With the second issue of Scando-Slavica for 2019 we are glad to be able to offer our readers an exciting collection of articles on a wide variety of topics within Slavic studies by authors based in Russia, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The topics addressed by our contributors include Russian literature from the 1890s to the 1950s, linguistic issues in modern Russian, 17th-century Russian, modern Czech, and Slavic etymology; and, finally, attempts at scientific cooperation between Norway and the early Soviet state.
Alexey Vdovin’s article discusses the complicated hybridisation of Ukrainian and Russian identity of the main heroine in Aleksandr Kuprin’s story Olesja (1898). The analysis, based on postcolonial theory, offers new insights into the culture of the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire and adds new perspectives on Kuprin’s works. Olga Trukhanova analyses the influence of E. T. A. Hoffman on two early short stories by Vladimir Nabokov, The Potato Elf and The Venetian Woman. Dmitry Tokarev focuses on the Nordic motif in the works of the Russian emigré poet Nikolaj Gronskij, particularly in his play Scenes from Spinoza’s Life, where he argues for an identification of one of the main heroes of the play with the Russian eighteenth-century poet Gavrila Deržavin. Vera Serdechnaia in her article outlines the reception of the English poet and painter William Blake in Russian modernist culture of the first half of the twentieth century.
Johanna Viimaranta and Marju Vihervä analyse the predicate functions of modern Russian onomatopoeic interjections on the basis of parallel corpora. Christine Watson studies expressions of truth, doubt and hearsay in Russian seventeenth-century translations of German and Dutch news reports. Irene Elmerot presents a corpus-based discussion of linguistic depictions of Romani people, Vietnamese and Ukrainians in Czech media after 1989. Florian Wandl offers a new etymology of the Slavic words for ‘morning’, and Fredrik Kortlandt in a brief contribution discusses the history of the final diphthongs in Baltic and Slavic, continuing a discussion in a 2016 Scando-Slavica article by Miguel Villanueva Svensson.
Tamara Lönngren sheds new light on the scientific policies of the early Soviet state by presenting previously unknown Russian archival materials relating to Fridtjof Nansen’s planned, but not realised, Norwegian Kola expedition.
The volume also includes a review of a recently published book: Valery Vyugin reviews Tora Lane’s Andrey Platonov, The Forgotten Dream of the Revolution (2018). The volume concludes with an obituary of the Finnish slavist Marja Leinonen, who passed away in the summer of 2019.