The present article deals with the various problems that faced N. V. Gogol’ working on vol. II of his great novel. Attention is paid not only to ideological and psychological matters, but also to the more complicated composition pattern which can be discerned in the five preserved chapters of “Dead Souls” II

This article deals with the holiday calendar in contemporary Russia. Up to now, it has been customary among Russian ethnologists to speak of three periods of formation and radical transformation of the Russian calendar: a) during the introduction of Christendom, b) during the rule of Peter the Great, and c) in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. It is now appropriate to add one ...

In this article the poetry of Jakov Polonskij is compared to Afanasij Fet's verse with a special focus on the motif "night". A juxtaposition of parallel passages demonstrates both similarities and profound differences: on the one hand, Polonskij is familiar with the various aspects of verse technique so brilliantly applied by Fet, while on the other hand he avoids the erotically coloured emotional ...

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 ...