This paper attempts to give an overview of the different case endings found in the Instrumental Plural in the Northern Russian dialect of Varzuga on the Kola Peninsula, and looks at the situation in the neigh­bouring Russian dialects of Carelia and the Archangel district. Along with the Literary Russian ending [m'i], Varzuga uses the endings [my] (in nouns) and [ma] (in nouns, adjectives and pronouns). ...

In M. Ju. Lermontov's novel «A Hero of our Time» almost every person is wearing a «mask», trying to conceal his or her real intentions—or, on the contrary, taking advantage of the mask, doing or saying things otherwise condemned by the prevailing social conventions. This paper offers a brief analysis of the phenomenon and its function in the structure of the novel.

Until recently, few researchers had studied the archaic Russian dialects of the Kola Peninsula. In 2001 and 2004, slavists from the University of Tromsø carried out dialectological field work on the Ter Coast of Kola Peninsula. On our first expedition we were joined by colleagues from Moscow. In 2004, the universities of Tromsø and Bochum received funding from NFR (Norway) and DAAD (Germany) to set ...

In this paper the hero of Dostoevskij's novel “The Idiot”, Prince Myškin, is compared to a more humble character of that book, Luk'jan Lebedev, with special regard to their religious teaching and the Russian notions of “jurodivyj” (“God’s fool”) and “šut” (“buffoon”). The paper concludes with the assertion that the Prince concentrates on the bright aspects of religion, while Mr. Lebedev, when ...

The Russian preposition s (with the instrumental case) exhibits an ambiguity which makes it apt for being used in puns and anecdotes. In certain contexts it oscillates between a more semantic function (comitative meaning in a broad sense) and a more syntactic. In the latter case it forms a preposition phrase which fills an actant position of another predicate.

This study is an attempt to perform a valency analysis of two Russian constructions which differ only on the suprasegmental level: the noun phrase knig pjat' (‘approximately five books’) and the sentence Knig – pjat' (‘As to books, there are five of them’). In the semantic representation of the NP the additional meaning indicated in the translation is accounted for by the introduction of a ...

Gjennom uminnelige tider har mennesket vært fascinert av havet. I en rekke skapelsesmyter fremstår gjerne havet som en positiv størrelse, en pulserende og livgivende urtidsstrøm. Men ved siden av å være en raus kilde til liv, er havet også nært forbundet med undergang og død, forlis og drukning.<p> <p>Få havstykker har som den beryktede Moskenesstraumen fått denne havets dobbelthet knyttet til ...