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Invited by the Editor to comment on this much-discussed theme, in particular on the Paper of Senator Yuzyk, I am now reversing a decision made a year ago to keep silent on this issue. Not because I have been indifferent to it, but because I regard the whole enterprise as unfortunate. There is no such thing in Canada as biculturalism. The Senator himself says that as a nation we are multicultural, and he ought to know. All the way along we are threatened by misuse of terms.

Professor Buyniak's careful survey is the most complete history to date of Slavic Studies in Canada. A commentator will hardly improve on his thoroughness, but he can voice a few hopes and add a few critical observations which would normally not have a place in a factual study of this kind. The first observation to be made is that Slavic studies, like other area studies, have gone through a period of growing pains, marked not merely by lack of funds and foresight on the part of university administrations, but also by difficulties inherent in venturing into unfamiliar grounds. The profession should perhaps face the fact that the distrust on the part of university administrations in the early years was not only due to short-sightedness and a built-in conservatism, but in part to the absence of qualified Slavic scholars. During the first post-war years many appointments were made, even senior appointments, that were the result of a hasty and improper appraisal of candidates for academic positions. Indeed, there were no precedents for evaluating the credentials of Europeans eager to teach in Slavic Studies, and brandishing unfamiliar certificates of proficiencyor sometimes with no certificates at alland demanding academic positions on the strength of them. The consequences of appointments made on the basis of such credentials were sometimes painful and caused administrators for years to look askance at the whole profession, withholding their trust and their funds from the doubtful and the deserving candidates alike. It is gratifying to be able to say that this period is now definitely over; new appointments are being made on the basis of the same criteria as in other fields and the growing output of scholarly works bespeaks the growing strength and quality of the profession. In this connection, it may be pointed out that students of "purely" Anglo-Saxon origin are beginning to take interest in Slavic Studies and this augurs well for the future: only they can furnish a durable basis for the development of Slavic Studies. Another observation is in the nature of a caveat: there is dangerand that danger is not lesseningthat Slavic specialists will be drawn into the duels of the Cold War and will, in fact, become its instruments.

This paper examines the multi-temporal character of postwar Soviet development. By analyzing personal histories of the timber production workers' settlement of Muezerka in northwest Karelia, the author argues that industrial development did not entirely standardize social space and time, but it initially served as a vehicle of disintegration in newly developed areas. She shows that, in order to start the development of a new territory, it was necessary to create a symbolic starting point - "zero time." Each time a new settlement emerged, the entire path to progress had to be traversed anew, and the production of a special temporality of development, which implied a temporary withdrawal from modernity, was an essential working element in this path.

In 2016, the Canadian Association of Slavists (CAS) marked two important milestones. At our annual conference in Calgary, we celebrated both the 70th anniversary since the Association's predecessor, the Canadian branch of the Association of American Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages, was established in Toronto in May 1946, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of this journal, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes, in 1956.1 (A couple of years were missed in the first decade, and so this note appears in the last issue of Volume 58, rather than 60...)In honour of these anniversaries, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes, with the kind permission of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Canada, reprints below the address by Professor Watson Kirkconnell to the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Slavists in Ottawa, on 10 June 1957.2 In it, he recounts his own personal encounter with Slavic studies and his involvement in the early development of the field in Canada.Watson Kirkconnell (1895-1977), an influential Canadian scholar, university administrator, and prodigious translator of verse from the 1920s through the 1960s, played a significant role in the development of Slavic and East European studies in Canada and in laying the foundation for Canadian multiculturalism.3 Kirkconnell was trained in classics and economics at Queen's University and then at Oxford. In 1922, he accepted a position in the English Department at Wesley College (now the University of Winnipeg), where he remained for 18 years. Between 1940 and 1948, he served as head of English at McMaster University. In this period, he was deeply involved in politics, both in defence of Canadian Eastern European immigrant communities and in warning against alleged Soviet attempts to infiltrate them. In 1943, he was appointed by the Royal Society of Canada to organize and then chair the Humanities Research Council of Canada, the forerunner of today's Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences of Canada (of which CAS has been a member since 1954). An 18-year stint as President of Acadia University capped Kirkconnell's distinguished academic career.4Personal tragedy and life in the ethnically diverse Winnipeg of the 1920s sowed the seeds that would make this Scottish-Canadian Baptist with no formal training in Slavic studies into their champion. Bereaved when his wife died in childbirth in 1925, Kirkconnell drowned his sorrows in poetry, setting for himself the unlikely goal of translating verse from across Europe. Armed with only his enthusiasm and a personal collection of over 80 dictionaries in 60 languages, he translated poems from 50 languages. When his publisher questioned the ability of a single person to accomplish such a task, he sent his efforts to various specialists in Britain and the United States for approval. The volume was finally published as European Elegies in 1928.5 Kirkconnell would go on to translate 20 volumes of verse.6 No wonder a later commentator noted that Kirkconnell had "nullified the curse of Babel"!7As Nandor Dreisziger notes, Kirkconnell's translation activities would open up for him new acquaintances among scholars and writers in Britain, the United States, and in numerous European countries; they would also lead to a lifelong association with various immigrant communities in Canada and to a discovery of those groups' contribution to Canadian literature.8 Indeed, in 1935, he published his first volume of translations of Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Italian, Greek, and Ukrainian poetry written in Canada, Canadian Overtones. From 1937 to 1965, he contributed an annual survey of non-English and non-French books written in Canada to the University of Toronto Quarterly.9 Meanwhile, in his activities as a prominent Canadian Baptist in these same years, he emerged as a "prophet of multiculturalism", dedicated to re-imagining that faith's communities and outlook for an ethnically plural Canada. …

This article examines narratives of occupation in portrayals of the Soviet past in Ukrainian museums. The paper analyzes the juridical, historical, and ideological usage of the term “Soviet occupat...

Thanks are due to Radu Bordeianu, Thomas Bremer, Jaroslaw Buciora, Anatolii Babynskyi, Tetiana Kalenychenko, Andrii Krawchuk, and Frank Sysyn for their stellar contributions to this symposium. Each...

The authors explore the representations of the child and childhood which emerged in post-communist Romania, with a clear focus on literary works. The paper proposes a triadic typology of literary r...

This collection of eleven papers by major scholars in their respective fields represents a cross-section of scholarly interest in Macedonia, Macedonians, and the Macedonian language. The title of t...

This paper looks at how the memory and, subsequently, narratives of the Waffen SS “Galicia,” later known as 1st Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army, are being (re)constructed and presented to a wider audience by scholars, politicians, and World War II veterans. The narratives and political framings of the “Galicia” Division tend to divide into two dichotomous approaches, each presenting itself as “historical truth.” On the one hand, the ex-members are often portrayed as traitors, opportunists, and war criminals. On the other, ex-“Galicians” are seen as those who arguably chose “the lesser of two evils” and joined the German Army in order to defend their motherland against the Soviet invasion and build a nucleus for the Ukrainian army. Rather than follow the well-trodden paths of attempting to justify or condemn the Division’s actions, this paper will analyze how the interpretations of the Division’s identity are presented in contemporary debates, addressing at the same time the concept of memory. It will offer a discussion of the political framing of history in contemporary Ukraine and of the challenges that Ukrainian historiography faces with regard to the question of World War II in general and the “Galicia” Division in particular. In this way the paper will seek to contribute to an understanding of the institutionalization of memory and the shaping of national identity through existing and newly emerged narratives about World War II in contemporary Ukraine.

In March 2011,1 approached Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue canadienne des slavistes editor Heather J. Coleman with an idea for a special issue on Historical Memory and the Great Patriotic War, to which she responded positively and with enthusiasm. The goal was to produce a volume that would coincide in its appearance with the 70th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Stalingrad (2 February 1943), a conflict that has long been considered a critical turning point in the German-Soviet war, marking the end of the military expansion of Hitler's regime and the concomitant revival of Soviet forces. The year 1943 was also a critical time of nationalist formations in the western borderlands as anti-Soviet forces began to consider the likelihood of the return of the Red Army and Soviet rule. We decided to limit the issue to three of the former Soviet republics that we considered were deeply affected by the war and continuing to deal with it in a variety of ways, namely Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. In the event, no papers were submitted on the war and memory in Belarus, a topic that is coincidentally the subject of my own forthcoming monograph. Thus the papers in this special issue all pertain in their different ways to either Russia or Ukraine and, in fact, are divided equally between these two largest of the East Slavic nations.The reasons for limiting the selection of countries were as follows. In theory it would have been possible to expand the choice of topics to other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and especially to Poland and the Baltic States, which have had similar encounters with the experiences of the war years, as well as deep differences with Russia concerning the interpretation of some of the events of the war, both in memory and as manifested in archival sources. Fundamentally, the official perception of the end of the war is of a Soviet reoccupation rather than liberation, as evidenced by the name of the Riga Museum of Soviet Occupation. But my feeling was that the topics have been relatively well covered earlier. Scholars such as Jan Gross and Timothy Snyder, for example, have enhanced our knowledge of the war years in Poland in recent works, while broaching the most controversial issues, including that of the Jewish Holocaust.1 It was felt moreover that opening the issue to Poland would render it too large to manage within the context of a single volume and would have been more appropriate were there to be a series of volumes. One understands nevertheless that the omission may be somewhat grating, especially given the interrelated and closely linked memories of events among Ukrainians and Poles in particular, but also between Russia and Poland concerning issues such as Katyn, the Warsaw Uprising, and others.2Arguably, the Baltic States, occupied from 1940 by the USSR, and from the summer of 1941 by the Germans, might also have been added. But in that case my feeling was that other Soviet republics should then have been included as well. Many contributed to the war effort, even those that were never occupied. Some provided troops and supplies; others suffered deportation en masse for alleged collaboration with or support for the enemy (Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingushetians, and Meshketian Turks among them). Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, on the other hand, have seen a revival of debates about the war years and how they should be commemorated. The passage of time signifies that the veterans who remain will soon pass away, so that direct eyewitness accounts of the war will no longer be possible and commemorative events on various anniversaries will have to take place without the traditional veterans' parades. In this regard, the 65th anniversary of the end of the war in May 2010 may be the last major occasion on which the veterans themselves take part in official ceremonies marking the Victory (the word was always capitalized in Soviet accounts from the 1970s onward). Today these post-Soviet states are dealing with highly contentious issues of how to remember the war for a number of reasons. …

This paper analyses the changes in ethnic self-identification of the population of Ukraine from the last (January 1989) Soviet census to the first (December 2001) Ukrainian census. It begins with a comparison of the census data and describes the remarkable changes observed. Given the incomplete nature of published data on international migrations and their differentiation by ethnic groups in the inter-census period, the paper applies a method to fill in the gaps and calculate net migration balances for each ethnic group. Also, since no data is available on the net reproductive rates for separate ethnic groups in Ukraine, it sets out a method to estimate net reproduction rates for Ukrainians and Russians in the inter-census period. Using these methods, it establishes that differences in net migration on the one hand and the differences in net reproduction on the other contributed 11.1 and 4.4 percent of the growth in the share of Ukrainians and 6.8 and 5.2 percent in the sizeable decline in the sha...

This paper proceeds from the premise that Russian iurodivye—or fools for Christ—display a remarkable resemblance to the Hebrew prophets. As it explores the genealogical link between these two cultural paradigms, the paper shows that, during the various stages of the developmental history of holy foolery, the figure of the Old Testament prophet served as the holy fool’s literary and behavioural model. The influence of the prophetic paradigm on the cultural phenomenology and hagiographic imagery of iurodstvo was exercised through the prominence assigned to the prophet in the written, visual and audible texts available to the Eastern Slavs from the beginning of Christian era. On the literary level, this enduring influence is discernable in the prophetic topoi that reached holy foolish hagiography directly and indirectly. While the direct venues are confined to Old Testament texts, which described the lives and acts of the Hebrew prophets, the indirect ones include New Testament texts and hagiographie...

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)1. INTRODUCTIONHow do writers adapt to changing linguistic circumstances? How did Macedonian writers of the first half of the twentieth century move from writing in the languages of their schooling (Serbian or Bulgarian) or their Macedonian home dialect to become writers of the emerging standard Macedonian?1 Much research has been conducted that focuses on the state processes of language standardizing, e.g., commissions to codify grammars, publication of new dictionaries and handbooks, access to the media in newly standardized linguistic codes, and access to education. Such works leave unanswered questions: such as why a speaker chooses to write in an emergent language or dialect, particularly if they have been schooled in a dominant language. Dorian writes: "the social standing of a group of people carries over to the language they speak. Social and economic opportunities go mainly to speakers of the state-sponsored language" (26). Yet in the Balkans some writers switched to a lower status variety because of group cohesion and ethno-linguistic identity. Although the lower status language is a reflection of power relations in contexts of developing ethnic and political awareness and newly standardizing languages,2 some people will opt to shift to this emergent language since, as Dorian states: "If conditions are reasonably favorable, people identify with their own language and do not seek a preferable substitute. In cases in which people have changed to another language and given up their own entirely, it has nearly always been due to a local history of political suppression, social discrimination, or economic deprivation. More often than not, all three have been present" (39). Indeed, in Macedonia all three were present, but in the early twentieth century new circumstances arose that allowed Macedonians to choose Macedonian. How and why individuals make this choice, and how they express themselves in a language they often do not fully control-given that they are usually schooled in the higher status state language and often have few tools such as grammars and dictionaries to aid them-are key underlying questions of processes of standardization.Much of the scholarship on language standardization is concerned with institutions of social implementation of language shift, language planning, formal declarations of language reform and the legal apparatus that implement language planning.3 In this paper, however, I focus a discussion of language standards on individual speakers and writers. Scholars such as Danforth who privilege the experience of individuals inform my work:Most scholarly work on ethnic nationalism has focused on the construction of national identity as a large-scale collective phenomenon and as a long-term historical process. It has not paid sufficient attention to the construction of national identity as a short-term biographical process that takes place over the course of the lifetime of specific individuals... Many important questions are raised by focusing attention on the construction of national identity at the individual level. (85)In this study I examine individual speakers: how and why they shift their language to the emerging norm-and, by so doing, help to create it. This change in focus is also informed by Kalogjera (212) who notes that more attention has been given to the selection stages of language standardization (cf. Radovanovic 1992), but relatively little attention to the acceptance stages. I will focus on the linguistic and meta-linguistic factors in language shift and the concomitant identity shift in the generation of writers who, though schooled in Serbian or Bulgarian, chose to write in the nascent Macedonian standard language, even when this led to an inability to publish, social ostracism, personal injury and prison.This paper is the first step in a broader study of writers in the period 1935-1955. These are writers from the interwar period and writers who published in the first decade after standardization. …

The paper considers the case of vegetovascular dystonia, one of the most typical and common “Soviet” diseases. This syndrome emerged in Soviet medicine after World War II, and very quickly become a...

This paper uses data from the 1995 and 2000 World Values Survey to examine and compare the relationship between social capital, education and political participation in Western and Eastern Europe. The concept of social capital is measured using indicators of trust and membership in voluntary organizations, while the concept of political participation is put into operation through indicators of political action. The research uncovers clear indicators showing that social capital is a factor in political participation in Eastern Europe and that the existence of general social trust is a characteristic of the most successful transitions. The paper finds evidence to support the theory that a trust-building mechanism based on reciprocity and a “critical mass” is indeed at work in the democratization process and that social capital is an integral part of transition for the Eastern European states.

This paper looks at the Ukrainian presidential elections from the perspective of machinations, including machine politics, administrative resources and fraud. By conceptually differentiating between different electoral strategies, it offers a model for analyzing their effectiveness and limitations. The empirical evidence first draws on Donets’k Oblast’, the home of Viktor Yanukovych, illustrating the effectiveness of such strategies starting from the 1999 presidential elections. The paper shows how and why these strategies were successful in Donets’k and offers some explanations as to why they failed at the national level in 2004.

0. Since the year 1992, the Serbian Institute in Bautzen/ Budysin has published a series of monographs (Schriften/Spisy) with at present close to 40 volumes. These are for the most part original and carefully researched investigations of between 112 and 527 pages in the areas of Serbian history, literature, language, culture, art, society, religion, education, and politics. Also included in this "Series Maior" (our designation-the Latin maior and minor seem more adequate translations than English large, small and major, minor, respectively, of Sorbian wulki and maty) is the Sorbische Bibliographie/Serbska bibliografija, which appears every five years (for an overview of the bibliography up to the year 1995, see our review in CSP 42 [2000]: 385-86); a conference volume; and a selection of reprinted papers.Five years ago, the Institute published the first two volumes in a "Series Minor" (Upper Sorbian Maty rjad; Lower Sorbian Maty red; German Kleine Reihe). Since then five more of these slim volumes have appeared in print.1 Actually, both the title "Series Minor" and the consecutive numbering of the volumes appear for the first time in the fifth volume; this lack of a subtitle and volume numbering will no doubt present some problems for librarians and bibliographers (the Institute's website gives the general title Kleine Reihe des Sorbischen Instituts/Ma!y rjad Serbskeho instituta and also numbers the volumes consecutively; see www.serbskiinstitut.de/si.publm.html).As opposed to the "Series Maior", i.e., the monograph series described above, the "Series Minor" is obviously meant to be published quickly and is addressed to topical issues in contemporary Sorbian life, presents documentation, and, as in Nr. 7, makes available a master's thesis. However, it must be said that this philosophy is never stated overtly by the publisher, i.e., the Sorbian Institute. We must thus await future issues or an explicit editorial philosophy to determine whether our presupposition is correct. Four volumes are devoted to the area of language maintenance, revitalization, and politics (vols. 1, 2, 4, 6); one volume to linguistic analysis (Nr. 7); and one volume each deals with church history (vol. 3) and the reminiscences of a Sorbian Stasi victim (vol. 5), respectively.1. It seems quite appropriate that the "Series Minor" should start out with the publication of workshop papers concerning the major problem facing minority language policy makers in Europe today, viz., that of maintaining and/or further developing such languages (vol. 1). The six sections in this volume deal with Sorbian (both Lower and Upper); Scots Gaelic; Welsh; Saami; Basque; and Romansh. The workshop was held in April, 1999, at the Sorbian Institute in Bautzen/Budysin, a city of some 40,000 inhabitants in Upper Lusatia in the Free State of Saxony, Germany. The city itself cannot boast of more than 8% Upper Sorbian speakers and it is in fact located in what is now generally considered a peripheral area of Upper Sorbian with little hope of language survival beyond the present generation. As Leos Satava points out in his lead paper, it is only in the Western, i.e., the Catholic, part of the Upper Sorbian language area that "the situation is quite favourable so far since 'the baton' is still being passed on in the sphere of ethnic consciousness and intergenerational language transmission" (15).Satava's conclusion is borne out by Ludwig Ela's paper on Sorbian in which the latter states that one cannot really speak of a revitalization policy for this language group (except for the project "Witaj") since the attention of language of policy makers concentrates on "Bestandschutz" and "Bestandspflege" (which basically means "protecting and preserving what there is"). "Witaj" (Lower/Upper Sorbian for "welcome") is a project that foresees the establishment of Sorbian kindergartens and thus eventually of schools and has indeed succeeded in regaining some lost linguistic territory in the Lower Sorbian area (21). …

The paper attempts a comprehensive and theoretically grounded analysis of all parliamentary and presidential elections carried out in Ukraine in the decade 1994 to 2004. It is organized into four sections. The first deals with the electoral system, how it came into being and has been amended, how it translates votes into seats, the "effective number" of political parties in the electorate and the legislature, and the battle over the electoral system itself during the presidency of Leonid Kuchma. In the second section, voting behaviour of the Ukrainian electorate is examined. Using voting data, along with the results of public opinion surveys and reports on the conduct of the various election campaigns, the paper sorts through the relevant determinants of voting choice to identify the most pertinent ones as they operate in the Ukrainian context. Generally speaking, such determinants are: (1) background social characteristics of the voters, including the regional and ethnic factors; (2) the public's...

This paper looks at various civic organizations in Poland during the period of transition from communism. It offers an analysis of representative groups of Civil society Organizations (CSOs), proving that they bear features of the socialist past. The paper demonstrates that the popularity of the re-legalized Solidarno śc has been steadily declining since 1989. In fact, no former dissident movement plays an important role in contemporary Poland. Moreover, the revitalization of organizations dissolved during the communist period cannot be read as a success story. Administrative dissolution and repression turned out to be effective tools in dismantling CSOs. The renewal of Catholic organizations has also largely failed. However, organizations established during the communist period still play a leading role in civil society. The communist era, in short, was decisive in shaping contemporary CSOs. Associational life after 1989 displays considerable inertia and while it is difficult to determine whether...

The paper discusses the gendering of the Lithuanian national movement during its formative stage, 1883–1914. It concentrates on the intelligentsia’s debate on the women’s question, which served as one of the most significant cultural battlegrounds for the national elite, helping to define its own identity and new directions for Lithuanian nationalism. Through the discussion of different marital strategies and women’s roles in national politics as seen by the male intelligentsia, the paper argues that, despite the harsh critique of traditional peasant gender relations, the debate amounted to women’s virtual domestication. For male patriots, the emancipation of Lithuanian women meant, first of all, accepting the role of patriotic wives, i.e., responsibility for the education of children, or the role of nation mothers, which entailed nurturing new members of the community. A few secular and independent women writers were welcomed into nation-building politics but only as junior partners.

INTRODUCTIONAdvances in instructional technology provide a variety of ways to help students read authentic texts in a foreign language. Links to annotations, sound files, and images help students of varying levels of competence to achieve their own, individual reading goals. The mere presence of annotations and other features in electronic materials, however, does not guarantee comprehension of a text's complexity or of the culture behind it. This paper seeks to show the role that on-line electronic reading materials can play when learners read and study culture in a second language. Its first part considers the positive features of electronic texts in contrast to paper texts. The second shows how these very features might lead to the kinds of misrepresentation that the mere parsing of individual sentences tend to cause. The third proposes that reading involves not merely identification and/or learning of a stable set of cultural values and facts and that, therefore, the presentation of reading materials should be designed to encourage students to view culture as a process, i.e., as a living organism that is never static and ever evolving. The fourth and fifth parts suggest how electronic materials might be devised to encourage this. My consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of electronic materials relies on current literature on second language learning. To illustrate my points about the main features of electronic materials I will marshal examples from Brown University's On-Line Czech Literary Anthology, which is located at www.brown.edu/Departments/LRC/CZH/ (henceforth BCzA). In the sixth part I will present my conclusions.1.0. POSITIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF ON-LINE ELECTRONIC TEXTS vs. PAPER TEXTSThe salient positive characteristics of on-line electronic materials for reading are best appreciated when we consider the disadvantages of their counterparts on paper. A paper text, if devoid of annotations, is not necessarily accessible to students of all language levels. If the text is glossed, its annotations are visible regardless of whether the reader needs them all. The visible presence of such annotations can tempt students to look up every single word rather than trying to grasp the main point of the text on the basis of only a few critical words. Beginning-level students might also be overwhelmed or intimidated by vocabulary lists containing a multitude of unfamiliar words. Paper texts lend themselves to be read linearly and their lexical information is usually provided only at the first occurrence of a word. Devoid of sound and frequently of images, printed materials do not readily help learners create visual and auditory representations of events and characters.The electronic text, on the other hand, has a more efficient way to deliver "helping hands" for language students; its structure is likely to give readers a stronger sense of choice than its paper counterpart. The electronic text allows readers to believe that they are actively seeking information on their own; each reader makes decisions about which lexical links to open and/or which follow-up exercises to do. The reader can also decide how s/he will read the text (be it a global reading of the text, a detailed reading of each sentence, or analyzing the literary associations in the text) and choose annotations accordingly. A text with such "invisible and unobtrusive" (Davis 1989: 42) annotations is less likely to overwhelm the beginning-level reader than a text with a long, visible vocabulary list. A clean text combined with prereading questions also encourages students to make attempts at reading globally.Research in second language teaching reports the positive effects of texts with multimedia annotations and glossing. Multimedia format such as the German electronic text Cyberbuch is said to stimulate students' interest (Moyer 1999: 45). Lomicka's data suggests a possible positive effect of multimedia annotations on comprehension, including the comprehension of cause-effect relationships in a text (1998: 49). …

Traditional Bulgarian society can be differentiated from the modern on the basis of certain theories developed by scholars in sociology of language, social anthropology and semiotics. This paper provides a brief overview of several typological theories of society and culture and examines how they might apply to Bulgaria. It then goes on to posit a co-variation between patterns of language use and the typological characteristics of Bulgarian society over the last two centuries. The second part of the paper demonstrates that the semantic opposition of Generic vs. Specific behaves as predicted in two corpora of texts produced during Bulgaria's "traditional" and "modern" stages of development, respectively. gained political independence from the Ottoman Empire (1878). At that time Bulgaria severed its ties with the Ottoman cultural space and society took steps towards a greater rapprochement with Europe, leading to gradual modernization and stratification. The process was accompanied with the relative emancipation of the individual from compulsory conformity with the dictate of communal values.

This is a comparative analysis of the Russian re-readings of Seren Kierkegaard. The paper demonstrates a profound interdependence between the text and cultural context. Special attention is given to Lev Shestov’s presentation of Kierkegaard as “Dostoevsky’s Double” and Piama Gaidenko’s modernist depiction of Kierkegaard as a “master of paradox and irony.” The former was written in France at the beginning of the twentieth century, while the latter was realized during the “thaw” of the 1970s. This study of the Russian reception of Kierkegaard complements and links the existing European and North American interpretations of his philosophical system to the Russian intellectual tradition. The paper concludes that Gaidenko fruitfully joined the discourse on Being and Existence, even though she had no access to the mainstream postmodern debates, but she did so on the basis of Europe’s shared cultural tradition.

On a beautiful, warm Thanksgiving weekend in 1998, the participants of the National Cinemas Conference met in the eerily quiet corridors of University College at the University of Western Ontario. We exchanged anecdotes and shared memories of our trips to Central and Eastern Europe, and discussed many recent changes in East-Central European cinema. Strong coffee and doughnuts helped to raise our spirits during the proceedings. This professional gathering provided a valuable forum for the discussion of recent trends in cinema's role in the presentation, as well as the implementation of political and social change in East-Central Europe. It also dealt with the current political complexities in this part of the world and the influence of these complexities on film. In the years following World War Two, East-Central European countries have developed distinguished film cultures. In the past ten years, however, from state sponsored, well-organized, bodies of production and distribution they have turned into dispersed, fragmented organisms, fighting for funding, audiences and new means of expression. Since 1989, the year that marked the official abolition of the Communist system, with the de-Sovietization and rapid Westernization profoundly affecting East-Central Europe, East-Central European cinemas have started to produce a variety of films: these range from genre films reflecting the transplantation of American poetics into European realities to intensely personal films; from world class animation to highly esteemed documentaries; from political films to spiteful comedies. During the conference, we observed that the "post communist" period continues to be characterized by an attempt to overcome modes of thought and habits characteristic of the prec eding phase, one symptom of which is the abandonment of political strategies in the reading of films. East-- Central European audiences, historically having favoured political films, seem to have grown tired of the political. The Aesopian strategies, political metaphors and symbols prevalent before 1989 no longer dominate the industry, nor do hidden archives, censored scripts and victimized dissidents constitute the "film landscape." Film-making has ceased to fulfill only a national and social mission and, instead of being a "political weapon," has again become an entertainment endeavour. With these ideas in mind, the participants of the conference examined in depth Hungarian, Polish, Belarusan, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Czech and Soviet cinemas, as well as that of the former Yugoslavia. The conference was organized by the Film Studies Program at the English Department of the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and generously funded by the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, The Department of English, The Department of French, and the Visual Arts Department at the University of Western Ontario, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The Dean of the Faculty of Arts Grant from the J.B. Smallman Research Fund and a Department of English Research Grant financially supported the publication of the issue of Canadian Slavonic Papers. I would like to thank Professors Kathleen Okruhlik, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and Patrick Deane, Chair of the Department of English, for their understanding and assistance during the long months leading to the publication of this work. I would also like to acknowledge the extraordinary help and patience of the Editor of Canadian Slavonic Papers, Professor Edward Mozejko, and the Assistant Editor, Dr. Gust Olson. Our cooperation during the editing of this special issue spanned many grueling weeks. Thanks to their perseverance and meticulousness, this double issue has emerged in its present form. Last but not least, I would like to thank my editorial assistant at the University of Western Ontario, Scott Holden, a graduate student in the Department of English, who helped me edit the texts written by our East European colleagues. …

When the Soviet Union begun to crumble in the late 1980s and glasnost replaced the official ideology, Ukrainian cinema responded with a resurrection of a twenty-two year old film rather than with a new production that would take advantage of the new political openness. The release of Krynytsia dlia sprahlykh (A Well-Spring for the Thirsty), made in 1966 but released only at the end of 1987, initiated, on the one hand, a new era in the history of Ukrainian cinema and, on the other, put Ukrainian cinema into a retrospective mode which has hindered its development during the 1990s.I Due to its belated release, the film and its director Yuri Ilienko, became synonymous with the idea of a national cinema in the newly independent Ukraine. The high critical regard for Ilienko was extended to the 1960s cinematic movement that made him famous: the Ukrainian Poetic Cinema. Why does the ghost of a bygone era still haunt film-makers in Ukraine today? Why does the model of national cinema envisioned over 30 years ago under the totalitarian Soviet regime still dominate Any discussion on national cinema in independent Ukraine? Moreover, why are films which had little or no impact on general audiences in Ukraine considered to be representative of a national group these audiences belong to? In answering these questions this paper attempts to take a close look at the Ukrainian Poetic Cinema of the 1960s as a cinematic and cultural phenomenon that shaped the cinema of independent Ukraine in the 1990s. Although the main focus of the paper is on cinema I also try to analyse much broader cultural implications. The post-colonial status of the post-Soviet space in which Ukrainian cinema finds itself today demands a search for answers in a complex historical process which formed the present Ukrainian society and her artists. Ukrainian Poetic Cinema of the 1960s is a cultural phenomenon which shaped the generation of Ukrainians who actively sought the creation of an independent Ukrainian state and who were first to proscribe a national cultural model for this new state. Therefore, the Ukrainian Poetic Cinema is both a cinematic and a general cultural phenomenon that provided the groundwork for the creation (or the absence) of a national cinema in the independent Ukraine of the 1990s. The story of Ukrainian Poetic Cinema begins on the set of Tini zabutykh predkiv (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors) in 1964. The production brought together director Sarkis Paradzhanian (better known as Sergei Paradzhanov), the cameraman Yuri Ilienko, and actor Ivan Mykolaichuk, all of whom continued to make their own films, as well as artists Hryhorii Yakutovych (set designer) and Myroslav Skoryk (composer). As most participants admit the production was a truly cooperative effort. The resulting film proved to be not only a challenge to the socialist realist film style in the Soviet Union but also a picture that could successfully compete at film festivals around the world.2 Why has Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors appealed to international critics and audiences?3 The film had a stylistic and thematic freshness unexpected from a film originating in the Soviet Union. The universal appeal of its tragic story, quickly summarized by foreign critics as "shadows of unforgotten Shakespeare" or "the Romeo and Juliette of the Carpathians," played to the tune familiar to Western cultures.4 A journey to his own destruction taken by Ivan, the main character, after the death of his beloved Marichka was yet another well utilized romantic motif used in the film. However, the film's originality did not come from its story but from its setting. Like its model, the modernist novel by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, the film was set among Hutsuls, a Ukrainian tribe living high in the Carpathian Mountains oblivious to politics, changing regimes and borders, and in general to the progress taking place below them. Hutsuls had a complex system of beliefs combining pagan, Catholic and Orthodox world views, had preserved otherwise forgotten rituals and customs and spoke a Ukrainian dialect little affected by language politics. …

1. INTRODUCTION This paper examines the status of the modal particle1 bi/by in three Slavic languages: Bulgarian, Macedonian and Russian, with a focus on the Russian data. The evolution of this modal particle in Slavic constitutes in many respects a canonical example of grammaticalization. A lexical item, in this case the verb to be in the aorist tense, was used with the l-participle to form an irrealis mood.2 Over time, in some of the Slavic languages, this auxiliary has lost inflectional properties and become an invariant particle. This shift from lexical item to grammatical form is accompanied also by increased restriction in syntactic position. Such changes are typical of the grammaticalization process. The comparison of Bulgarian, Macedonian and Russian data is valuable for two reasons. First, the Russian and South Slavic data illustrate some of the possible range in both rate and type of change involved in grammaticalization. Second, with this varied data before us we can address two frequently posed questions in work on grammaticalization: 1) What motivates grammaticalization?, and 2) What accounts for differences among languages in rate and type of change? This study suggests that answers to both of these questions are to be found in an appreciation of the structural differences among these three closely related languages. 2. WHAT IS GRAMMATICALIZATION? The term grammaticalization has primarily been understood to refer to a diachronic process, i.e., the process by which lexical or content items assume functions more grammatical in nature (or grammatical forms become even more so). However, much recent scholarship views grammaticalization from a synchronic perspective as well.3 While appreciating the historical nature of grammaticalization-the process-the focus in such works is on the results of this process at a given point in a language's development. Primarily synchronic studies, informed by the understanding that inherent features of the grammaticalization process such as different rates of change and less than complete applicability of a change, help us appreciate that what is evidenced synchronically at any given point may be some ambiguous or recalcitrant data. Such work underscores the essentially noncomplete nature of grammars and offers an explanation for those areas in a language's grammar which are in flux. The diachronic and synchronic approaches suggest different but interrelated models for analyzing data. The diachronic perspective is concerned primarily with how the historical process of change is conceptualized. The model usually employed is the cline of grammaticality, for example: content item > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix (Hopper and Traugott 1993: 7) The synchronic approach seeks to establish parameters for assessing the degree to which a given form in the contemporary language is grammaticalized. Measures to assess the degree of grammaticalization include such factors as decategorialization: lack of inflections associated with a particular category; recategorialization: reinterpretation as member of a different grammatical class; and lack of syntactic autonomy. Clearly these two analytical frameworks are linked. The cline of grammaticality posits that changes associated with the process of grammaticalization follow a path of predictable morphological developments. Synchronic measures of grammaticalization such as decategorialization and lack of syntactic autonomy can be shown to correlate with points along this historical continuum. For example, the position of a clitic is subject to greater syntactic restrictions than that of a grammatical word. This paper considers grammaticalization first and foremost from a synchronic perspective. I am not concerned so much with the evolution of the bi/by forms, but rather with their current status. There are two stages to this analysis. First I assess the degree to which the modal form bi/by is grammaticalized in contemporary Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Russian. …