Ivan Karamazov as a Philosophical Type—but which one?

The article analyses a set of philosophical statements made by and attributed to Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, in order to answer the question as to what kind of philosophy Ivan may be said to express in the novel. My close reading reveals that there is a significant distinction between, on the one hand, Ivan's most radical statements, that is his rational egoism and the idea that "everything is permitted," which are always given in reported speech, and on the other the “Ivan of direct speech,” a character characterized by far more moral sensibility (e.g. in the Pro et contra part). On the basis of these findings the article seeks to bring together two traditions in the reception of Dostoevsky—the philosophical and the narratological. By letting these approaches inform one another I suggest ways in which the structural organization of the text is itself a bearer of philosophical meaning. Moreover, the article takes seriously Bakhtin's claim that Dostoevsky's heroes are not merely stable representations of ideas, but engage with them through dialogue and encounters with others, as exemplified by Ivan Karamazov himself as well as by other characters' responses to his articulations.

Subject-verb Agreement in Constructions with Quantifiers in Russian

The agreement of subject and predicate in Russian is actually much less trivial than it might seem at first glance. This paper deals with the case when the subject is realized by a combination of a noun with a quantifier. I analyze a set of examples with the words двое, трое, пара, тройка, десяток, сотня, тысяча, миллион and миллиард where there is a variation in predicate number agreement. Using Random Forest, CIT and Logistic Regression algorithms I prove that collective (двое, трое) and non-collective (пара, тройка, десяток, сотня, тысяча, миллион, миллиард) quantifiers exhibit different patterns of agreement. The first group tends to trigger more plural agreement, while for the second one singular agreement is more typical. Moreover, the quantifier phrase position relative to the predicate can also influence the choice of number marker on the verb.

Ф. М. Достоевский – 200 лет со дня рождения

This article explores two Norwegian publications related to Dostoevskij, both of which were published in 1922. In his doctoral dissertation, Martin Gran, who was the first scholar in Norway to defend a dissertation in the field of Slavic studies, discussed the works of the young Dostoevskij. The second publication under scrutiny is Erik Krag’s novel Ottar Wreike, which shows influence from Dostoevskij’s Raskol’nikov.

Dative radial category in Old Church Slavonic and Modern Russian

In this paper, the semantic roles expressed by the Dative case in Modern Russian and Old Church Slavonic are described in terms of radial categories. The corpus data shows that the radial category of the Dative case has changed since Old Church Slavonic. The radial category in Modern Russian is smaller, and it includes fewer subcategories than attested in Old Church Slavonic. The change of the category prototype could explain the changes in the category of the Dative case. Recipient is postulated to be the prototype of the Dative case category in Modern Russian, while Direction appeared to be the best prototype for Old Church Slavonic data.

Wretched Subjectivity

This article rethinks critically a landmark work of the twentieth century—The Captive Mind, by Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz. Published in 1953, the book sought to understand human subjectivity, or, as it put it, “how the human mind functions,” in Cold-War Eastern Europe. I argue that, while probing what Western intellectuals of that time saw as the historical novelty of totalitarianism, Miłosz formulates an analysis that is rather retro. He represents Eastern Europe in terms of colonialism and imperialism—as a colonized realm and a colonized mind. What is more, he casts his representation in the terms of what Edward Said famously called “Orientalism”—producing a distorted, Orientalist work. Finally, while intimating hope for overcoming Eastern Europe’s domination, Miłosz shows that hope as illusory.

How do we measure “measure”? Measure constructions and Metaphor

The article describes Russian measure constructions with the nominal quantifiers куча, груда, море, and туча. These nominal quantifiers are used in different, though overlapping, collocations determined by the semantics of the nouns. These nouns can be used in their literal meanings, or to create a metaphor. In rare cases, combination of metaphor and metonymy is used to add semantic nuances.

Эрик Краг: студенческие годы в советской России

Erik Krag: his student years in Soviet Russia Erik Krag was the first Norwegian professor of Slavic literatures. The artic­­le Erik Krag: his student years in Soviet Russiapresents earlier un­known and un­pub­lished facts about his stays, including the chronological frames, in Moscow and Leningrad as a young student. These facts are evident from archive material, deposited in Oslo, Moscow and St Peters­burg. The article also demonstrates that the founder of the yaphetic theory N. Ya. Marr showed interest in the young Nor­wegian scholar.

Are There Analytical Adjectives in Russian?

In the scholarly literature there has been a discussion on whether modern Russian is developing more analytical tendencies, with special attention to new nominal compounds such as VIP-zal 'VIP lounge', veb- stranica ‘web page’. Traditionally, such units are described in terms of “analytical adjectives”, which covers all nominal non-inflectional units related to a head noun (Panov 1960, 1971). The data analyzed in this article suggest that what has previously been described as “analytical adjectives” constitutes at least three different patterns: 1) nominal [N[N]] compounds that roughly represent two groups: type (a) where the first component (modifier) should be a loan word (units like internet, veb, top, etc., the head noun of such compounds can be of Russian origin); type (b) where the second component (head noun) tends to be a loan word, whereas the modifier can be of Russian origin (this type is characteristic of names and titles like Gorbačev-fond ‘The Gorbachev foundation’) 2) appositions that mostly include abbreviations and names of styles and can be used both pre-positionally and post-positionally to the head noun (units like VIP); 3) a contracted pattern (potential stump compounds, or blends, like internacional-sem’ja from the inflectional adjective internacional’nyj ‘international’ and the noun semja ‘family’). The third pattern was productive in Soviet discourse (cf. zapčasti from zap[asnyje] ‘replacement’ časti ‘parts’) and seems to be regaining productivity. The presence of these three patterns affects not only the system of Russian word-formation but also the Russian grammatical system in general, since it evokes various intermediate cases between adjectives and compounding elements. We present a very general overview of the aforementioned patterns based on the data from a corpus study, an Internet study and a linguistic experiment.

Russian, Swedish, and Finnish adpositions meaning ‘under’ and ‘over’ in temporal constructions

In Russian, Swedish, and Finnish, adpositions with partly overlapping spatial meanings of ‘under’ and ‘over’ / ‘across’ are used with different temporal meanings, which, from a cognitive linguistic point of view, can be interpreted as evidence for different conceptualizations in these languages. In Russian and Finnish the adpositions meaning ‘under’ are used in the temporal meaning ‘just before’ while in Swedish the adposition has the temporal meaning ‘during’. In Swedish and Finnish the temporal meaning for ‘over’ is ‘throughout the whole period of time’, while in Russian it is ‘after a certain period of time’ or ‘every second’. These constructions and the limitations of their use are described for Russian, while very few studies exist for Swedish and Finnish. In our study, we use corpus and Internet data to investigate what types of lexicalized temporal units are allowed in the temporal constructions under investigation.

Searching and finding the meaning of new verbs: prefix variation of the Russian verb гуглить ‘to google’

This article analyses the semantics of four perfective Russian verbs with similar but not identical meanings—погуглить, загуглить, нагуглить and прогуглить ‘to google’. The verbs were analyzed with regard to the adverbs and direct objects each verb takes. The results show that погуглить and прогуглить are more often used in the sense ‘to search for something [using Google]’, нагуглить in the sense ‘to find something [using Google]’, and that загуглить can be used in both senses. The method used in this article, analysis of co-occurrences, is useful for anyone who wishes to study the semantics of closely related words.