This article contributes to the discussion of the Dictionary of Dostoevsky’s Language which is based on meaningful words in Dostoevsky’s prose. As is clear, some words are less frequently used and some occur more often. It is argued that a word may have fewer occurrences across the author’s works but it is no less meaningful than highlights. An example in question is the word skladka (crease). Making references to researchers who already took heed of the word in Dostoevsky’s texts, the paper explores the meanings of the word at various periods of the author’s work. It is claimed that the word is most meaningful when Dostoevsky creates the type of man who either hides something or is uncertain about something. This conclusion is confirmed by the private letters wherein the author makes use of the expression ‘someone with a crease’. The word crease thereby adds to the arsenal of words and phrases Dostoevsky actively uses for describing two-facetedness and ambiguity.

The article discusses how the group affiliation of an individual impacts the making of his or her identity in the text. The analysis of public narratives of Czechs, men of art and science, establishes “typical” images of Self, declared in the public (media) narratives. The paper studies structural components of narratives, the type of conflict, and identity declared on this basis. It is shown that both types of conflict and social identity of the actors in the two studied groups are different.

In modern Spanish there are several ways of forming masculine and feminine nouns referring to humans. The article discusses how the “New Grammar of the Spanish Language” (2009), the first academic grammar since 1931, marks new shifts in the category of gender in Spanish animate nouns. These changes are particularly important in common gender nouns referring to job titles. Some major changes occur in common gender nouns referring to humans, particularly names of female professions and occupations. There are occurrences of gender specific nouns with a pronounced gender ending; some unchangeable nouns referring to humans start to change their meanings. The Royal Spanish Academy, however, defends generic masculine as a most essential function of masculine gender. The codification is based on the concept of polycentric and variable norm, and it combines conventional and innovative approaches.

This article discusses the Danish critic Georg Brandes’ attitude towards Ivan Turgenev whose works he found most adequate to an esthetic ideal. These are the genuine masterpieces of realistic art giving a most clear and complete idea of how varied was the Russian society and how people of different strata and class lived. They stand out for their artistic perfection, delicate and genuine art of portraying a human soul, and simplicity and sweetness of style. G. Brandes’ articles and reports highlighting the international value of Turgenev’s prose had largely promoted Turgenev in the Scandinavian countries.

This article marks the 170th anniversary of Ivan Tsvetajev, founder of the Moscow Fine Arts Museum, professor of Moscow University. It discusses the history of the museum collection of antiquities in Russia in the 19th–20th century and the foundation of the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, now the Moscow National Fine Arts Museum. Special emphasis is laid on the impact of Moscow University faculty on the promotion of the idea to have a public museum of fine arts.

The article comprises some dominant and determinant factors within the rise of American academical Russian literature study. Thus “new criticism” and sovetologic propagation during the 1960–1970s were hindering the development of Russian literature study in the USA, the Great Britain and Canada. But the author lays special emphasis on the determinant role of Russian scholars’ achievements in this field of knowledge as well as а free access of foreign researchers to National Archives in the USSR that became possible due to Détant and International research exchange agreements between this country and the USA, the Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and European countries.

The article discusses the critical response of the 19th-century Russian linguist Fyodor Buslaev to the book ‘L’art russe: ses origines, ses éléments constructifs, son apogée, son avenir’ by the French architect and restorer Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. That was one of the early works in European science devoted to the art of pre-Petrine Russia.

The article discusses Fyodor Buslaev’s viewpoint on the metalinguistic reflection in his fundamental ‘Historical Anthology of Church Slavonic and Old Russian’ (Moscow, 1861). The anthology can serve as an introduction to the study of the early Slavic-Russian grammatical tradition. Excerpts from philology-related works described and commented on by Buslaev vividly show what interested Slavic scribes and what helped to evolve their grammatical thinking between the late 9th century and the first third of the 18th century. It is argued that Buslaev played a vital role in the formation of today’s concept of how grammatical thought in Russia evolved. The paper discusses what Buslaev thought about the Bulgarian origin of the tales by Chernorizets Сhrabr and the role of spelling as a major trend in the development of grammatical knowledge up to the 1630–1640s. Of special interest is Buslaev’s idea that the second, Moscow, edition of grammar by Melety Smotritsky published in 1648 is not identical to the first edition published in 1619.

This article analyzes manuscript 308 of the Book of Psalms from the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra collection stored in the Russian National Library. It was first studied by the Russian linguist Fyodor Buslaev in the 19th century. His conclusions about the nature of the spelling patterns and ornamentation of the manuscript are confirmed at the textual level. The paper identifies the sources of the liturgical terminology and the versions of the New Testament readings in the manuscript.

The starting point for discussion in the article is the claim made by the 19th-century Russian linguist F.I. Buslajev that deverbatives preserve the category of aspect for nouns like ‘zavyvanije’ (howling) and adjectives like ‘byvalyj’ (old salt) have semantics of multiplicity. The modern Russian functional communicative grammar defines such words as non-izosemic (non-prototypical), or not equal to their part-of-speech semantic prototype. The article focuses on how multiplicity and repetition are expressed in Russian at the levels of morphology, word-formation, lexis, syntax and text. Accumulating and structuring the already studied means of expressing multiplicity in Russian, the author adds some other means to the list. The illustrative case for comparative analysis includes fragments of Russian translations, offering different interpretations of the English narrative which is semantically ambiguous as far is multiplicity is concerned. The choice of research material was prompted by F.I. Buslajev’s ideas of using “comparative syntax” in the analysis of translations.

The article deals with the peculiarities of the artistic embodiment of the phenomenon of insanity in the literature of the first third of the 20th century – in particular, to various variations in the motive for breaking the mechanism in the context of the topic under study. In the works of various authors, a variety of ideas about the mind (as an abstract or concrete mechanism) and insanity (as a phenomenon capable of damaging the mechanism partially or completely) is revealed. In the story of G.P. Beloretsky “In a madhouse” the author focuses attention both on the breakdown of the “mechanism” of an individual (the situation when the life of the body continues after the loss of the mind) and on the conflict between man and the laws of the universe – the “cog” and the “world machine”. In the works of L.N. Andreyev and I.K. Bykovsky, one can see a comparison of the mental health of the characters with the image of the machine – the locomotive and the presentation of the situation of insanity as a picture of a railway accident, because of which the train turns over and continues to move out of the rail. F.V. Gladkov in the story “Drunken Sun” shows a comparison of a person with a mechanical object, and a mental illness with a mechanism requiring repair. In the novel G.N. Gaidovsky’s “Cardboard Emperor” reveals to the disingenuous hero the truth about the world system – it seems to him a global spectacle in which there is a conflict between puppet master and puppets. E.I. Zamyatin in the novel “We” refers to the semantic opposition “mind / madness,” in which he opposes the system of the United State – insanity as a way of escaping the pressure of the totalitarian system.

This article analyses the specifics of the MAN-OBJECT metaphor in “Ταξιδεύοντας. Ρουσία» written by the 20th-century Greek writer and journalist Nikos Kazantzakis. The analysis is based on cognitive metaphor theory, with a focus on the semantics of the source domain lexeme used in the metaphor. The MAN-OBJECT metaphorical shifts reveal the categories: 1) ‘mortal’ metaphors used for a negative characterization of the man describing him as an object: 2) container metaphors which are used to characterize the man for the fullness of his inner world; 3) metaphors used for a positive characterization of the man though the object meaning he possesses.

This article discusses the essence of neoromanticism in Jack London’s stories, how the individual method of the writer is made and how the author’s specific techniques work in the text. The paper seeks to analyze images of space and characters in two stories “Love of Life” and “The Courage of Woman”. It is argued that antithesis is one of the most productive techniques in the texts. It is noteworthy that he author finds his own method, irrespective of the existing traditions and various literary trends.

The article examines the concept WORK in Catalan, stressing its significance in the minds of Catalans. National proverbs and sayings describing the concept are grouped semantically and syntactically. Research reveals distinctive features of Catalan consciousness.

This article discusses personal reflexive verbs (hereinafter referred to as the PRVs) in English, German, Russian and Ukrainian. The PRVs are regarded as derived units and analyzed in the opposition to their compound stems, non-reflexive verbs (hereinafter – the NRVs). Both NRVs and PRVs are researched within the constructions they form. The PRVs are described in terms of the theory of diathesis at two levels, semantic and referential. The article establishes a type of diathesis peculiar to this notional class of verbs and types of reference at both semantic and referential levels.

The article analyzes the Italian translation of Dovlatov’s short story “The Show” by the slavist and Dovlatov researcher Laura Salmon. Of particular interest is how the translator puts across the four main styles in the short story: the military sociolect, the camp and prison argot, the social realism literature style and the individual style of the narrator. Special emphasis is laid on how the translator struggles to render the camp and prison argot, a phenomenon of Russian culture. Dovlatov’s prose is characterized by the ultimate neutrality of the text. Alternating neutral and stylistically marked pieces of text enables the author to get a comic effect. A distinguishing feature of this short story is rhythmically organized pieces of the characters’ communications. Coupled with the many facts of Russian reality, all this makes the translator’s work backbreaking and as a result, obstruct the adequate perception of the text by the Italian reader.

This article is a tribute to the late Milan Ǵurčinov, a literary critic, historian of literature, and comparative scholar. Apart from the main aspects of his literary activities, the focus of attention is on Ǵurčinov’s special sphere of interest, methods of writing a history of literature in the South Slavonic cultural context. It is pointed out that over the period of several decades Ǵurčinov repeatedly studied ideological commitment in literature, proportion of ethic content and aesthetic form in a literary text, ways of ideological impact of the literary word in a specific literary space, and, most importantly, understanding of modernism as a manifestation of acute perception of reality. Ǵurčinov sought answers to the problem of how literature relates to a certain time, how it operates in a linguistic and cultural space, how it exhibits idiosyncrasies of the writer, how it defends national identity and cross-cultural vision of things, how it can serve one and many.

The article reviews the papers read during the 47th International Philological Academic Conference in Saint Petersburg State University (March 19–28). 10 sections were operating during the conference, and Slavic philology section was one of them. During the section scholars from Russia and other countries presented their papers. The section consisted of five subsections: “Andreev Readings (Slavic Literature and Literary interconnections)”, “Derzhavin Readings. Modern and Historical Problems of Bulgarian and Slavic Studies”, “Slavic Linguistics”, “Animalistic Phraseology in Slavic Languages against European Background” and ”Comparative Linguistics of Slavic and Germanic Languages”. The papers read during the mentioned subsections addressed the problems of modern Slavic cultures and literary interconnections, modern and historical problems of Bulgarian studies, the problems of Slavic paremiae and phraseology related to animals, and peculiarities of interconnections between Slavic and Germanic languages.