2026-03-11
Olga Kalashnikova
Although it is widely accepted that the First Old Church Slavonic Life of Wenceslas (FSL) is a tenth-century Bohemian composition written in Old Church Slavonic (OCS), some scholars have hypothesized a Latin original and subsequent translation. This article evaluates that hypothesis by testing the FSL against features typically associated with Latin-to-OCS translation, including loanwords, hendiadys, and morphological patterns. It argues that the FSL lacks consistent evidence of translation from a Latin source. While most Latinisms attested in the text are more plausibly explained as the result of cultural and religious contact with communities under Roman jurisdiction, even those expressions that appear more suggestive fail to meet the criteria of reliable translation markers and are better interpreted as scribal interpolations introduced during the text’s exceptionally complex transmission. Similarly, the purported instances of hendiadys and Bohemian morphological features are too sporadic and contextually ambiguous to support the hypothesis of a Latin prototext. Cases of quasi-hendiadic synonymic reinforcement are more likely to reflect broader literary conventions, and what has been interpreted as Bohemization may instead result from local linguistic norms affecting the text at later stages of its transmission. The article therefore concludes that the FSL should be regarded as an original OCS composition with an unusually complex transmission history.
2026-03-11
Maria Chukcheeva
This article examines the relationship between historical scholarship and visual culture in the Russian Empire during the second half of the nineteenth century. It focuses on the work of the prominent Russian historian I.E. Zabelin and his influence on nineteenth-century visual production. Zabelin’s seminal studies of everyday life in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Muscovy served as an important source for historical paintings by many Russian artists. The article draws on drafts of Zabelin’s lectures Historical Studies and Archaeology in Relation to History Painting , delivered at the Moscow Society of Art Amateurs. In these lectures, Zabelin devoted particular attention to the problem of representing the national past in the works of Russian artists. He argued that artists should strive to capture the spirit of earlier times rather than aim at strict historical accuracy in the depiction of individual scenes. A central place in Zabelin’s discourse was accorded to the representation of historical figures in Russian history painting. Beyond an analysis of Zabelin’s theoretical contributions, the article considers the broader cultural and ideological implications of his views on Russian historical painting and traces the evolution of history painting as a genre within nineteenth-century Russian art.
2026-03-11
Salvatore Del Gaudio
The geo-dialectal area examined in this study is located in the western and southwestern parts of the present-day Brjansk Region of the Russian Federation. In contemporary Russian dialectology, this territory is classified as belonging to the western group (also referred to as the southwestern zone) of the broader southern Russian dialectal area. As noted in several studies on the Ukrainian–Belarusian border dialects, the Brjansk dialects share a number of cross-dialectal features with both the Belarusian and Ukrainian dialectal areas. These dialects therefore merit particular attention and may warrant future reclassification, at least with regard to oral texts recorded in the twentieth century. At the present stage of research, the study aims to identify and analyze salient Belarusian features and, to a lesser extent, Ukrainian features that characterized the dialects of the Brjansk Region until the late 1980s. The analysis focuses primarily on phonetic, morphosyntactic, and lexical phenomena.
2026-03-11
Maria A. Grafova, Elena V. Voskoboeva
This article presents the publication and commentary of a previously unknown, unpublished, and never-staged play by the prominent Russian playwright Evgenij Švarc, Šura Klimova . Recently discovered in a Moscow archive, the play is based on a debate that was widely discussed in the USSR at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s concerning career choice during the period of industrialization. The letters to the magazine “Pioner” that initiated this debate were written by a teenage girl, who also serves as the protagonist of the play. Her name is Šura Klimova; she comes from a poor family and dreams of becoming a wealthy film star. Both in reality and in the dramatic plot, she is criticized for her “petty-bourgeois” aspirations. The article examines the historical context of the play’s creation at a pivotal moment in Soviet history and situates it within Švarc’s oeuvre. Although Šura Klimova represents one of his earliest dramatic experiments, it already displays the techniques and stylistic devices characteristic of Švarc’s later, more famous plays.
2026-03-11
Vitalii Maksymchuk
In contemporary linguistics, internet-based and corpus-driven neography is gradually replacing traditional (classical) neography, while lexicographers increasingly involve ordinary language users in the compilation of dictionaries of neologisms. This development provides grounds for distinguishing between highly regulated, weakly regulated, and spontaneous (unregulated) forms of internet neography. This article analyzes how football neologisms—new lexical items directly associated with football—have been represented in Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, and Croatian neography over the past decade (2014–2024), and examines trends in their lexicographic treatment. The study concludes that football-related innovations have received relatively little scholarly attention, primarily due to limitations of the available source base and the criteria used for material selection. Furthermore, the proportion of football neologisms recorded in both print and online dictionaries averages 0.56%.
2026-03-11
Oleg A. Lekmanov
This article presents a comprehensive analysis of poems and poetic fragments by twentieth-century Russian poets that engage with the figure of the fourteenth–fifteenth-century icon painter Andrei Rublev. The study aims to show that the scarcity of biographical and historical information about Rublev prompted many poets to fill this gap with meanings relevant either to their own authorial perspective or to the cultural and ideological contexts of their time. The poets examined in the article represent diverse literary and social backgrounds, including the peasant poet Nikolai Klyuev; the Soviet Orthodox poets Nikolai Rylenkov and Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky; the Sixties-generation poet Andrei Voznesensky; émigré poets such as Lyubov Stolitsa; and the internal émigré Sergei Solovyov, among others. Particular attention is devoted to the poem Andrei Rublev (1916) by Nikolai Gumilev, a leading figure of Russian Acmeism, as well as to the ideological debates surrounding Andrei Rublev in the poetry of two prominent Soviet poets of the second half of the twentieth century, Varlam Shalamov and Boris Slutsky.
2026-03-11
Veselka Željazkova
2026-03-11
Gabriella E. Imposti