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 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.