With the second issue of Scando-Slavica for 2018, we are happy to offer our readers a new collection of articles in Slavic studies. The topics addressed include classical and modern Russian literature, modern Russian grammar and lexicography, and language attrition with special emphasis on Polish.
In her contribution, Mayya Kucherskaya discusses Nikolaj Leskov’s short story Vladyčnyj sud (Episcopal Justice, 1877) and its relationship to events that took place in Kiev at the end of the 1840s and the beginning of the 1850s. Basing its analysis on recently discovered archival documents, the article sheds new light on Leskov’s creative use of documentary material, and also traces the evolution of Leskov’s views on the relationship between the Christian and Jewish faiths.
Pavel Uspenskij offers a new reading of Osip Mandel′štam’s late poem Na otkosy, Volga, chlyn′, Volga, chlyn′, written in July 1937. Without neglecting the insights gained from earlier biographical interpretations of the poem, Uspenskij’s detailed analysis of Mandel′štam’s use of folkloric traditions shows that the poem can be understood as a poetic text in itself – even without external reference to the biographical context or intertextual allusions.
Elena Pavlova’s article discusses the relatively new trend of including references to current political events in Russian women’s popular fiction. According to the author, this growing politicization reflects a new wave of interest in both domestic and international politics among the general public in Russia, but also the increased commercial potential signalled by the development of this formerly more apolitical literary genre with its traditional focus on entertainment.
Paola Bocale presents a detailed linguistic analysis of the Russian polyfunctional deictic word tam ‘there’, exploring its semantic and pragmatic features in order to establish its function as a marker of irrealis in contexts describing hypothetical situations, unrealised or future events, negations, commands, etc. Her findings indicate the existence of a connection between irrealis and the spatial notion of distance not only in Russian, but also in other Slavic and non-Slavic languages.
Further developing their conception of Russian case as the nominal equivalent to mood, Elena Lorentzen and Per Durst-Andersen analyse the important distinction between the modern Russian locative and accusative cases in both spatial and temporal contexts. Through a detailed analysis of juxtaposed contrastive case constructions, the authors reach the conclusion that within the prepositional case system of Russian the locative can only be applied to the domain of space, whereas the accusative, as the unmarked member of the opposition, can be used with reference to both space and time.
Gustaf Olsson’s article discusses the formation of aspectual pairs for verbs recently borrowed into Russian. Focusing on the productive type of verbs formed with the suffix -ova-, the author reports the results of a corpus analysis comprising a large number of verbs with respect to aspectual status and prefix variation with special emphasis on the verbal prefixes za-, s-, pro- and ot-.
Tore Nesset presents a contribution to contrastive Germanic-Slavic linguistics through a study of Norwegian compounds and their corresponding constructions in Russian. By carefully analysing different types of Norwegian compounds, Nesset identifies five prototypical patterns representing typical correspondences between Norwegian compounds and Russian grammatical constructions.
Through a critical discussion of existing Russian lexicographical practice, Andrey Gorbov’s article draws attention to important methodological issues in the description of loanwords in Modern Russian. By a thorough analysis of the etymology of loanwords such as klarnet, butik, legioner, etc., the author argues convincingly for the need for updated methods in future lexicographical descriptions of Russian loanwords.
Dorota Lubińska explores the relationship between language attrition and language attitudes among Polish first-language speakers residing in Sweden. Reporting on a small-scale study, in which the informants’ use of certain linguistic features were compared with answers to a questionnaire about language attitudes, the author is able to add additional support to earlier studies that have emphasised the selective explanatory power of attitudinal factors in L1 attrition.
Finally, the current issue of Scando-Slavica also presents reviews of three recently published books: Anni Lappela reviews Lyudmila Parts’ In Search of the True Russia: The Provinces in Contemporary Nationalist Discourse (2018), Brendan Humphreys reviews the 2017 anthology Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Stalin’s Soviet Union, edited by Andrej Kotljarchuk and Olle Sundström, and Oleksandr Fylypchuk reviews the anthology Byzantium and the Viking World, edited by Fedir Androshchuk, Jonathan Shepard and Monica White (2016).