This is the fourth issue of Scando-Slavica to appear against the backdrop of the current European war. Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is going on with undiminished force in its 20th month, claiming new civilian lives and continuing to cause immeasurable material destruction every day. The publication policy of the journal, adopted by the editorial board of Scando-Slavica and announced in volume 68:2, is therefore left unchanged: we do not accept contributions by authors representing Russian state institutions, but welcome those by independent Russian scholars. This war will also have longtime effects on the development of scholarship within the field of Slavic and Baltic studies, which will certainly have to be addressed in the years to come. It is our firm conviction that Scando-Slavica provides an appropriate platform for such a discussion.
With the present issue, the journal introduces a slight change in the presentation of its material. The eleven research articles contained here are grouped under the separate headings of “linguistics,” “literature” and “culture,” respectively, in order to give a better overview and enhance the visibility of each article.
The linguistic section opens with two articles dealing with problems of Polish grammar. Alexander Andrason’s typologically informed contribution is devoted to the topic of verbal serialization, examining to what an extent constructions with the Polish verb musieć (‘must’) could be regarded an instantiation of a serial verb construction. Damian Herda provides a corpus-based study of a recent development in modern Polish, namely the degrammaticalization of the intensifying prefix prze-. As shown by Herda, this process results both in increased morphosyntactic flexibility and semantic enrichment. The following three articles touch on various aspects of Russian linguistics, also using corpus-based methods. Anastasia Makarova and Tore Nesset focus on the two Russian nouns for ‘threat,’ groza and ugroza, presenting a study of their submeanings and distribution involving diachronic developments. Elmira Zhamaletdinova examines Russian impersonal constructions with the modal word možno ‘can, be possible’ with and without the future copula budet ‘will be,’ identifying contextual factors that may motivate the choice between the two constructions. Elena Gorbova presents an aspectological study of prefixed verbs which are derivatives of verbs of motion, focusing on the problem of imperfectivability and aspectual correlation. Tatiana Perevozchikova presents a likewise corpus-based, contrastive study of the competition between reflexive and non-reflexive pronouns in first person singular contexts in Bulgarian, Czech, and Russian. The section concludes with a contribution at the intersection of dialectology and historical linguistics – Oksana Lebedivna’s investigation of the “fourth palatalization” of velars in the Kryvorivnja dialect in the southeast area of the Hutsul dialect of Southwest Ukrainian. Making use of spectrogram analysis of sounds, this study clearly illustrates the growing importance of advanced digital technology, which is felt in all the linguistic contributions to this issue.
The section on literature features two articles relating to distinctly different epochs and genres. Mirosława Hanusiewicz-Lavallee examines Slavic translations of one of the most popular religious books of early modern Europe, Spill de la vida religiosa, and the cultural identities gained by the work in its subsequent hypostases in Polish, prosta mowa and Church Slavonic. The article illustrates the sometimes unexpected workings of translation as literary works travel across boundaries of languages and denominations. Zifa Temirgazina, Ljudmila Tokatova and Gibadat Orynchanova, in their contribution, deal with Aleksandr Blok’s famous cycle “Poems about the Beautiful Lady.” Focusing on the lyrical hero-narrator as the subject of various perceptions, they investigate the symbolic and verbal means involved in the work’s modelling of the “dual world” typical of Blok’s early poetry.
The section on culture also consists of two articles spanning different times and topics. Ingrid Maier scrutinizes a previously unknown Russian 17th century alphabet table, Alphabetum Russarum, located in Weimar, and casts light on its cultural contexts. Jerzy Gorelik examines the role played by Scandinavia in ethnological and art-historical texts on Slavic wooden architecture. The author identifies competing narratives relating to nation-building projects in Scandinavian, German and Slavic 19th century writing on the subject, thereby contributing to the present scholarly discussion of “usable pasts.”
As usual, the issue concludes with a book review: Kåre Johan Mjør takes a critical look at Per-Arne Bodin’s recent collection of essays on Russian culture, Rysk kultur i tusen år [A thousand years of Russian culture] (Skellefteå 2022).
November, 2023