Darkness of the sense of the motives and images in Klyuyev’s poetry is due to the rare book sources, little-known to the reader the mythology of Pomorje and the axiology of the old believers, the density of metaphors, the synthesis of mysticism and reality. The article presents the experience of commenting on the plot of the charismatic Pomor woman in the poem “The Saga about the Great Mother”, offers a version of the origin of images. The interpretation of fragments is based on real Klyuyev’s mother story – the Olonets visionary of the protopope Avvakum’s family, on the appeal to the specificity of old believers-“bespopovtsy” life norms, the ideology of sectarian ‒ “serafimovtsy”, eunuchs. Avvakum’s letters, the works of N. de Lira, V. Dahl, N. Nadezhdin, V. Yasevi­ch-Borodaevsky etc. are used. The sacralization of the mother in the Klyuyev’s works, the mother’s role in his intelligence, her place in the poet’s images are described. A parallel is made of the poem and kondaks by Roman Sweetsinger. The story of the heroine’s love Saint Theodore Stratilat has a literary context. The article provides the information about the relationship between Klyuyev and Grigory Rasputin – the character of the poem. The problem of authenticity and fiction in Klyuyev’s memoirs is regarded.

The article presents a comparative analysis of “The Song of Triumphant Love” by Ivan Turgenev and “The Kreutzer Sonata” by Leo Tolstoy which defines significant points of specific intertexts of the stories, revealing new meanings. Attention is paid to the words-metaphors presented in the text through their sonic shells. Thus the sound becomes the basis of the text-forming as an index of a motive, reflecting the particular rhythm and tone of the text. Tolstoy’s theory of love and jealousy through music is projected onto Turgenev’s text that focuses on the new discourse and semantics and the ways of creation the fiction on realistic basis. In addition to the similarities of plots in Turgenev’ and Tolstoy stories the text figures interacting semantic fields and common motifs such as betrayal and murder are regarded.

Since the 18th century, Slovak Evangelical authors include the phenomena of the Hussite movement and of Jiskra and bratrik movement into Evangelical ecclesiastical history. The paper focuses on the dichotomy of the historical-factual and symbolic planes and on the constitutive signs of symbolic grasping of the theme of Hussite-Evangelical continuity in Slovakia in Historical Works and Tracts of Slovak Evangelicals.

In modern French society, it is widely spread that the native language is being destroyed, receding under the onslaught of a competitor language, namely, English. The lucidness and precision of the French analytical structure are sacrificed to the laconic effectiveness of the English synthetic model. The corrections of the “main core” of the French morphosyntactic system (such as, for example, the preposition of the determinant, the model of the syntactic communication without preposition, the reverse word order in the creation of composites) become frequent. The article elaborates the thesis that changes in the tool-kit of linguistic formation associated with the mastering the foreign language patterns and new word production features, do not reveal the degradation and “spoilage” of the language, but for its flexibility, capacity to update and development.

The paradox of the modern era is that with the assertion in society of the value of the individual as a subject of being, there is a tendency of its “alignment” by social institutions and the anthropogenic reality. The article explanes that the modern culture of Western civilization in a particular sense is opposed to the traditional society and its culture. Replacing the traditional civilization, technogenic one also changes the spiritual context. And the most important thing here is the emergence of a different system of values. In the culture of the post-industrial society, the man is no longer a “measure of all things”, but the measure of values of a different order. Many researchers associate the spiritual crisis of culture with the mass culture, which is not the cause, but only the consequence of rationalism in cultural and historical development, the form that cultural artifacts take in the context of replicated universality.

The article compares the principle of the arrangement of the material in the ancient Indian glossary Nighantu and the dictionary-thesaurus of Amarakosha. In both dictionaries the grouping of words into lexical-semantic groups reflects a peculiar picture of the world. Comparison of the structure of dictionaries and the list of lexemes suggests that Nighantu is the semantic field of the hymns of the Rigveda, and Amarakosha represents the classical Indian texts.

The article deals with book miniatures reflecting the history of the assassination of the first Russian saints-martyrs, from the two famous illuminated manuscripts – Radziwiłł Chronicle (Late 15 c.) and the so-called Silvestrovsky Sbornik (Sylvester Compilation, late 14 c.). Miniatures of one theme are shown against the background of the iconographic tradition that has developed over centuries of princes Boris and Gleb veneration. The nature of the selection of illustrative material, graphic topics, the ratio of drawings to texts allow us to conclude that there are genre requirements dictated by the type of works (chronicle story-hagiographic work). Ancient Russian artists were influenced by various texts telling about Boris and Gleb. The evidence of this is the contamination of motives and details that go back not only to the illustrated monument itself. Therefore, ancient book miniatures can not serve as an indisputable basis for determining the chronological sequence of the appearance of the main monuments of the Boris and Gleb cycle.

The article elucidates the outstanding contribution to the study of Russian literature and Croatian-Russian literary relations of the famous Croatian scholar Alexander Flaker, one of the most significant representatives of Zagreb school of literary style, the founder of Zagreb school of Russian Literature study. Flaker’s scientific heritage is enormous, he owns over 700 publications, including works concerning the influence of Turgenev’s work on the development of Croatian prose in the second half of the 19th century, on the connections of Russian and Croatian literature of the 20th century (the works by A. Che­khov, S. Yesenin, M. Sholokhov and others). The results of the long standing work are summarized in the monograph “Russian Avant-Garde” (1984).

The article deals with the organizational and scholarly contribution of Prof. A. Flaker to the creation of a multi-volume work on the theory and history of the Russian avant-garde. The project consolidated the efforts of the best European and Russian philologists and art historians in the mid 80s and early 90s of the last century. The goals, structure and thematic blocks of this work, its significance for the study of Russian culture of the 20th century are described. The connection with the traditions of the Russian Formal school, Soviet structuralism is shown.

The article shows the inexhaustible artistic potential of “The Story of Alexander the Great”, a Greek novel written by Pseudo-Callisthenes, F. Kafka used in his prose miniature “Der neue Advokat” (1917). In the course of the comparative analysis, basing on the Kafka᾽s strategy – the paradox of the “absence”, the author examines the interactive levels of the Kafka᾽s text and comes to the conclusion that this work is “inlaided” with the elements of Alexandria. The analysis is based on: 1. (West) Cyrillic Roudnice Handwriting of the first half of the 16th century; 2. the manuscript of Macedonian Alexandria, published in Ohrid in 2001 under the editorship of D. Pandev. During the preparation this publication, the handwritten version of the story of Alexander the Greate of the 16th century edition in the Church Slavonic language (in serbian variant) was used.

The article is devoted to the transformation of the Soviet myth about Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya in the drama ‘This light’ (1942) and in the novel ‘Doctor Zhivago’ by Boris Pasternak. In the drama the story of Zoya’s feat is transferred to Innokentiy’s Dudorov bride Grunja Friedrich “cossack girl”, in the novel – to Christina Orletsova.
In the concept of drama and novel by Boris Pasternak Zoya – Grunja – Christina become redeemers not so much of imaginary tribal sin but of all the true sinfulness of the prewar Soviet years. Thus, starting from the Soviet myth, Pasternak raises the heroines’ fate to the Christian life canon, differently transformed in the culture of different eras.

Published over the past decade eight volumes of the series “Library of Russian Translations from Old Polish Literature of the 17–18th centuries” presented not only a standard of the modern edition of old-printed and manuscript sources to the scientific community, they also outlined new aspects in the study of Russian translation techniques of the early Modern Times, as well as those of old Polish literature perception by the Russian readership of the 17th–18th centuries.