Search

Korehito Kurahara and “Proletarian Realism”: Proletarian Literature in Japan in 1920s. This paper examines the proletarian literature movement that emerged in Japan in the 1920s, focusing on Korehito Kurahara, a leading proponent. Kurahara studied Russian literature and his theory, “proletarian realism,” was based on concepts promoted by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP). The paper analyzes two of Kurahara’s works from which proletarian realism originated. Both works are based on arguments between leaders of the proletarian writers’ organization and A. Volonsky. After Kurahara, Japan attempted to interpret proletarian literature from the perspective of literary history, which Kurahara incorporated into Japanese literature based on RAPP discussions. This suggests that Japanese proletarian literary theory developed under the influence of the Soviet Union.

The sixth volume of the "Communications" of the German-Russian Historical Commission includes papers presented at the 2012 Hamburg Colloquium. Presented bilingually – as always – the fifteen essays by prominent German and Russian historians and cultural scholars examine a broad range of cultural interactions between Germany and Russia.

Professionals and Marginals in Slavic and Jewish Cultural Traditions is the annual publication of the Slavic & Jewish Cultures: Dialogue, Similarities, Differences’s project for 2022. It includes papers from the international conference of the same name held in Moscow on December 1–3, 2021. The book includes twelve articles by Russian and Israeli scholars who work on the social and cultural role of professionals and marginals in various ethno-confessional traditions. The question of the perception of professionals in culture falls under the opposition “one’s own/another’s,” where belonging to “one’s own” or a “foreign community or class” becomes a defining marker. Traditionally, “social strangers,” to which representatives of various professions belong, were assigned a special role in calendar, magical, and occasional rites. Thus, professionals and social marginals were not considered outcasts: society assigned them a particular place and role, delegating special cultural functions to them. Like previous publications in this series, Professionals and Marginals in Slavic and Jewish Cultural Traditions is notable for the large amount of field and archival material that it makes publically available for the first time.

The paper is about Sergej Ivanovič Zarudnyj, a central figure in Tsar Alexander II’s “great reforms”. Descended from the family of a Cossack staršyna from Sloboda Ukraine, Zarudnyj had a brillant career in the imperial capital as a engaged reformer of Russia’s backwards legal system. His cultural origins, his family’s history, and his education at Kharkiv University deeply affected his translation work and legal discourse; in both of these spheres, he aimed to introduce and popularize the products of Italian legal culture in the Russian Empire.

The paper analyses the general factual value of the imperfective verbs in Russian and Bulgarian. The first part examines the three main types of the general factual meaning in the past (‘referential’, ‘existential’, and ‘atelic’). We show that in Bulgarian these meanings are rendered by imperfective verbs in the aorist, perfect, and imperfect tense respectively. The second part is dedicated to the future tense. In Russian, the general factual reading of the analytical future has many restrictions while in Bulgarian the general factual meaning is the main meaning of the imperfective future.

In the paper morphological processes for creating aspectual pairs in Resian are discussed. A distinction is made between original Slavic verbs and verbs originating from other languages. In the former case the most productive process is prefixation (and perfectivation), whereas in the latter case for verbs of Romance origin the most productive process is suffixation (and imperfectivation). Verbs of Germanic origin also allow prefixation.

The paper is concerned with the history of the Russian verb past’ ‘fall’, which until the mid-19th century used to have biaspectual present forms. The analysis deals both with the historical motivation for this biaspectual behaviour and the factors behind its loss. The most important stage of the process seems to be the gradual disappearance of the primary spatial usages of past’: these came to be expressed by a newly created aspectual pair, padat’/upast’. The latter is close to the so-called two-stem perfectivation verbs, which I examined in more detail in my previous work.

This paper discusses the morphological means used to express verbal aspect in Resian. A marked difference can be observed between the native Slavic verbal lexicon, which mainly shows prefixation, thereby creating perfective forms, and that of Romance origin, where prefixation is almost completely absent and suffixation abounds, thereby creating imperfective forms.

This paper deals with Slavic micro-languages in situations of absolute language contact with German (Upper Sorbian, Burgenland Croatian) and Italian (Molise Slavic, Resian). The Slavic way of forming aspectual pairs has been preserved throughout, whereas aspect usage has changed. The behaviour of prefixes in borrowings varies according to the individual contact situations: Sorbian and Burgenland Croatian form prefixed partners even from loan verbs in contrast to Resian and Molise Slavic, borrowing telic verbs as perfectives and forming their imperfective partners by means of suffixation.

The aim of this paper is to compare the superlexical prefixes of Russian and Bulgarian. The main focus is on delimitative and attenuative po- in derived PF forms as well as in secondary IPF verbs. Using the Russian-Bulgarian parallel corpus, I show that there is a functional parallelism between PF and IPF delimitatives in Russian and Bulgarian. The semantic similarity between delimitative and attenuative meaning is the basis for expressing special pragmatic functions by means of both PF and IPF poattenuatives in Bulgarian, while attenuative po-verbs in Russian express specific pragmatic meanings primarily via PF forms.

This paper deals with the different meanings and functions of prefixes in perfective verbs derived from the indeterminate motion verbs chodit’, nosit’ and ezdit’. In some expressions with transitive verbs (e. g. vychodit’, donosit’ and naezdit’) the prefixes are lexical. Their function consists in creating accomplishment verbs with a resultative meaning. On the other side, the prefixes po-, za- and ot- in such verbs as pochodit’, zachodit’, ot’’ezdit’ are superlexical. They have the function of expressing additional meanings which refer to the duration, inception and cessation of the action.

This paper attempts to identify the factors that either limit the passivization and decausation of Russian idioms containing transitive verbs of movement. Most of these verbs are highly subject to passivization in free structures and produce causative-decausative pairs. But in phraseological units their transformation is not always possible. The purpose of this research is to reveal the semantic and grammatical features that restrict the above transformations, to identify their primary or auxiliary role and to determine the existence of common features that resist both types of transformation.