The starting point of the article is V. Ivanov’s epistolary statement and an expression included in it: “me, semper idem” as important for reflections on the question of “person and time.” Ivanov’s expression, considered within its context, was analysed taking into account other texts by the same poet (the poem Fio, ergo non sum, as well as others from the Prozrachnost’ cycle, author’s commentaries etc.), and S. Frank’s philosophical reflection and his idea of a person as a unity which encompasses continuing in time (“vremiaoblemlushcheje jedinstvo licznosti”). In analogous interpretation (lecture analogique) of both expressions included in the title of the article, two Paul Ricoeur’s conceptual categories were used: the idem identity and the ipse identity, as well as the thinker’s notion of their dialectic relationship. Referring to the European model of thinking about time (St. Augustine), taking into account its presence in Frank and Nikolai Berdyaev, author of the article considers two types of conceptualisations of the category of becoming, in its relation to the category of Being and the problem of transcending time in the reflections of the above- mentioned thinkers and in V. Ivanov’s poetry. Therefore, the article discusses situations in which a human as a person transcends the order of “horizontal” time, and in their existential experience enters the vertical dimension of Eternity (“moment-Eternity”). In relation to that, what turned out to be useful was another notional analogy: the concept of the “poetic moment” and “metaphysical moment” in Gaston Bachelard.

The article presents selected literary texts of Russian Romanticism, which can be classified as utopian or dystopian literature. Attention was drawn to the fluidity of borders between the species of positive and negative utopia. Works by Utopian writers were divided into two groups: those sympathizing with decay (A. Ulybyshev, W. Küchelbecker) and those representing the Pushkin era: J. Senkovskij and V. Odojevsky. The analysis of utopian texts showed that they belonged mainly to escapist utopias, and Russian Romanticism significantly influenced the development of negative utopias, which were open to the literary experiment. It was also shown that the works in question are related to the genre of travel literature and scientific fantasy.

The article is an attempted analysis of the literary genre of fable as a case study of a selection of fables by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. In particular, the analysis focuses on the fable cycles: The New Adventures of Helen the Beautiful, Adventures of Barbie and Wild Animal Fables. The perspective adopted in the article focuses mainly on the axiological aspect of the fables and the reconstruction of their moral message. The moral sense in Petrushevskaya’s fables is veiled under their overt sense. Even the overt sense is hidden deeply under the multiple levels of “intertextual irony” (Eco). The analysis also explores the links between Petrushevskaya’s works, folk magical fairy tales and the prototypical genre of the classical Russian fable. The innovative fables created by Petrushevskaya de-conventionalize the classical schemata of the genre, and as such they constitute an ironic, mocking and sometimes a bitter commentary on the contemporary world. The fables exhibit a high degree of “poetics of everyday life” – a merger of popular and high culture. They both recreate and at the same time mock the schemata and rituals of pop culture, also displaying noticeable feminist tones. In their poetics, the fables employ cyclic and serial arrangement, and are completed with “words of wisdom” that are far from naïve moral judgements.

The symbolistic poetry of Alexander Blok is connected with the thinking of both philosophers and psychoanalysts about the world and the man inscribed in it by the phenomenon of “I”. When coming into contact with transcendence, the poet crosses the demarcation line dividing the rational and irrational world, consciousness and unconsciousness. In the first period of creativity, the Russian symbolist nourishes his imagination, infl uenced by the philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev, with longing for the ideal of femininity. The driving force of the Blok’s imagination becomes, understood after Freud, the desire to meet the ideal residing in the oneiric space, and then to unite with it at the dual level (physical and spiritual). From the psychoanalytic perspective, the cycle Verses about the Beautiful Lady is both an attempt to go beyond awareness and search for the sense of a poetic image, its original source in the unconscious, as well as entering into the mirror phase described by J. Lacan. Beautiful Lady plays a role of what the French psychiatrist appoints as an objet petit a: this object is essentially unreachable and that is why it raises a great desire in the lyrical subject. The mechanism of the transition from chaos to unity, though only apparent in Blok’s works, is identical to the psycho-physical experience of the child, observing himself in the mirror.

The aim of this article is to verify the data regarding the period when selected foreign nouns were introduced to the Russian language in relation to information provided by Russian dictionaries. A corpus created for the purpose of this paper consists of source texts from the years 1600‒1670 – the time preceding the rule of Peter the Great. The verification of data from Russian dictionaries is expected to show that, contrary to popular opinion, a significant number of foreign words were introduced to the Russian language even a century earlier than suggested in etymology and historical dictionaries. This observation can be proved by the analysis of literary monuments of the first half of the 17th century that have not been thoroughly investigated.

In the Hajnówka district, over 450 surnames with the suffix (derivational morp heme) -uk are recorded which were mostly formed from patronymics based on given names of Greek origin, less frequently of Hebrew, Latin and Slavic. The goal of the present article is to discuss patronymic surnames with the suffix -uk found exclusively in Poland or in largest numbers in the Hajnówka district in the Białystok region, which is overwhelmingly inhabited by the Orthodox population, who usually speak Belarusian, Ukrainian or sometimes mixed dialects. The material basis of the present study is therefore the surnames with the suffix -uk most characteristic of the area investigated and strictly associated with this territory from the time of its settlement.

The author set himself the following specific objectives: a) establish the number of people with a particular surname in Poland; b) establish the number of people with a particular surname in the Hajnówka district; c) establish the surnames with the suffix -uk found exclusively in Poland or in largest numbers in the Hajnówka district; d) establish the origin of the surname investigated. The article may prove useful not only in establishing the origin of the surnames studied but also in determining the place where they arose and the directions of migration of the population within Poland.

The author studied 40 pages (letters Д–Ж) of the Dokładny słownik rosyjsko-polski, written by the Ukrainian-born Russian P. Dubrowski and published in Warsaw in 1877. After a brief profile of the now nearly forgotten lexiographer, the author adds a few additional questions to the known critical remarks about the topic of study and discusses – in the context of the state of Polish language generally and of the Kresy in the nineteenth century – interesting findings refl ected in this dictionary in the areas of spelling, phonetics, flexion, syntax and lexis. She found that the Polish language presented in this Russian-English dictionary rather faithfully reflects the nineteenth-century instability of norms at all levels of the language, so that non-native speakers of the language were more inclined to choose recessive over expansive variants, occasionally those supported by analogous forms in Russian. In the author’s view, the prospect of a comprehensive, systematic exploration of this source is promising, especially regarding the possibility of extracting peculiar lexis from it, in particular so-called lexical agnonyms.

The Polish word ‘niepamięć’ (oblivion) is defined by dictionaries as ‘forgetfulness’, ‘lack of remembrance’. In the last 25–30 years, its meaning has been extended and incorporated into the term ‘niepamięć zbiorowa’ (collective oblivion), which means ‘socially relevant phenomena suppressed from memory and/or not admitted to the collective memory of a community’. The author has analysed the contents of the Polish concept of ‘NIEPAMIĘĆ (zbiorowa)’ and asked whether one could find a lexical equivalent of Polish ‘niepamięć’ in Russian and an equivalent of the concept of ‘NIEPAMIĘĆ’ in Russian mentality. Providing a negative answer to these questions today, the author proposes that, instead of analysing individual words such as ‘niepamięć – забвение (zabveniye)’, one should analyse entire conceptual and lexical fields of memory in Polish and in Russian.

The article is devoted to the problem of language interaction in Polish and East Slavic languages phraseology. Polish had a signifi cant impact on the formation of the phraseology of the East Slavic languages of the late XVI – early XIX century, which led to the emergence of similar Polish-Ukrainian-Belarusian-Russian phraseological units. It is often very difficult to determine the donor language. In some cases, the idiom (or proverb) could migrate from one language to another, enriching itself with new elements (in terms of vocabulary or semantics) and returning to the donor language in a new capacity. In the search for the source of phraseology in the article the authors propose to consider the date of the earliest fixation of the unit, the extended context of its use, which may contain linguistic or ethnographic details that help to identify the donor language. The article investigates the origin of one of the most obscure and recalcitrant items in Slavic phraseology: Polish zbić z pantałyku, Belorussian збіць з панталыку, Ukrainian збити з пантелику and Russian сбить с панталыку. In all four languages the meaning is ‘to confuse, befuddle, baffle’. This phraseological expression is shown to be first attested in Ukrainian at the end of the 18th cent.; from Ukrainian it was borrowed into Russian and then migrated into Polish. It is proposed that the expression originated in Ukrainian vernacular on the basis of Polish loanword pontalik ‘ornament, jewel’ adopted in Ukrainian as пантелик.

The study analyzes the vocabulary of the Ruthenian “prosta mova” (“common language”) in a bilingual Ruthenian-Church Slavonic printed edition of 1607 (“Likarstvo na ospalyj umysl´´ čolovičyj” – “A Remedy for the Idle Human Mind”, translated by Demian Nalyvajko). We single out and discuss those lexical stems of the Ruthenian text that have no immediate equivalent in the early modern Polish language. Some of these stems belong to the Orthodox church terminology, others can be explained by the Church Slavonic original of the translation, still others demonstrate that Nalyvajko, like many other Ruthenian authors of that period, avoided certain Polish word stems despite the fact that his language is characterized by a plethora of marked Polonisms, and some of these avoided stems do occur in other Ruthenian texts of that period. Several markedly Ruthenian stems belong to the sphere of functional words.