This article discusses verbs in the East Slavonic dialect in Proto-Slavic whose temporal meanings were made largely through an opposition of the present form and the -л form. Other kinds of temporal forms served to make modal meanings. It is argued that in the East Slavonic dialect the -л form was the only way of rendering the meaning of a past action or state, the category of person was shown either through a personal pronoun or a personal form of the verb быти.

The present paper deals with the tendency in the contemporary Bulgarian literature to compose personal anthological books by the significant Bulgarian poets that made their debut in the period from the end of the 1960s to the end of the 1980s. The author of the article draws attention to the most important publications of this type, the analysis of which makes it possible to reveal the prospects of this trend that has appeared in the last decade and to investigate the specificity of the creativity of authors who, with the help of anthologies, “design” their creative biography.

The article gives a survey of A. Jelachicʼs observations dedicated to the Russian thinkers of the 19th century, unified under the title “Grand Masters of Russian Literary Criticism and Social Thought”, published in the “Russian Archive” in 1932–1935. These articles consern the life and work of Russian social thinkers and literary critics of the 19th century from the 1840s until their deaths (with a special reference to the period from the 1840s to the 1870s). Jelachic shows the evolution of their philosophical views: from Hegel and his idealism through the anthropological materialism of Feuerbach to Kant’s agnosticism and Conte’s positivism.

The article is devoted to an aesthetic experiment that became a kind of a continuation of “Coimbrã Issue” (1865) and “Democratic Lectures in Lisbon Casino” (1871). In Eça de Queirós’s novel “Cousin Basilio” (1878) was vividly reflected the 70’s generation’s passion for the newest achievements of European thought and “Flaubert’s Lessons”. Theoretical argument on realism in literature gained an unexpected reflection in the novel. According to Eça de Queirós’s deep conviction, romantic literature, understood as the “apotheosis of feeling”, should be replaced by a merciless “anatomy of character”. He demonstratively “rewrites” “Madame Bovary”, the novel which is regarded as a cult one by his like-minded people, conducting his literary experiment on Portuguese ground and “anatomizing” both the national character and the “disease” of modern society.

Phonetic systems of the European languages, despite similar internal principles of functioning, possess a unique originality that even a person having the most superficial notion of these languages is capable to catch. In the given article the phonetic system of Spanish oral speech is regarded not only as a part of oral discourse system but as special Spanish national worldview. The analysis revealed that phonetic processes of Spanish oral speech, on the one hand, are the system phenomena of the colloquial regis­ter, and, on the other, appear to be language implementations of the individual speech and that they possess features of the national character and the unique worldview.

The article discusses perception of personality and creativity of Nikolai Gogol in Russia at the turn of the 19–20th centuries and shows the dynamics of the changing attitude towards the writer in Russia in the first decade of the 20th century. In the center of the analysis are the assessments given to this writer by Russian modernists. It is shown that the tragic fate of Gogol for the modernists of the first wave – the senior symbolists – became an important argument in disputes with the Orthodox clergy about the essence of the religious ideal. The younger symbolists otherwise perceived Gogol and found in his personal and creative fate the answers for their actual questions.

This paper examines the specificity of translation of subtitles for theatrical (dramatic) performances. The author analyses her personal experience of collaboration with Italian theatres and describes objective (conditioned by the situation) and subjective reasons that determine the choice made by the translator, the possibility to adopt an existing translation of dramatic or literary text, the interaction with the stage director and with the actors, the specificity of the translator’s work during the rehearsals and the performance.

The article presents a general overview of the development of Serbian linguistic Slavistics from the second half of the 20th century, which is studied in the context of its development, including describing and evaluating criteria such as problematic, theoretical, methodological, institutional, personal. The main theme of the article is the Ivichev period in the development of Serbian linguistic Slavistics from the second half of the 20th century.

The article deals with some ways of expressing the meaning of Swedish phrasal verbs with postverbs of direction in Dutch and Russian. The text under study is ‛Christ Legends’ by Selma Lagerlöf, a classic writer of Swedish literature, and their translation into Dutch, as well as Russian. The most productive way of rendering phrasal verbs used by both translators is by means of adverbs and locative prepositional combinations with corresponding semantics.

The article deals with Turgenev’s critical responses on sculptural works of his contemporaries – Ivan Vitali and Marc Antokolsky – and ancient masters.

The article deals with the relationship between the event and the experiment in the plot structure of the Turgenev’s “studio” named “Knock... knock... knock!”, which has a direct relation to its genre specificity. It is proved that the event and the experiment are duplicated. On the one hand, the occasional knock, due to which the action is tied up, grows into narrator’s experiment on the main hero, on the other — the hero believes in the great event that guides him, and mathematically calculates his life according to the Napoleonic scheme. The function of the event in the “studio” proves to be more complicated than in the story: the random knocking, with which the action begins, is not in fact the main event, but it can reveal in the person the inner springs of his actions. The writer understands such a deed in “Knock... knock... knock!” as typically Russian suicide.

The article considers two self-titled lyrical miniatures by Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy having a form of a dream. The author proves that the two works appeared to be a kind of replicas in the implicit creative dialogue between the writers.

This article deals with the portraits of characters in Bryusov’s “small” prose. After the analyses of the writer’s portrait characteristics and his ideological and aesthetic views, the author came to the following conclusion: the strengthening of the impressionistic beginnings is dictated by the weakening of the characterological function of a portrait in his work. In most cases Bryusov gives up connections between the character’s appearance and his character. As a rule, a portrait does not express the writer’s attitude towards a character and his actions.

The article analyzes ways of expression the duplicity conception embodied in four “Gogol” plays by Nikolai Kolyada. The author comes to the conclusion that the main means of creating the doubles in plays by Kolyada are the “pairing” of characters brought to their full identity, their multiple reduplication on the basis of placing them in equal situations and giving the same speeches, the establishment of the intertextual communications uniting intratextual and pretextual images. Following Nikolai Gogol in recognition the irreal and unnatural essence of the duplicity, reflecting generality of spiritual emptiness, Nikolai Kolyada “enlarges coordinates”, emphasizes totality of action of the chaos overturning and destroying the fundamental bases of life. Relying on the synthesis of romantic and postmodern traditions and also on the reconsideration of Gogol’s aesthetic-ideological model, the duplicity in plays by Nikolai Kolyada is beyond an ordinary art practice and becomes an important aspect of manifestation the original literary-philosophical system of the playwright.

The article investigates passé composé in the context of its aspectual semantics. On the example of ‘Les Catilinaires’, a novel by a modern French writer A. Nothomb, this study considers the influence of such aspectual meanings as accomplished / unaccomplished and divisibility / non-divisibility on the use of different verb tenses that can express a single action in the past in the narrative text of literary fiction. A complex characteristics is given to the opposition between ‘passé composé’ and ‘passé simple’, two tenses that are used in narrative text. It reveals the correlation between, on the one hand, aspectual properties of ‘passé composé’ and ‘passé simple’ and, on the other hand, the speech time, the narrator and different kinds of utterance. Special attention is given to the possibility of using these two past tenses in order to mark out different compositional parts of a fictional text.

The article explores the relationship between Chekhov’s and Nagibin’s work. The main goal is to establish the degree of Nagibin’s adoption of Chekhov’s art, to investigate the parallels between Chekhov and Nagibin in greater detail than it has been done before in critical research. It is proved that in Nagibin’s non-fiction works the interest to Chechov’s artistic heritage was straightforwardly reflected. The genre of micronovel, that has been developed in later works of Chekhov and was used in some works of Nagibin lies in the focus of the investigation. The works of two authors are analyzed in terms of genre, which helps to reveal both differences and similarities in the works of Chekhov and Nagibin.

This article looks at the duplicity as the most important poetics’ component of Stanislaw Lems’ novel “Eden”. In the characters’ system special attention is paid to the dialectical features of the main characters’ relationship. The diffusive peculiarities of the novels’ duplicity which are the merging of antagonistic and twinned duplicities’ types is also under analyses. The scientific research defines the duplicity between different characters, describes the motif texts’ contract as consequence of the motif levels’ duplicity and emphasizes the duplicities’ influence of the philosophical novels’ component. In conclusion the importance of duplicity for determining the differences and similarities of characters’ psychology and for describing moral and ethical problems is emphasized.