic features of using personal pronouns in a specific situation.

This article discusses criteria for and forms of evaluating literary works across different genres used throughout history of Literary Studies, particularly in “poetics” of N. Bualo and A.P. Sumarokov. One such criterion is pronomination.

In fiction, a character’s profession is indicative of a character’s social role, and it has a symbolic and metaphorical meaning. This article explores the professions that were widespread in the social and cultural space of Belarus since the early 20th century – a teacher, doctor, postman, village correspondent. Some professions are considered from the perspective of a person’s self-realization, their participation in social creativity. The research aims to prove that it is important to take into account both the system of values and the professional background of the heroes while forming a typology as profession itself has a historical, universal, or timeless meaning. The article serves to establish systemic links between the Belarusian novelists Ya. Kolas, K. Chorny, M. Gаretsky, to name just a few.

Drawing on research into violence, this paper discusses the understanding of power in the short story ʽLyudochkaʼ by Viktor Astafiev. The story, to be more precise, raises the problems of rape and murder as most atrocious forms of violence. The composition of the story and characteristics of the characters show that a human’s social and biological natures, according to Astafiev, are secondary destructive forces and these can be tamed by the moral – inner – force. Through his story Astafiev translates the concept of patience as a deeply-rooted national concept and argues that being patient is the only viable strategy of survival, which is conditioned by a history of social suppression. The idea of being patient is encountered in many Russian proverbs and sayings, poems, stories, and novels. It is common practice that a Russian person is portrayed as a victim of the stately repression machine. The gender stereotypes which ascribe protection and defense to a man and life sustenance to a woman, however essential they may be in the narrative, are broken by the plot. The pessimistic perception of life through literature enhances the value of compassion and self-sacrifice. The word is equated with the deed, and virtual reality of artistic consciousness becomes an only space of ideals and values.

The article discusses how values are transformed when a piece of poetry is translated. It is argued that the axiological component is all-important in the process of translation. The translator of poetry transforms or adapts the author’s picture of the world, seeking to incorporate it into the recipient’s picture of the world, in a modified form though. The latter in his or her turn accepts or rejects this attempt. The article seeks to analyze Samuil Marshak’s successful experience of translating Robert Burns, which, as is known, has become a fact of Russian literature and culture. Special emphasis is laid on several aspects – social and psychological proximity of the poet and the translator, orientation toward the readership, confines of the mediator style, adaptation of the Scottish folk ballad, poetic traditions of conveying songs, and musicality of the translation.

This article analyzes singers-songwriters’ songs, laying special emphasis on the characteristics of the songs by Adriano Chelentano, Gianni Morandi, and Toto Cutugno – the unity of the poetic word and music, their folk and/or parafolk character, and the ability to express national identity. Italy in their songs is largely portrayed through the landscape of the country, it is loved as ‘a small homeland’, and is made up of a myriad of material culture elements. It is argued that in the collective unconscious, the image of the united country has been for centuries shaped on the basis of common customs and traditions, habits and objective world items, rituals and cults.

The present-day anthropological approach to language following the ideas of W. von Humboldt attracts attention to the language consciousness reflecting the world-view by linguistic means, while mental language is expressed by concepts. The paper considers the words “lubovʼ / amour” entering into the nucleus of language consciousness of Russians and Frenchmen representing in associative dictionaries as reactions and stimuli. The aim of the article is to compare the words “lubovʼ / amour” in the language consciousness of Russians and Frenchmen. The contrastive-comparative analysis shows that this human concept has almost adequate expression by Russians and Frenchmen. However the quantity of reactions may be different. As to the reactions we can see more paradigmatic relations then syntagmatic ones. Frenchmen have 4 times as many stimuli as Russians. And reactions of Russians and Frenchmen coincide more then their stimuli.

In the 13th century, the most detailed and extensive European encyclopedias appeared not only in Latin, but also in national languages. The first such encyclopedia that broke with the Latin tradition was the book ‘Li livres dou Tresor’ written in French by the Florentine scholar, writer and politician Brunetto Latini. The second part of this writing contains the moral teaching, namely, knowledge of vices and virtues, according to general opinion, based on the Aristotelian ‘Nicomachean ethics.’ The article measures up the extent to which Brunetto Latini relied on Aristotle’s treatise, whether there were other sources for the ethical part of his encyclopedia, and what impact this work had on the subsequent moral philosophy.

This article deals with the reflection of Luxemburgish national traditions in the culinary terms and the problems of their origin, semantics and word-formation-structure. The author gives the consideration for translations of these terms into Russian and for assimilation of French borrowings.

The article discusses the English derivational suffix -ing and borrowings and derivatives with -инг in Russian, tracing them back to the time before Peter I (e.g., стерлинг / sterling, шиллинг / shilling) up to the turn of the 21st century. Suffixation is regarded as a three-facet phenomenon: foreign-borrowed-adopted, suggesting that a foreign suffix can be borrowed by a language and later adopted by it. It is argued that at all times the derivational suffix worked intensively, producing a variety of thematically-bound words. The impressive number of derivatives shows that the -ing suffix has become an integral part of the Russian derivation system.

In the article the factors influencing neological activity of the person are defined and it is also considered how presence of a neologism sets structural-semantic characteristics of a statement. As the result of the use of a new unit in speech new «intense» structures are created that is a consequence of the special attention of speaking (writing) person to form of expression of new contents. The statement is being made with a view to create higher discursive tension stimulating an active position of the addressee and presupposing certain discursive strategies of the author: the strategy of dissosiation from the performing a new unit, demonstrating difficulty of breaking the neological barrier, and, on the contrary, the strategy stimulating neological courage of the author – vari­ous forms of modalization of a statement, placing of a neologism into the paradigmatic rows integrated either by form (the words of similar word-formation models), or by sense (groups of words having a common semantic component).

This article first introduces documentary evidence showing why Alexei Tolstoy had to move from Leningrad to Moscow. It then discusses the history of his will and what his widow did in an attempt to set up a memorial museum in the author’s country house.

This article deals with the problem of Spanish-Russian bilingualism among children, gives a brief theoretical description of the main notions connected with the bilingualism. The central notion is code-switching. It is one of the forms of language interaction in written and verbal bilingual speech. The Carol Myers-Scotton’s conception, so-called Matrix Language Frame model, is used as thetheoretical basis of this article. The recordings of one bilingual child’s idiolect are used as a practical basis for this article. The bilingual’s parents (Russian mother and Spanish father) talk to the child using the concept “One Person – One Language” which means that each parent talks to the child in their native language only. Due to this type of communication, the child automatically creates his own original bilingual phrases, most of which are included in this article.

The article is devoted to the functions of foreign language inclusions from the Latin, Greek, French languages in the German text as methods of realization of intra- and extratextual connections. Contextual and formal characteristics of foreign languages inclusions in the texts of private letters are analyzed in the light of conditions of text creation.

The article shares papers from the family archive of Prof. Maria Mikhailova, namely memoirs of her grandmother Ksenia Pavlovna Pyshkina, former head of the library at the Sverdlovsk district in Moscow (now Chekhovka), who talks about her childhood and adolescence in Georgia’s Tiflis, and offers a commentary on the period between the 1920–1930-ies. The extracts from the memoirs discussing this last stage are of special interest as they recreate the unique atmosphere of this time through real life stories about outstanding people Ksenia Pyshkina had known. Most importantly, these papers convey a sense of anxiety and pain associated with the atmosphere of suspicion and repression which literally haunted many people at that time. Meanwhile, the reader should understand that even such a terror-stricken life was full of joy. And these memoirs are a good illustration of this.

This article describes and analyzes the exhibition, a part of the parallel program of the 7th Moscow Biennale of contemporary art, which is called “The Opposing Shore”. It is dedicated to the problem of physical borders. The focus of the research aims at the problem of conceptual accordance of every single showpiece with the given theme of the exhibition. Owing to the fact that the exhibition was held at two demonstration platforms – CCI Fabrika and New Space Theatre of Nations, there was a goal to see an interconnection between the given parts of the exhibition. Methods of the embodiment of artistic ideas, general plot motives of the compositions are revealed during the consecutive analysis as well as the aesthetic aspect of the project’s content. In addition, the features of modern exhibition of multimedia, sculpture, photo projects and installations and also some development trends of modern art are examined. In conclusion, the general illation is made about the consistency of the exhibition “The Opposing Shore” from the point of view of semantic artistic messages.