Nº 1 (2025)

This article is an attempt to reconstruct how the Don authors of the 19t^h century imagined (defined) the place of Cossacks in the ethnocultural space of Eastern Europe. The author shows that the attempts to analyze the Don Cossacks using such categories as «ethnicity» and «subethnicity» led to contradictory results: while the most authoritative ethnographers (particularly, S.A. Tokarev) attribute part of the Don Cossacks to the Russian ethnicity and part – to the Ukrainian one, the most authoritative historians (particularly, V.M. Kabuzan) consider Cossacks a subethnicity of the Russian people. M.A. Ryblova offered a way out of this contradiction by studying the Don Cossacks as taking into account the «changing of sociocultural model». However, analyzing the Don Cossacks of the 18^th–19^th centuries, she did not quite understand the specificity of the Don authors, claiming that they considered Cossacks to be an «ethnosocial group». The article shows that, for Don authors of the 19^th century, the basis for self-identification was not belonging to the Cossacks, but belonging to the Don Host. At the same time, the Don Host didn’t possess any traits characteristic to an ethnicity or subethnicity in a traditional sense: various authors identified two or three groups of Don Cossacks differing in anthropological type, language and character. Moreover, the Don authors definitely considered the Don Cossacks a unity separate from Great Russians/Little Russians, but, at the same time, they constructed this unity not through ethnicity, but through corporatism, through their pride in history of the Don Host, which united people of different languages, origins and even faiths. Language, character and anthropological type, on the contrary, were used to distinguish different groups among the Don Cossacks, and the differences between them were emphasized – but, at the same time, didn’t break the historical and corporate unity.

This article examines the projects of Polish maritime empire building and their propaganda addressed to peasants. The projects created within the Maritime and River (Colonial) League in the late 1920s to mid–1930s constructed the image of a pioneer peasant in the Brazilian state of Paraná. In the second half of the 1930s, projects to invest in the Maritime Defence Fund and peasants’ service in the navy became more popular. Propaganda among peasants was predominantly oral. Excursion trips to the Baltic Sea and a peasant essay competition on the maritime and colonial themes were of fundamental importance. The projects under consideration were intended to strengthen national unity and integrate the peasantry into the imaginary space of the Polish maritime empire.

The description and nomination of mythological characters as white has already attracted the attention of researchers. This article focuses on the cademia of contextual, functional and connotative synonyms of the definition «white» in demonological beliefs and narratives. The material of Slavic demononymy has shown that «white» is the main colour denotation of mythological characters. In different contexts the definitions «shining», «sparkling», «glittery», «gleaming», «transparent», etc. are synonymous with white; these – as a result of various semantic processes – attract a number of other definitions, etymologically far from the designation of white colour, but functionally or symbolically replacing it, for example, «red» or «mottled». An attempt is made to show that the cultural and cademia meanings of mythological vocabulary reflect quite fully the reconstructed ancient etymological meanings of the root *běl-, including the meanings «fire», «ghost» and «fog». The topic of the designation of mythological characters as black was also partly touched upon, but only in the context of opposition with white. The situations of the opposition «white – black» in the nominations and descriptions of mythological characters is due mainly to the axiological perception of demons, where white and fair colours mark positive or neutral characters, and black marks negative ones.

This article focuses on comparing the usage of verbal aspect forms in Russian and Czech within the context of news headlines, taking into account their discursive features. The author pays special attention to the expression of events in Czech headlines that use past tense imperfective forms (when a choice of aspects is available). The study is conducted from a comparative perspective, highlighting the differences in aspect usage between Czech and Russian: when translating such headlines into Russian, the use of perfective verbs is usually required. This Czech discourse-driven aspectual model for representing events has not been specifically studied in Slavistics. It typically appears in headlines of entertainment, crime, and sports news, serving to draw readers' attention to the event described. The article analyzes the conditions and communicative-pragmatic effects of using this aspectual model in Czech news reporting of the last fifteen years.

The Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Berlin, which existed between 1926 and 1945, was an iconic research organization of the Ukrainian emigration of that period. Respectively, the Institute Library was one of the largest and most comprehensive thematic book collections. During the final battles of World War II, the Institute building was destroyed, and the library itself was considered to be lost for a long time. As the study of the former trophy literature funds that came from Germany to the State Library of the USSR has shown, a certain part of the collection of the Ukrainian Scientific Institute was transferred to other German scientific organizations before the war and was thus preserved. The present article, along with identifying books from the original collection and studying their subsequent existence, is intended to show the mechanisms of interaction between governmental and academic structures in Nazi Germany.

The article deals with the history of the intercollegiate scientific conferences of historians-Slavonic scholars of the Soviet Union. The main role in their organization played the Department of Southern and Western Slavs of the Faculty of History of Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Institute of Slavic Studies (from 1968 – Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies) of Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. Over the period of 1962–1990, 12 conferences took place that assumed a really all-union scale. Their main object were the problems of modernization of the teaching of history of Southern and Western Slavs in higher educational establishments, coordination of the Slavic studies, especially in the contemporary history, including institutions of humanitarian sphere in the country. Сarrying out of such important scientific events contributed to the enlargement of the geography of the study of history of Slavic peoples in higher educational establishments, the development of all directions of the Slavic studies in the Soviet Union.