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The paper deals with the role of context and its features in the interpretation of ironically used metalinguistic (reflexive) expressions in the Russian, Polish, and English languages. Although contextual cues have always been a major topic of interest to irony scholars, more research seems to be needed on how context interacts with a metalinguistic expression and how it indicates that such an expression is to be interpreted ironically. It is clear that the most natural context in the situation in question is speech (in a broad sense) that is referred to in particular metalinguistic expressions. Therefore, the main goal of the paper is to establish the crucial features of linguistic units that could be named and described by metalinguistic expressions and to specify relations between the former and the latter. The main criteria used to classify the examples that are analyzed in the paper are 1) the type of the linguistic unit in the context, 2) the type of contradiction between the metalinguistic expression and the context, and 3) the limits of the context that is required for ironical interpretation of the metalinguistic expression.

The paper deals with the specifics of outsiders’ laughter in the book Unknown letters (Неизвестные письма/Unbekannte Briefe, Russian 2014, German 2017) by a Russian-German writer Oleg Yuryev. In particular, it analyzes how Russian cultural and historical traumas of the 20th century were reinterpreted in the book from the perspective of an ironical outsider. In doing so, it focuses on a fictional letter by the writer Leonid Dobychin, which is contextualized with fictional letters of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz and Ivan Pryzhov, representing previous historical and cultural periods. Yuryev’s ironic reflections on the Russian historical reality and literary scene of the 20th century manifest themselves at different levels, from the positioning of outsiders’ laughter in relation to the official and marginal hierarchies of the literary canon to the postmodernist play with the traditions of literary classics. In addition, the paper addresses the inter- and/or transcultural aspect of outsiders’ laughter in Yuryev’s book.

This paper deals with the word-formation of Mayakovsky’s neologisms, the principles of their composition and also the objects subjected to neologization. Attention is also paid to the Nachleben of these neologisms in contemporary Russian, based on the research into the Russian National Corpus. The paper is a result of the analysis of all Mayakovsky’s neologisms listed in A. Humesky’s book Majakovskij and His Neologisms (1964), except for those originated by the simple connection of two words or word components. The results were compared with the most recent work dealing with Mayakovsky’s neologisms, V. N. Valavin’s dictionary (Word-formation of Mayakovsky. An Attempt at a Dictionary of Occasiоnalisms). It is argued that the main word-formation principle is that of composition (substantives and adjectives) and suffixation (verbs), that even today many neologisms show surprising vitality, and also that not all of the neologisms ascribed to Mayakovsky are indeed his authorial creations.

In this study, the focus is placed on the semantic content of several concepts in the language consciousness of Polish and Russian speakers revealed by means of the free associative test. Particular attention is paid to the real content of the concepts bezpieczeństwo and безопасность. The paper reports on the results of the comparative analysis of data obtained by means of a free non-directional associative experiment. The distribution of cognitive characteristics according to the degree of brightness in the structure of the concepts is presented. Special attention is paid to identifying similarities and differences in the semantic content and the semantic volume of the investigated concepts. The examined data, taken from associative dictionaries, allow for describing the dynamics of the process of conceptualization as well as for presenting the peculiarities of both concepts. The paper further discusses the formats of the conceptualization of bezpieczeństwo and безопасность and the language dynamics of the objectification of these formats.

The paper is devoted to a holistic analysis of the scientific-organisational and scientific-didactic activity of the Head of the Institute of Russian and Ukrainian philology, Professor Andrzej Sitarski (2008–2019). In the paper, the author presents her reflections on the status of ego-texts along with their categories. The authorʹs attention is primarily focused on the evaluation of Professor Sitarski’s role in the upbringing of talented linguists, as well as on his personal contribution to the development of Poznań Ukrainian studies. The in-depth analysis is conducted on the basis of the category of memory that is depicted in ego-text genres, including the genre of memoirs-dedications. Professor Sitarski has an outstanding linguistic personality of a bilingual that boils down to particular verbal and nonverbal properties represented through his psychotype – his abilities of the elite linguistic character of a scientist and lecturer of Russian language are distinctive for him.

Scientists describe the way young people (school children and university students) think today, as a fundamentally superficial, fragmentary, illogical mosaic. This mode of thinking significantly differs from the conceptual thinking specific to previous generations. Easy access to Internet content and electronic technologies induces students to plagiarize and to resign from independent action. The paper presents fragments of essays and exam tests bearing traces of Internet content manipulation. This practice is not considered as unethical by a number of students. However difficult it may seem to efficiently counteract the habit of copying and pasting material available online, it can be channeled into appropriate approaches and methods. To accommodate these recent changes in cognitive mechanisms, the educational material, and the theoretical elements which are offered to the modern pupils and students, one should intensively focus on contextualizing fragmentary information, providing records in the modernized forms such as modules, flowcharts, algorithms, and mind maps. This approach may help students overcome the inconsistency in the reception and reproduction of the information and avoid serious mistakes in their comprehension of the presented facts. The adaptation of the teaching techniques can form in students the skills of extracting the most important facts, following cause and effect relationships, and structuring the data accordingly.

The paper presents the poems by Nikolay Karamzin (1766–1826), which refer to hope. They include the following groups of texts: 1) reflection poems: To myself (1795), The song (1795), The hope (1796), To an unfaithful (1796), Sorrow and joy (1797), The coast (1802); 2) occasional poems: about the Tsar Pavel I (1796), about G. Khovanski (1796) and about P. Pelski (1803); 3) poems touching upon the life of a poet and poetry: To a poor poet (1796) and The talents (1796). Some poems are autobiographical (The coast was written after the death of Karamzin’s first wife). The hope, which is based on a comparison of a human’s life to a journey, is considered the most meaningful of his texts. According to Karamzin, life is filled with joy and sorrow, expectation and disappointment, but hope makes the plans easier to achieve, and brings a man closer to the goal. The meaning of his poems is optimistic after all. Karamzin’s letters to Ivan Dmitriev, a poet and a friend, serve as an interpretive background in the article.

The aim of this paper is to present the literary theme of hope in the works of the Soviet Russian rock poet Igor Talkov (1956–1991). The poet’s poems as well as fragments of texts from the author’s prose serve as examples. In the course of analyzing the literary legacy of the composer, the author of the article distinguishes the following images of hope: the theme of hope conditioned by striving to fulfil his role in a dignified way in the arena of life; the theme of hope for the immortality of the poet’s fame and poetry; an inverted image of hope, interpreted as a loss of delusions; the theme of hope leading to victory in the unequal struggle of two ambivalent forces: Good and Evil; the theme of hope which is faith in a better life. Moreover, the conducted research shows that the poet, recalling the literary image of hope in his work, repeatedly referred to biblical texts and the works of the authors of the Golden Age, which, as works by Igor Talkov, allows to distinguish another characteristic feature of the presented speech master.

The aim of this paper is to analyze an increasingly dangerous phenomenon in modern times – the Internet addiction – in the context of contemporary Russian literature. It seems that in this light, the work of Viktor Pelevin can serve as a perfect example of a literary voice in the discussion about the condition of the modern world. The present paper uses the findings of modern technology experts (e.g. Clifford Stoll), philosophers, and sociologists (e.g. Jean Baudrillard, Kazimierz Krzysztofek). In Viktor Pelevin’s novel entitled Love for Three Zuckerbrins (Любовь к трeм цукербринам, 2014) the author continues his analysis of the problem, already marked in The Helmet of Horror (Шлем ужаса: Креатифф о Тесее и Минотавре, 2005), centered on the impact of the development of the latest technologies on human beings. While in the author’s earlier works this issue remained in the sphere of predictions and guesses, here it is unequivocally resolved to the detriment of the human individual. By touching upon the question of popular games for people, Pelevin shows their real role – playing with people. In this context the abovementioned attraction to simple entertainment has irreversible effects – a win in an Internet game means a failure in real life. While advocating unequivocally on the side of the opponents of the adulation for cyberspace, Pelevin points out that a complete unification with it will lead to the end of humanity.

The paper is concerned with the aspects of communication during the acts of worship by Russian Catholics. The liturgy and rites are performed in contemporary Russian language. The material was excerpted from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The paper provides a description of the liturgical model of interpersonal communication during services and the linguistic indicators of its components. The units were grouped according to the criterion of participation in the communication situation involving the sender, the receiver and the communication channel, i.e. liturgy.

The paper refers to one of the types of diagrammatic iconicity singled out on the basis of the similarity of the form of the sign in a sequential order to the content. The text discusses coordinate and subordinate phrases which embody the principle. The paper emphasizes the differences existing between them in terms of the freedom of order of structural components. Further, it compares the source text and the target text applying the sequential order principle as tertium comparationis.

The paper addresses B. Norman's humorous etymological Russian dictionary. By reanalyzing the morphological structure of Russian words, Norman provides them with knowingly false, amusing interpretations. The paper proposes to investigate the word-formation aspects of Norman’s re-analyzed lexis. It mostly represents an attempt to “build” the false etymological entities into the system of all existing word-formation techniques of the Russian language. Specific features of amusing para-etymology are also identified.

The object of the paper is a comparison of two concepts of Russian common consciousness: “Germans” and “Poles”. To this effect the combinative power of Russian words German and Pole according to electronic Russian National Corpus (http://www. ruscorpora.ru/) was analyzed. The use of these words in such constructions as “As + qualitative adjective + as a German / Pole” (as careful as a German; as courteous as a Pole, etc.); “German / Pole + adjectival noun” (a German pedantry; a Polish sweetness, etc.); “Qualitative adjective + Germans / Poles” (punctual Germans; coquettish Polish women, etc.) demonstrates ethno cultural stereotypes, typical for Russian ordinary consciousness. These stereotypes should be taken into account in the process of intercultural communication.This paper deals with the slang derivations of the modern Russian language, related to the notions of “иностранец”, “инородец”, “провинциал”, “провинция”. Key aspects of the analysis of these language units are the aspects of word formation and the Russian language, due to the permanent extralinguistic factors, there is a large number of expressive ethnonyms.The area of their distribution is the sphere of the various social dialects, hence they get into general use (for example, in colloquial language). Our task is to identify how the derivational features of these formations determine their emotional and expressive color.

In the present paper the analysis of a motif characteristic of the Church-oriented novels, novelettes, stories and sketches – the motif of family discord – is offered. The examination of several literary works of the 1860s and 1870s has shown that it is the depiction of the negative aspects of clergymen's family life that dominates, the reasons for which being different moral principles, hierarchy of values and major life objectives. Usually it is a priest's wife that is presented as a negative character, although the opposite may be also observed. In the paper both the influence of the literary motif of family discord, popular in the realistic literature, is examined and certain facts of everyday life of the Orthodox clergy are presented in order to show the combination of these factors in the Church-oriented literary works.

The paper is devoted to a study of national character in Evelyn Waugh's work The Loved One. The ironic representation of British and American national characters is analyzed in the paper.

This paper discusses the issue of cross-cultural foreign language teaching accentuating Russian Foreign Language Teaching at colleges in Slovakia. In the introduction some ideas on the position and meaning of cross-cultural communication are presented. In the second part there are explanations of the term cross-cultural communication by some linguists and methodists, as well as its implementation on several levels. In the third part attention is focused on the relations between cross-cultural communication and foreign language teaching. The issue of cross-cultural (policultural) didactics is also explained. In the fourth part the problem of cross-cultural teaching methodology is discussed. In the fifth part the focus is on presenting a summary of cross-cultural communication teaching practice in the Department of Russian Studies at Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. The paper concludes with a summary of the problems investigated.

While studying a movie novel, one receives the opportunity of tracing the reverse process: the process of the “text on the screen” being turned into the “text on paper”. This seems to become even more interesting considering the fact that cinema is a synthetic art form, where the patterns which affect all the senses of perception are used to create the audio-visual image. When it comes to words, naturally, in the cinema one mostly hears them. The word is, of course, one of the most important means of transferring information, yet not the principal one. In this way literature is entirely different from cinema, as it uses only one way of transferring information (visual – if it is a paper-based book, and auditory – in case one is dealing with an audio-version). Consequently, the process of making a movie novel is connected with converting information from one form into the other. In addition, there is the question about the peculiarities of movie novel poetics considering the fact that the general contents are known to the recipient and, what is more, were perceived with the help of the other senses.

The paper concerns linguistic humour as an aesthetic-cultural category which is at the core of comedy. Linguistic material from contemporary Russian movies and their translations into Polish is analysed. The basic linguistic components creating linguistic humour include neologisms, linguistic games, modifications of phraseological units and intertextual references. The aforementioned components cause many problems in movie translations into a foreign language. The paper attempts to provide an overview of ways of translating.

The paper is aimed at understanding peculiarities of behavior of the Russian literary character. The analysis of the early romantic poem Steno by I.S. Turgenev is defined by its imitating of Byron's Manfred. At the same time, the author of the paper indicates items of difference in the “architectonics of actions” as it is viewed by the Russian and English literary character.

In this paper we endeavour to probe into the life and art of а unique poet and intellectual Symeon of Polotsk. We are dealing with this on the basis of his first still unpublished manuscript, focusing on the panegyrical works. Symeon, the future tutor of Peter the Great was formed in the turbulent times of the 17th century on the eastern lines of the weakening Polish empire. In his thirties he was forced to flee his native Polotsk and took refuge under the wings of tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in Moscow. There his talents found an excellent opportunity to flourish. The court of the Romanovs was Fast becoming the cultural and spiritual centre of the absolute monarchy, which was soon to become the powerful Russian empire. The poetry of Symeon took an indispensable part in the burgeoning royal ceremonial. In this the poet not only responded to the realities of the tsar’s court, but shaped new directions in the baroque art and influenced other wordsmiths of his time. The uniqueness of his approach to the panegyrical poetry employs biblical symbols and celestial analogies in order to celebrate the might and wisdom of his master and protector. This paper pays tribute to the indisputable originality of the works

This paper focuses on the concept of boredom in the creative work of one of the significant figures of Soviet underground culture – Elena Shvarts. All the creative heritage – both poetic and prosaic – is treated like a semiotic unity, so that it is possible to see the evolution in understanding such a notion during more than five decades of the poet’s life. While analyzing the five-volume collection by Shvarts, statistical calculation has revealed only 28 cases of using the concept. Even though for Shvarts’s lyrical subjects, who are usually passionate and ecstatically active, boredom is not specific at all, the author sometimes puts this concept in the meaningful center of her creative universe. It could be done both explicably and implacably through the description of “boring” landscapes and events. After close reading of the texts from the five-volume collection, it is claimed that boredom in Shvarts’s oeuvre is strictly associated to the physical (and\or physiological) world, with its routines, wishes and activities. To the contrast, the transcendental world and everything connected to the sacrum, according to Elena Shvarts, cannot be boring.

The aim of this paper it to discuss the techniques employed in modern political Russian verbatim drama, as well as in their performances. Modern verbatim drama seeks to stay relevant and up-to-date by referring to taboos, radical social controversies, and political incidents. So, it becomes an important event of not only cultural but also social life, and it exerts a strong impact on modern Russian society. The aesthetics of the modern verbatim drama is aimed at representing the reality which is absent from official discourse. Such texts as One hour eighteen minutes by Elena Gremina, Three quarters of sadness (Bolotnaya square case) by Polina Borodina, The last party by Anna Dobrovolskaya, and New Antigone by Elena Kostyuchenko openly explore the issues which do not function as part of the public discourse. Thus, they capture the traumatic experiences in order to overcome traumas. These texts take the traumatic events of current political and public life out of the marginal area, and they acquire the status of social statements which give hope for political and social changes, and give rise to unofficial discourse allowing the readers as well as the viewers to define their own opinion related to the traumatizing events.

This paper presents the results from two different experiments carried out independently with two different groups of students using the same materials and the same methodology, with the aim to check whether oral translation, if applied as a main teaching technique, can foster the development of the accuracy component of language proficiency. The experiments were carried out at the International Centre for Plurilingualism at the University of Udine with two experimental groups over a period of three years. Apart from providing a positive answer to the research question, the results show that the whole training can be carried out as part of the in-class activities and is independent of factors of personal character like the amount of time a student dedicates to the L2 learning at home, his or her willingness to put him/herself to work and even, to a large extent, independent of the student’s mother tongue or previous contacts with the foreign language. Since the main goal is the rapid memorization of the lexical and grammar material inside a context, the present technique suggests itself as a promising teaching tool in any lexically specialized field of L2 study.

The term contrastive grammar is still ambiguous. In this paper we trace the unjustified synonymy of terms (confrontative grammar, comparative grammar, contrastive grammar) which lead to controversy among linguists and we attempt to introduce appropriate clarifications to explain the phenomenon. We can state that this linguistic direction is quite new, and its metalanguage is still in the process of development and formation. When studying contrastive grammar in the modern scientific functional-communicative paradigm, the focus of attention is directed to the issues of pragmalinguistics, that is the research, in addition to the actual meanings, of the semantics of linguistic units for designating objects of the environment, also the speech-thinking activity of speakers who use these units and listeners who interpret them; the possible situations of their application; the study of “language in context”; language research, taking into account the goal that is planned to be achieved in the communication process; the wide multidimensionality of the interpretation of the statement; the study of interactive means, taking into account grammatical meanings. The main category of pragmalinguistics is the category of evaluation, and therefore, the issue of contrastive grammar and contrastive description of languages is important to consider in the focus of the paradigm of the category of evaluation; in particular, this concerns the manifestation of each grammatical category.

The author of this paper defines the aspectual paradigms of Russian verbs as such grammatical structures whose formal aspect is correlated with the conceptual one, therefore being its cognitive counterpart. With a view to analysing these paradigms he uses the theory of markedness as an analytic tool. According to it, the grammatical changes that occur in natural languages originate from general principles of naturalness which are typologically relevant. They result in morphological shifts that are linked to the verbalisation of Russian aspectual paradigms and allow to predict the direction of their development. In particular, the principle of natural grammatical development should be considered crucial. It means that the grammatical changes in natural languages cause elimination of marked elements, so that these more complex linguistic structues are replaced with less complex ones. Such a principle manifests an unconscious desire of language users to minimise their linguistic efforts, as it would place an additional burden on interpersonal communication.

The purpose of this article is to reflect on the phenomenon of travel to the places in Venice associated with the Russian poet Iosif Brodsky and the way in which the Fondamenta degli Icurabili, a place of imagination that is the title of the Russian and Italian-language translation of the essay Watermark, functions in space and consciousness of travellers. The article focuses primarily on individual literary journeys that were reflected in or even inspired the traveller’s writing activities. The experiences of being in the Fondamenta degli Incurabili and trying to understand the meaning of the toponym were described by many authors of contemporary non-fiction texts about Venice: Yuri Lepski, Yelena Yakovich, Gleb Smirnov, Arkady Ippolitov, Ekaterina Margolis. Two texts are particularly noteworthy, i.e. the reportage by Yuri Lepski Brodskiy tol’ko chto ushël (2020), which is entirely devoted to the experiences related to the journey in the footsteps of the poet and Progulki s Brodskim i tak daleye. Iosif Brodskiy v fil’me Alekseya Shishova i Yeleny Yakovich (2016) by Yelena Yakovich, where Brodsky himself interprets the title of his essay. Methodological tools deriving from the field of geopoetics and cultural geography, such as the place of imagination or reading journeys, proved helpful during the development of the paper.

The paper aims at investigating the demonstration of Russian intuition in the contemporary Russian speculative fiction. The research thesis is that the Russians, both presented in literature and within the frames of the national character studies, manifest themselves as the intuitive introvert type according to Carl Gustav Jung’s classification. For validating the thesis, as far as the proposed literary works are concerned, one should use the instruments offered by cultural literary criticism along with the support of non-literary disciplines, such as intercultural communication and ethnopsychology. Moreover, one should consider also notes on Russian national character taken by Jung himself as well as studies on the sociocultural aspect of the analysed works. A wide range of methods and perspectives allows deep research of the “feeling – intuitive” Jungian scale as manifested within literary characters representing the Russian element (also called Russianness) in the selected works, which belong to the most significant and/or popular pieces of contemporary speculative fiction in Russia.

This paper is devoted to studying productive word formation processes in Russian slang (creating new words morphologically and semantic derivation). The paper focuses on terms which are used to name people and which were taken from S.I. Levikova’s The Great Dictionary of Youth Slang. The lexical units that are analyzed are not stylistically neutral, and their expressiveness can be achieved through suffixation, compounding, contamination, clipping or via metaphors and metonymies.

This paper addresses the lexicographic work of V.I. Prakhov, who was a Moscow University graduate and a successful teacher in the 1830s and 1840s in the cities of Mogilev and Mstislavl. During this period, he compiled his (unfinished) Materials for an Explanatory Russian Dictionary, i.e. four books that contained “regional, colloquial, and archaic words which were mostly found in Old Russian and Western Russian memorabilia”. While describing the areas of V. Prakhov’s dictionary research, the paper focuses on the regional lexis that was captured in his manuscripts, i.e. the colloquial words and phrasemes of the Vologda Region.

This paper focuses on describing possible directions of research on so-called superior expressions in the field of cognitive semantics. It presents an analysis of the concept of fire, which is examined in the theosophical texts of “Living Ethics”. The aim of the paper is to prove that the lexicographical understanding of ‘fire’ (in certain Russian dictionaries) is not the same as the philosophical understanding of this concept (“Living Ethics”) since as far as the latter is concerned, the concept of fire rather refers to the domain of thought and the noosphere (in terms of Neo-Platonism) rather than to a physical phenomenon. This fact is confirmed by analyzing lexical-thematic categories that are specific to selected models of collocation, in which one of the parts contains the stem огон- (огн-).

The aim of this paper is to emphasize the importance of Russian folk literature in the form of a fairytale and to show potential difficulties in translation. Folk literature cannot be seen only as a certain form of ordinary people’s artistic voice since it has been developing in parallel with the mainstream literature in Russia. Russian folk fairytale has a specific structure and form which does not exist in any other culture. Like in many other languages and cultures, there are certain names, descriptive adjectives and other forms that are very challenging for translators. In this paper many examples are provided to support this hypothesis. It is almost impossible to translate certain Russian fairytales without “over-“ or “under-interpreting” the content, and the subject matter itself needs to be thoroughly elaborated.

This paper presents an analysis of the vocabulary that was used by A. Matveev to describe artworks in his commentaries. A. Matveev was a Russian diplomat who visited France in 1705 as the Tsar’s special envoy. Many of his commentaries, which show that A. Matveev was a highly educated and perceptive observer, are devoted to Western architecture, sculpture and painting. The paper addresses the language devices that were used to describe and assess those phenomena and cultural values that were new to Russians at that time.

In 2018, the story of the unsuccessful poisoning of the Skripals by Russian special services shocked the world, and the further appearance of “Petrov” and “Boshirov” in an interview with Margarita Simonyan with completely implausible explanations led to the emergence of many memes and humorous works. The satirical play by Viktor Shenderovich To see Salisbury (2019) can be considered as one of the most significant reactions created by Russian-speaking society to the lies of the state. It is successfully performed abroad and, of course, has no chance of being staged in Russia. The author asks the question: what if everything that Petrov and Boshirov told in a scripted interview on the air of on Russia Today is true, and they are not unsuccessful spies, but a couple of gay lovers who are interested in Gothic cathedrals and the Charter of Liberties? Reflections on their own blurry unstable identity led the characters to an existential crisis in the spirit of the Theatre of the Absurd. This paper analyses how the absurdity of reality in the play serves to create a comic effect. Shenderovich grounds his satire based on direct citation of the precedent text of the interview, known a priori to every Russian-speaking recipient, on the intertexts of the Russian linguistic culture, fills the gaps of perception with paradoxes, and answers the questions asked by the audience after the RT broadcast (Why do the passport numbers differ by one digit? Why do the characters know Simonyan’s personal phone number? etc.).

The aim of this paper is, first of all, to discuss the linguistic sphere in Oleg Bogayev’s comedy works. We would like to pay special attention to the way the characters express themselves. The way Bogayev’s characters create reality is deeply rooted in the spirit of postmodernism, which is reflected primarily in the playwright’s bold experimentation with words, especially in the area of constructed replicas. Language saturated with humour and comical elements can be found in the plays Maria’s field (2004) and Notes of a prosecutor in love (2019). In each of these works, the mode of expression is shaped slightly differently, primarily because of the relationship between the word and the reality presented. They have been constructed according to different genre patterns. The comical and humorous character is most clearly manifested in the former at the linguistic level, while in the latter it is conditioned by the situation. On the one hand, there is humour in Bogayev’s works that can be described as good-natured and comical, directed at human existence and social problems, both as perceived by the author and the characters. On the other hand, there is satirical humour that destabilises the image of the presented world, shattering stereotypes and fixed beliefs. Humour often lurks the tragedy and absurdity of the human world, with all its weaknesses and problems.

The paper provides a study of religious lexis excerpted from the Russian translation of the encyclical letter Laudato si’. The Russian version of the encyclical was translated and published by Russian Franciscan Publishing House. The analyzed material consisting of single words, as well as compound multi-word expressions, related to the Catholic denomination (264 lexical items – 1000 uses, which accounts for 14% of the entire encyclical), was grouped into semantic fields. The vocabulary was described in terms of the semantics and its functioning and codification, both in the contemporary Russian religious language and in general Russian language. It was assumed that the encyclical is addressed not only to the representatives of the Church hierarchy but also to all the faithful. Hence, there was the need to draw attention to the pragmatic aspects of the religious language, including the balance between comprehensibility and the use of specialist theological terminology in the translated text. It was demonstrated that the majority of the lexical items of religious terminology is coded by the explanatory dictionary of the contemporary Russian language, except for 14 lexical items related to the Catholic denomination that enhance the lexis of the contemporary Russian language.

The paper describes the assumptions of modern methods of teaching foreign languages, and this description includes the proposals of their creators regarding the knowledge that the student must acquire and the competences that he/she is to form. The results of the test checking sociocultural knowledge and sociolinguistic competences of Russian Studies students is also discussed. The low global result of the test (57% of correct answers) showed a poor record of students in terms of the examined issues. Knowledge about Russia is very superficial among the study participants. They are also not good in dealing with contacts on the level of official relations (formal records of statements).

In recent years linguistic studies have laid great emphasis on the semantic side of linguistic expressions. The aim of this paper is to introduce and describe ‘systema digestorium’ viewed from the perspective of the conceptual metaphor in Russian. It describes the process of creating such metaphors based on the notions of source and target domains. From a linguistic point of view, an interest arises to answer the question of how the functioning of such an important organ as the digestive system is reflected in the conceptualization of the surrounding world. This issue is important because the metaphorization is based on the use of everyday human experience, reflecting processes known to all human kind, including those of a physiological nature. The research material was taken from the national corpus of the Russian language and a number of dictionaries. The figurative meaning of activities related to grinding, swallowing, digesting food, as well as excreting food debris became the object of the research. The basic identifiers are the verbs: to chew, to swallow, to digest, to defecate. Each stage of the digestive system has its own specificity and concentrates on specific parts in viewing the world. In addition, the metaphor ‘systema digestorium’ is often used in Russian linguaculture to convey the expressiveness and originality of a language.

Fantasy and science fiction genres extensively use imaginary settings and locations different from realistic ones but striving to look real. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, pioneers of the science fiction genre in Russia, actively exploited the potential of both genres in their early tale, Monday starts on Saturday (1964), which combines features of the two space types. The present paper analyses the principles of creating ‘mago-space’ in the book. To do so, we look at the spatial organization of the events involved in the plot and the personages’ ideas regarding space. The research will enable us to clarify the role of space in conveying the authors’ message, which in this tale is quite explicit. We argue that the space changes significantly within the book, accompanying genre transformations and the development of the protagonist. Since the tale uses ‘mental sublocations’ as the main units of spatial organization, each part is determined by a certain type of cultural heritage. In the first part, it is the mental space of folklore and classical literature, in the second – that of mythology and science fiction, and in the final – philosophy and science. Mental spaces that coexist and follow various laws form a narrative which turns out to be a journey to the described present in the variety of its forms.

The paper deals with the linguistic means that had helped us to adapt to virtual reality and that now seem to us to have existed always. The words and expressions didn’t appear out of nowhere – they were imported from our everyday language where they had been used for naming objects and processes in the real world. Thus the new realm, such as the physical one, was marked by language signs that determine the nature and the structure of our conception of the Internet which is interpreted generally as a physical space (different types of the latter). These signs are described here in terms of conceptual metaphor theory. Recently we have been dealing with some new, “web-born” expressions. It is shown that such expressions are no more limited to the describing of the Internet and are extended to the real world; it can be said they provide us with new tools to interpret the “old” reality. Thereby we can see the very moment when the source and the target domains (that is real and virtual worlds) are switching their places.

On the basis of the existing and unquestioned linguistic stance, a division of all the living creatures inhabiting the Earth into those which do not have language (i.e. prehuman and languageless) and those who have language (i.e. the genus Homo sapiens) is postulated. The paper briefly discusses a rich diversity of communication modes occurring in the domain of the prehuman communication systems, such as the auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory, electric, thermal, and seismic ones, with appropriate graphic illustrations. Furthermore, on the basis of the phenomenon of the observable shrinking of this diversity and the key position of the human species, it postulates the necessity of preserving this diversity in the context of biodiversity. This major postulate is in accord with the need to intensify attempts to preserve biodiversity as well as preserve the remaining diversity on the level of the prehuman communication systems as a major challenge of modern humanity. In this context, the human species is considered here as the species of the ‘overseers’ and ‘archivers’ of all the existing communication systems existing on the Earth as the carrier of the tree of life.

The article presents the publications in the periodical “Zhurnal Imperatorskogo chelovekolubivogo obshchestva” and the literary almanac Podarok bednym in the light of the development of charity in Russia (motives, forms, results): 1. The publications of Alexander Sturdza (About social charity, About private charity), Pyotr Shalikov etc.; 2. The charity institutions in the capital and the provinces; 3. The charity initiatives of women and the Russian writers. “Zhurnal Imperatorskogo chelovekolubivogo obshchestva” (the monthly magazine) was published in St. Petersburg from 1817 to 1826. It contained, among other elements, information and reports about the activity of philanthropists and charity institutions, and literary works (Hymn to love for a man by Pyotr Shalikov). Podarok bednym was published in Odessa in 1834 (the motto was a quotation from the Aeneid by Vergil: “Miseris succurrere disco”) by a women’s benevolent society. It contained the commentaries and works of belles-lettres. The paper compares “Zhurnal Imperatorskogo chelovekolubivogo obshchestva” and Podarok bednym (the “common places”, for instance the articles by Alexander Strudza About social charity published in “Zhurnal Imperatorskogo chelovekolubivogo obshchestva” in 1817 and in Podarok bednym in 1834). It presents also the discussions about charity in the Russian periodicals in the first half of the 19th century.

The essence of marriage is being widely discussed in the last few decades in many social circles and at many different levels. From the linguistic point of view it is usually characterised on the basis of man’s and woman’s roles in their relationship. The aim of the paper is to present the view of marriage in Polish, Russian and English proverbial phrases. For the purposes of the article about 350 Polish and Russian and about 300 English proverbs have been subjected to cognitive analysis. The research proves that the concept of marriage is roughly universal in all three languages and it presents definitely an androcentric perspective. Wives in proverbs are shown in a very unfavourable light as grouchy, quarrelsome, unfaithful and narrow-minded human beings. Marriage reflected in sayings is usually a burden which diminishes man’s happiness and may even lead to his sickness, fast aging and death. What is more, quite a lot of proverbial phrases in all three languages under study foster violence against women. The concept of marriage presented in proverbs is undoubtedly a reflection of the old way of thinking and the old system of values, but the preliminary research of anti-proverbs, i.e. more modern expressions, proves that it has not undergone any fundamental changes in the language awareness of the Polish, Russian and English native speakers.

The paper aims to present the types of semantic relations which hold between the interlingual homonyms existing in the semantic field of “people’s spiritual life”. The primary type of the relations among the studied lexical units is exclusion (the presence of a religious component in the semantics of a word of one of the studied languages and the lack of such a component in the other language). Because of the significant number of the examples of this type of relation, the words were divided into three thematic groups: 1) concepts (пассия – pasja), 2) objects (арка – arka), 3) people (лектор – lektor). The relation type of inclusion (with the shared religious semantics, one of the homonyms has an additional meaning related to this area) was observed in a few pairs (катафалк – katafalk). The relation type of overlapping (with the shared religious semantics, each of the homonyms has an additional meaning) in a given lexical field was not identified. No relation of overlapping in a given lexical field and only a few cases of the inclusion relation can prove that the resources of Russian and Polish homonymous words belonging to the religious theme of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches contrast with one another in quite an unobvious way. It is conditioned by both linguistic as well as cultural factors.

The paper deals with the problem of relations between verbal irony and metalinguistic features of the natural language. It is shown that the irony in the vast majority of situations involves the reaction to a real or imagined speech, which proceeds from the fact that the human mind, the main target of irony, is explicated in a manner making it possible to be examined and evaluated precisely in speech. The target of the irony is man, his intellectual abilities, ethic and aesthetic choices, his views and beliefs, while his speech (word, statement, text, manner of speaking) turns out to be the direct pretext for ironic utterance.

Dorota Masłowska’s Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną employs various types of linguistic innovations. One of them is a mistaken selection of the number of nouns. This stylistic means results in linguistic humour. In the Russian translation of the novel reflecting this phenomenon should not pose any problems. However, neither of the instances of the stylistic means analysed in the paper was reflected in the Russian target text. It is difficult to determine why the translator did not attempt to show Russian readers a reconstruction of the language of the Polish text. As a result, Irina Lappo’s translation lacks the poetic qualities and refreshing touches of Masłowska’s language.

The author of the paper, using tools developed by postcolonial researchers, discusses the works of twentieth-century Russian writers. The setting of these texts is in the territory of Central Asia, Siberia or the Caucasus, constituting one of the factors defining them as the so-called Eastern text of Russian literature. Although most of the writers come from the other parts of Russia and – in most cases – are of Slavic descent, they know these regions quite well. These writers, however, are little interested in the problems of indigenous peoples, as long as they are not related to nationwide issues such as industrialization, collectivization or the labour camp system. The issues of destruction and loss of cultural identity, subordination, enslavement and exploitation of the local population are often omitted. The main characters in the works of Russian writers are invariably Russians, and their reference point is the Russian (Soviet) state.

The paper analyses the image of woman in the interpretative frame of Russian paremias. The author asks a number of questions: What role does the woman play in society and family? How is she treated by her husband? How do they treat their children? Who is the woman juxtaposed with? Who is she compared to? Answering these questions the author tries to reconstruct the image of woman functioning in the Russian awareness. This is the image passed from generation to generation in proverbs and sayings, which are the products of language, culture and awareness.

The paper deals with the nostalgic motives in Adam Mickiewicz’s sonnet The Ackerman Steppe, expressed in the imagery of the poem, and their reflection in Russian translations, which were published in different periods from the 19th century up to our times. The author examined how the epoch and the translator’s position influenced the perception of the images.

Emotions put their imprint on all language levels and, most likely, are manifested in almost all appeals. The paper analyzes the appeals, synonymous with the word “grandmother”, which perform pragmatic and expressive functions. On this basis, we call them emotives and emotives-regulators. Some nuances of their use in Russian, Belarusian and Slovak are described. The positive national and international emotional meaning of the appeals under consideration is underlined.

This paper is the result of the work on the lexical minimum of Russian language for bachelors of Russian philology within the context of Task-based Language Teaching method. The text provides a definition of the lexical minimum, presents the main principles of the Task-based Language Teaching. The main part of the article is devoted to the presentation of the principles of selection and organization of the language material included in the proposed lexical minimum.