Vienna Slavic Yearbook. N.S. 1 (2013) – Abstracts
Vom Nachwirken einer Minderheit:
Zuwanderer aus den böhmischen Ländern in Wien
Stefan Michael Newerkla (Wien)
In Central Europe, a major language contact area is the contact zone which we can associate with the former centre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Czech, German, Hungarian and Slovak figure as its core languages, whereas among others Polish and Slovene are only partially involved as its peripheral languages. From this contact area, a micro-area emerged in and around the capital of the Austrian Empire that was particularly affected by the influence of Czech on German due to huge Czech migration to Vienna, especially during the second half of the 19th century.
Keywords: Czech-German language contact, language convergence, Czech minority, Vienna, 19th & 20th century
Thought Experiments in Vladimir Odoevsky’s Russian Nights
Natasha Grigorian (Konstanz / Vienna)
In Vladimir Odoevsky’s volume Russian Nights (Русские ночи, 1844), there are two short stories that portray the downfall of imaginary civilizations with strong utopian and/or dystopian elements: “The Last Suicide” (Последнее самоубийство) and “A City Without a Name” (Город без имени). Each of the two texts is constituted by a systematic and, on its own terms, plausible narrative based on the unreal assumption that a particular fictional society exists and proceeds along the path of its own history. Both works can therefore be considered to be counterfactual thought experiments. The article analyses the two narratives on the structural and textual level so as to show what epistemic and cultural value these two thought experiments have within and beyond Russian Nights. The method used for the analysis is interdisciplinary, combining critical tools from the disciplines of literary studies and philosophy.
Keywords: Vladimir Odoevsky, Russian Nights, counterfactual thought experiments, reader-response criticism, utopia, dystopia, Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, “The Last Suicide”, “A City Without a Name”
Representations of the archetype
of the fatal woman in
The Idiot by Dostoevsky and The Most
Beloved of Earthlings by Marin Preda: Nastasya Filippovna and
Matilda
Diana Cusmerenco (Constanţa)
This article, Representations of the archetype of the fatal woman in The Idiot by Dostoevsky and The Most Beloved of Earthlings by Marin Preda: Nastasya Filippovna and Matilda, aims at highlighting the archetype of the fatal woman, an anthropological invariant of Dostoevsky’s work and Marin Preda’s, the Romanian post-war writer. The corpus of the research is limited to The Idiot and Preda’s last novel, The Most Beloved of Earthlings. The first part of the study focuses on the notions of personal unconscious – collective unconscious, analysed by Jung in his works so as to reach the relation between archetype, anima and the image of the fatal woman. Most of the study is devoted to the way in which the archetype of the fatal woman is represented in the novels of the two writers in discussion by means of its two possible “embodiments”: Nastasya Filippovna and Matilda.
Keywords: Dostoevsky, Marin Preda, novels, The Idiot, The Most Beloved of Earthlings, Nastasya Filippovna, Matilda, archetype of the fatal woman, cultural comparatism, literary comparatism.
A. V. Amfiteatrov’s Stena plača i stena nerušimaja and the Attempts to Restore the Fighting Spirit among Russian Émigrés in the Early 1930s
Wim Coudenys (Antwerpen / Leuven)
In Stena plača i stena nerušimaja A.V. Amfiteatrov vented his disillusionment with the Russian emigration. It appeared first in instalments in the Belgrade Novoe vremja in 1929–30, and subsequently in separate volumes in 1930 and 1932. With the publication Amfiteatrov wanted to support the anti-Bolshevik activities of the Bratstvo Russkoj Pravdy, an (allegedly) terrorist network that had the sympathy of many leading émigrés. The present article reconstructs the publication history of Stena plača and situates the work within the literary and epistolary legacy of A.V. Amfiteatrov.
Keywords: Russian emigration, 1920–1940, Russian literature, A.V. Amfiteatrov, Bratstvo Russkoj Pravdy, Anti-bolshevism
К прагматике сверхсложного прошедшего времени в восточнославянской письменности
Павел Петрухин (Москва)
The article analyses a specific pragmatic function of the East Slavic supercompound past tense, traditionally labeled as the “Russian” (or second) pluperfect. In many East Slavic documents, such as treaties, testaments, chronicles, birch bark letters, etc., the supercompound past form is used in performative utterances. However, its performative function is quite unusual: since one of the main meanings of the East Slavic supercompound past tense is the cancelled result, in “business” texts it tends to be used to cancel the result of some previous action or to reverse a previously taken decision. In medieval East Slavic documents the “anti-resultative” performative function of the supercompound past form is opposed to the well-known performative function of the perfect, aorist and present tense. A wide range of texts is examined: from early East Slavic written monuments to documents of the Muscovite Rus’ and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Keywords: East Slavic supercompound past tense, pluperfect, pragmatics, performative utterance
Der morphologische Ausdruck des Präteritums im Sprachkontakt: Der Fall des Lemkischen und Kaschubischen
Thomas Menzel (Oldenburg)
The morphological realization of preterite verb forms in contact situations of genetically related Slavonic languages: The case of Lemko and Kashubian. – The grammars of the Lemko language as well as of Kashubian reveal several different strategies of constructing past tense forms of verbs. Synthetic verb inflection co-occurs with analytical patterns. At least partially this formal diversity (and variation) is caused and maintained by language contact with Polish, but also by other, older language contact situations. In this study the distribution of the different past tense forms is examined on the basis of text corpora of Lemko and Kashubian casual speech. Polish and other foreign influences on the usage of past tense forms will be quantified in the speech of informants, who do not attend strictly to purifying norms. This allows us to evaluate, first, the impact of the given language contact situation on the speakers̕ linguistic output, and, second, the effect of normative activities on these minority languages.
Keywords: Language contact, Lemko, Kashubian, genetically closely related languages, verb inflection, casual speech corpus, markedness
Языковые контакты в Славии – XXI-й век
Андрей Зинкевич (Вена)
The paper examines contemporary language contacts within Slavia. – The presented macro-sociolinguistic review shows that direct territorial inter-Slav contacts are represented today through the following archetypes: the deep contact which includes all types of language interactions – from transient dialects to mixed language varieties (Eastern Slavia); the differentiating contact with a well-pronounced language policy of distancing from the neighboring literary languages (most of the contacts are in South Slavia) and the standard type of contact which holds more or less important contact phenomena for literary languages (Western Slavia and in part, South Slavia).
Keywords: Language contact, contact phenomena, (supra-dialectal) mixed variety, dialect continuum, (contact-oriented) Slavic literary microlanguage, transitional dialects
Relative clauses in Slovene: diachronic puzzles, synchronic patterns
Barbara Sonnenhauser (Munich / Vienna)
The paper Relative clauses in Slovene: diachronic puzzles, synchronic patterns is concerned with two relativization strategies in Slovene: relativization by means of the indeclinable operator ki and by means of the relative adjective kateri. Prescriptive grammars give rules when to use which option. However, there are contexts which are not covered by these rules and instances where the actual usage deviates from prescription. In addition to their synchronic behaviour, ki and kateri are puzzling also from a diachronic point of view. The present paper argues that the variation between ki and kateri can be accounted for in terms of an interplay between diachronic development, syntactic conditions and discourse factors.
Keywords: Relative clause, Slovene, relative clause attachment, diachrony, synchrony, standardization, syntax, discourse
Silben- und akzentzählende Sprachen: Das Slowenische in typologischer Sichtweise
Emmerich Kelih (Wien)
Syllable-timed and stress timed languages: Slovene from a typological point of view – The paper deals in the first part with general properties of syllable- and stress-timed languages. In particular the focus in on the multiparametrical approach of a rhythm based typology proposed by Dauer 1987, which is as a substantial alternative to the previous simple dichotomous typology. In the second part several segmental and suprasegmental characteristics of Slovene (vowel inventory, vowel quantity, syllable structure, pitch accent, position and function of the accent, consonants etc.) are discussed in detail. Finally it can be shown that based on the above mentioned characteristics Slovene has to be considered as a language.
Keywords: syllable-timed languages, stress-timed languages, rhythm based typology, isochrony, Slovene
Вячеслав Иванов и Элиза Лёвенгейм: О берлинской жизни молодого поэта.
Подготовка текста и комментарии Майкла Вахтеля и Герды Панофски. Вступительная статья М. Вахтеля (Princeton NJ)
Viacheslav Ivanov and Elise Löwenheim: On the Young Poet’s Life in Berlin. When Viacheslav Ivanov finished his coursework at the University of Berlin, he left for years of travel and study in France, Italy, Switzerland, England, and Greece. Through this time, he remained in contact with his Berlin acquaintance Elise Löwenheim. With one exception, his letters to her have been lost, but most of her letters to him have been preserved. The surviving correspondence offers interesting glimpses into Berlin life in the last decades of the nineteenth century as well as into Ivanov’s cultural interests. Numerous friends are mentioned as well as leading writers, philosophers, and playwrights. Elise Löwenheim and her husband were enthuasiastic members of the newly-formed Society for Ethical Culture, an organization that Ivanov viewed with considerable skepticism. His attitude comes out clearly in the concluding document of the publication, a previously unknown German poem he wrote in 1896 for Lidia Zinov’eva-Annibal’s amusement.
Keywords: Viacheslav Ivanov, Elise Löwenheim, Berlin, Society for Ethical Culture, Lidia Zinov’eva-Annibal, Nietzsche, Goethe
Zur Übersetzungstätigkeit von Michail Gorlin und Raisa Bloch ins Deutsche: Materialien im Nachlass Fritz Lieb
Fedor Poljakov (Wien)
German Translations by Mikhail Gorlin and Raisa Blokh: Material from the Fritz Lieb Papers. In the beginning of the 1930s, the Swiss protestant theologian Fritz Lieb was considering the publication of a series of essential Russian literary texts in German translation on the intellectual history of Russia. The plan was never realized; however, through the mediation of the philosopher Semyon Frank some preliminary translations were made by the literary scholars and poets Mikhail Gorlin and Raisa Blokh. These translations were sent to Lieb and are preserved in his papers in the University Library of Basel. The present essay describes the circumstances of this intended collaboration in the poetic context of „Russian Berlin“ and publishes hitherto unknown translations of Vladimir Solovyov and Sergey Esenin.
Keywords: Russian exilic culture, translations into German, Nikolay Belotsvetov, Raisa Blokh, Sergey Esenin, Semyon Frank, Mikhail Gorlin, Fritz Lieb, Vasilii Rozanov, Vladimir Solovyov
Noch einmal zu serbo-kroatisch hȁla ~ ȁla 'Drache'
Michael Knüppel (Münster i. W.)
Again on Serbo-Croatian hȁla ~ ȁla ‘dragon’. In the following miscella the author gives some additions to his article “on Serbo-Croatian hȁla ~ ȁla ‘dragon’” published in WSlJb 55, 179–183. The addenda as well as the previous article are dealing with the problem of multiple language taboos in Turkic and their way and appearance in Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian and Romanian languages.
Keywords: Serbo-Croatian hȁla ~ ȁla ‘dragon’, Turkic loans in Slavic languages; multiple language taboos
Notes on Balto-Slavic etymology: Russian norov, mjat', ruž’ë, dialectal xajat' 'to care', xovat' 'to keep' and their Slavic and Baltic cognates
Tijmen Pronk (Zagreb)
The article discusses the etymologies of the Slavic etyma reflected in Russian norov ‘character, nature’, mjat’ ‘to rumple, break (flax), scutch’, ruž’ë ‘weaponry’, dialectal xajat’ ‘to care’ and xovat’ ‘to keep, hide, steal’. Baltic cognates of the first three are Old Prussian arwis ‘true, real’, Lithuanian mìnti ‘to trample, scutch’ and reñgti ‘to prepare, equip’. In each case existing etymologies are analyzed and a new etymology is proposed. All words are argued to have cognates in other branches of Indo-European. They are derived from Proto-Indo-European *h2er- ‘to fix, adjust, make proper’, *meiH- ‘to diminish’, *uerǵ- ‘to act, work’ and *keh2- ‘to love, care’ respectively.
Keywords: Slavic, Baltic, Balto-Slavic, Indo-European, Etymology