My aim with this essay was to write about bordercrossing and border changing in Olga Tokarczuk’s literary work with the main focus on her novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. While writing I came to the conclusion that there are very many different sorts of border changing in the novel, for example borders between countries, borders between fiction and reality, indistinct borders, borders between identities and borders in time and space. However, one distinct bordercrossing, that I had not anticipated, emerged very clearly: the border changing when it comes to genre. Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead characterizes as a detective story, but the more you read the novel, the more you realize, that other themes might be more important than the puzzle. This book holds above all eco fiction and posthumanism. By crossing different borders Olga Tokarczuk has transformed an illusory detective story to a nuanced novel about human life on various levels and in different spaces, about human view on animals and about hunters’ disrespect for animals.

This thesis studies the 1931 short story collection Portret [The Portrait] by the Russian author Leonid Ivanovich Dobychin (1894–1936?). My main argument is that the principal theme in Dobychin’s writings arises out of the complexities of human encounters. 

My approach is based on affirmative interpretations that I call “encountering” readings. They draw on critical practices developed by Boris Gasparov, who argues in his 2013 study of Pasternak Boris Pasternak: Po tu storonu poėtiki (Filosofiia. Muzyka. Byt) that the key to Pasternak’s work lies not in the dominant feature of their linguistic texture, but in the momentary states of everyday life that the author captures, and Henri Meschonnic’s Critique du rythme: Anthropologie historique du langage (1982). Meschonnic focuses on rhythm as an intrinsic aspect of the text that requires the reader to participate actively in appreciating the text as a work of art by following the interplay between rhythm, the active subject and what is expressed. Both scholars reflect a turn away from the linguistically informed theoretical approaches that dominated the academic study of literature in the twentieth century. 

Similarly, I approach Dobychin’s characters on the level of their personal conflicts and everyday lives by simulating an interpersonal encounter in an anti-theoretical search for meaning that is congenial to both the central theme of the stories and the way in which they reveal human encounters “beyond words,” as it were, both within the works and with the reader, through suggestive associations and not yet categorized, “precategorial” experiences in everyday life. 

The “unoutspokenness” (nedogovorënnost’)—i.e. reticence, a deliberate avoidance of explicitness that Dobychin’s contemporary critics ascribed to his writings and often disparaged as “incomprehensibility”—serves as a starting point for a critical discussion of both earlier research on Dobychin and theoretical approaches to literature more generally. In searching for a dominant formal feature, a ‘key’ or ‘code’, in Dobychin’s writings, earlier scholars have tended to describe it in terms of an anti-aesthetic. The alleged lack of plot, inner coherence and meaning is explained as deliberate, intended to performatively mirror the absurdness and inadequacies, the disorientation and loss of meaning in Soviet reality itself. In this thesis, I argue instead that there is no such lack or incoherence in Dobychin’s works. The “nedogovorënnost’” of his short stories is instead understood as an exact and purposeful way of conveying meaning through what is experienced and shared beyond words in a time that was overburdened with idealistic ideological discourses. At the heart of Dobychin’s stories are moments of fragile human interaction that underlie trivial dialogues and actions in banal everyday existence. The stories let the reader experience the sudden and unexpected human connections that the characters encounter in their everyday impressions. The contrasts and plurality of human perspectives thus perceived evoke a potential interaction beyond societal roles. These brief encounters are presented as something precarious in a Soviet society striving towards a single true ideology. Such a reading suggests that Dobychin is not so much a deliberately enigmatic author as a writer who aspires to express in words that which is profoundly wordless: the encounters between people outside of the ideological categories and discourses of their language.

Osip Mandel'shtam's poetry has been interpreted abundantly by scholars and it might be seen as preposterous to return to one of the most discussed poems in general: “Chut' mertsaet prizrachnaia stsena” dealing with Gluck's opera Orpheus and Eurydice. My approach will be an intermedial one and I will analyse it in relation to the famous productions at the Mariinskii Opera in 1910 and in 1919. The task will be to scrutinize the relationship between the text of the poem and various paratexts, or, in the words of Derrida (1987) and broader, the relation between ergon and parergon. The focus is on the aesthetic impact of these relations more than on the question of genesis or influence. The basis for the interpretation will be the opposition between the period of the performance and the post-performance time, as well as the notion of liminality. The poem will be analysed against the background of the motif of the exit from the theatre in Russian 19th century Russian culture both in relation to literature and to a lithography from 1843 made by Rudol'f Zhukovskii. I will, however, use in particular material concerning the opera performance alluded to in the poem.

Trots regimens lögner finns ett formidabelt kulturellt kapital i den ryska litterära traditionen från Pusjkin till Solzjenitsyn. Det är det kapitalet som inger hopp för ryska språket och för Ryssland.

The topic of this paper concerns a subgenre of modern prose, namely the linguistic dystopia, by which I mean a depiction of a future (“pessimistically extrapolating contemporary social trends into oppressive and terrifying societies”), in which the dysfunctionality or power potential of language is thematicized and operationalized by either the narrator, various characters in the novel, or the reader. The focus in the article will be on the mirroring of the development in Russian politics and society of today in the dystopias (or utopias) of Russian conservative authors through language.

Denna uppsats syftar till att undersöka Michail Arcybaševs roman Sanin i den samtida kontexten under 1900-talets första decennium i Ryssland. Mot bakgrund av den sociala och kulturella kontexten analyseras romanens teman och dess mottagande i samtiden. Med utgångspunkt i Jauss receptionsteori diskuteras frågor om hur den samtida läsaren kan ha uppfattat romanen, hur romanen förhöll sig till den större kontexten, hur författaren själv betraktade romanen och vad kritikerna ansåg om den. Ett försök görs också att förklara varför romanen, som orsakade en sådan uppståndelse i sin samtid, idag är i det närmaste bortglömd.

The present study is aims to verify a hypothesis on the nature of lexical cooccurency. We are going to show that fixedness of word combinations is not necessarily connected with non-compositionality. Many constructions formed in accordance with the rules governing the cooccurrence of their elements can nevertheless be retained in memory as separate units. Using large text corpora for the empirical data we are going to analyze the types of construction то-то и N (that’s the N), в том-то и N (that’s the N) and в том-то и весь<весь и> N (that’s /just the whole N) with similar semantics which are realized in a wide variety of tokens. We will demonstrate that some tokens of the constructions can be so frequent that they can be considered to be cognitively entrenched units and are preserved in memory as separate units of the language. Such units should be described as separate items of the lexicon. We are also going to identify some regularities of distribution of fillers of the slot N in these constructions and formulate corresponding rules for such distribution.

The primary goal of the present study is to find an adequate methodfor the quantitative analysis of empirical data obtained from parallel corpora.Such a task is particularly important in the case of fixed constructions possessingsome degree of idiomaticity and language specificity. Our data consist of theRussian construction дeлo в тoм, чтo and its parallels in English, German andSwedish. This construction, which appears to present no difficulty for translationinto other languages, is in fact, language-specific when compared with otherlanguages. It displays a large number of different parallels (translation equivalents)in other languages, and possesses a complex semantic structure. Theconfiguration of semantic elements comprising the content plane of this constructionis unique. The empirical data have been collected from the corpusquery system Sketch Engine, subcorpus OPUS2 Russian, and the RussianNational Corpus (RNC). We propose to use the Herfindahl index as a tool forquantitative analysis in order to measure the degree of uniformity in the frequencydistribution of the various translations of the construction under investigation.This tool is not universal and does not enable us to answer all thequestions that arise in connection with determining the specificity of languageunits. However, it clearly helps to obtain more objective results and to refine thequantitative analysis of idiomatic constructions on the basis of corpus data.

The present study analyzes a group of Russian discursive units withfocus-sensitive semantics such as imenno (just/precisely) , kak raz (just/precisely) ,to-to i ono (that’s just it/the point/problem) , to-to i est’ (that’s just it/the point/problem)and to-to i delo (that’s just it/the point/problem). They are important elementsof communication but have not yet been adequately described. Some of the analyzedlexical units – for example, imenno and kak raz or to-to i ono, to-to i est’ andto-to i delo – are near synonyms. Others, such as kak raz and to-to i ono , are not nearsynonyms, but they nevertheless belong to the semantic class of focus-sensitive elements.Thus they can all be put into a single group according to the principle offamily resemblance. The material itself suggests the logic of the analysis – on thebasis of pairs or groups of the semantically closest near synonyms: (1) imenno vs.kak raz ; (2) imenno vs. to-to i ono, (3) to-to i ono vs. to-to i est’ vs. to-to i delo.Near-synonyms within these groups can be distinguished from each other on thebasis of semantics, pragmatics, and usage preferences. Identifying differences ofvarious types requires a good corpus with numerous examples, for they can be presentsimultaneously on several levels: semantic and pragmatic, pragmatic and usual,etc. Often, although not always, pragmatic and/or usual differences are semanticallymotivated. Syntactic distinctions among near-synonyms, including those in certainsyntactic patterns, are also generally motivated by differences in their semantics. Ina number of cases the problem is solved through the use of translational equivalents,that is, not on the level of individual lexical units (words and phrasemes) but on thatof the entire utterance. Using relevant lexicographic information, text corpora,including parallel corpora, and works of fi ction, we shall: (a) clarify semantic and pragmatic properties as well as usage peculiarities of thefocus sensitive discursive units imenno, kak raz, to-to i ono, to-to i est’ andto-to i delo; (b) analyze their systemic and translational equivalents in English and Swedish.

The semantic structure of discursive units is so intricate that it is often impossible to find appropriate equivalents in other languages. While translating utterances containing such words and constructions, contexts have to be taken into account to a large extent. However, while compiling bilingual dictionaries, a lexicographer has to find equivalents on the lexical level. At present we are working on a Swedish-Russian and Russian-Swedish dictionary which is small in size and therefore will include only frequent discursive units in present-day Russian. Such units as именно and как раз are very important for communication; nevertheless present-day Russian-Swedish dictionaries do not explain the difference between the Swedish near-equivalents to these Russian focus constructions (cf. именно and как раз). The starting point of our investigation is previous research of two German focus particles eben and gerade and their Russian near-equivalents именно and как раз (Dobrovol’skij, Levontina 2012; Dobrovol’skij, Šarandin 2013). Unlike как раз, именно may be used as a separate utterance; this ability goes back to different semantic properties. Using relevant lexicographic information and text corpora, among them parallel corpora, as well as works of fiction, we are going to: clarify the use of именно and как раз; discuss their near-equivalents in English and Swedish which will enable us to compile dictionary entries which will be included into our Swedish-Russian and Russian-Swedish dictionary.

The primary theoretical goal of the present study is to verify a hypothesis that fixedness of word combinations is notnecessarily connected with non-compositionality. Many constructions formed in accordance with the rules governing the cooccurrenceof their elements can nevertheless be retained in memory as separate units. Using large text corpora for theempirical data we are going to analyze the type of construction в том-то и весь N (that’s /just the whole N) which is realizedin a wide variety of tokens and demonstrate that some tokens of the construction can be so frequent that they can beconsidered to be cognitively entrenched units and are preserved in memory as separate units of the language. Such unitsshould be described as separate items of the lexicon. The practical task of the investigation is to refine our notions about thestructural peculiarities of в том-то и весь N (that’s /just/ the whole N) and its variant в том-то весь и N (that’s /just/ thewhole N).a We are also going to identify some regularities of distribution of fillers of the slot N in both variants of theconstruction and formulate corresponding rules for such distribution.

Because different languages often lack semantic equivalents, translation may require looking for other cross-linguistic correlations on the level of the utterance. To find a functional equivalent that is adequate to the translation of a given context, the search should focus on pragmatic correspondences rather than semantic equivalents. The present article examines this phenomenon on the basis of the Russian near-synonymous discursive units with focus-sensitive semantics imenno (just/precisely) and kak raz (just/precisely). They are important elements of communication but have far not been fully described. Using relevant lexicographic information, text corpora, including parallel corpora, and works of fiction, we are going to show that synonymy of these discursive units is not as complete as it appears at first glance. We will analyze their semantic and pragmatic properties, usage peculiarities as well as systemic and translational equivalents in English, German and Swedish.

The present investigation deals with parallel corpus data in Russian, English, German and Swedish. On the basis of an analysis of our findings we attempt to identify operational criteria that can be used to classify discursive constructions. The goal is to find a means for contrasting fixed, idiomatic phrases, on the one hand, and compositional constructions that are close to free word groups, on the other. The research is based on the example of the Russian construction N v tom, čto and its parallels in English, German and Swedish. Parallel corpora are usually used to find ways of translating linguistic structures into other languages, to identify the language-specific features of linguistic units, or to improve their lexicographical description. The present investigation is the first study to employ parallel corpus data to identify different types of Russian discursive constructions, and for that reason it can be viewed as a contribution to the development of the methodology of corpus studies. The pattern N v tom, čto in Russian is represented by the following vatiants delo v tom, čto; problema v tom, čto; beda v tom, čto; sut’ v tom, čto; pravda v tom, čto; ideja v tom, čto, etc. Here we address three of them delo v tom, čto; problema v tom, čto and pravda v tom, čto. Of these three, only delo v tom, čto is lexicalized, i.e. can be regarded as a unit of the Russian lexicon. This is proved by the fact that translations of the expression into other languages primarily involve not its word-for-word correlates, but instead functional equivalents that formally have nothing in common with it. Two other constructions are most frequently translated word-for-word, which suggests that these can be regarded as free word groups. The empirical data were drawn from Sketch Engine and the RNC.