The talus slopes occur in all climatic zones on the Earth. These forms are sensitive to climate fluctuations, therefore they may be indicators of changes in the environment and contain the record of the geomorphological events after the deglaciation period. Both in the past and nowadays, slopes in area of the High Arctic have been developing in the specific conditions of periglacial zone. This is caused by simultaneously occurring different processes of weathering and deposition. The article presents the methodological approach and the results of the sedimentological measurements and geomorphological studies of the eight talus cones located in SW Spitsbergen. The study was conducted in the non-glaciated valley near the Stanislaw Baranowski Polar Station in Spitsbergen. The aim of the investigation was to determine the modern mechanisms of material transport on talus slopes and their impact on relief of slope surface in the polar environment. The obtained results and literature data allowed to indicate four separate zones of talus slope environment and develop a conceptual model for talus slope development in the Brattegg Valley, SW Spitsbergen.

The article considers the problem of proverb stability and modifications, difference between the terms modification and transformation. Characterized are the main methods of transformation of the proverb “The devil is not as terrible as it is depicted” in newspaper discourse and social networks, while the functional potential of anti‐proverbs formed on its basis is described. The author draws the conclusion that standard modifications within the national paremiological corpus cannot be perceived as textual or occasional modifications. They should be taken as systemic variations within the language norm that exist in the mind of native speakers, ones that do not add another semantic meaning and are not recognized by native speakers as proverb deformations. Differences between proverbs (sayings of an edifying character, which contain the centuries‐old experience of the people) and anti‐proverbs (the authors consider anti‐proverbs to be the semantic antithesis of proverbs) are highlighted. The authors pay special attention to the study of the semantics of proverbs and their transformants to identify any relevant semantic and cognitive characteristics. The productive transformation of classical proverbs convinces one of the heredity of folk wisdom, the change of the deep meaning and formal plan of the original proverbs testifies to their adaptation to new social and historical conditions and values. As a result of the investigation it was observed that proverbs as with folklore small genre texts are flexible, open to transformation, reproduction, semantic and textual deviations. These communicative units are distinguished with dynamism, evolution, formal and semantic deviations. They go back to the precedent texts, starting their new life.

In 1964, “Pol’sha” magazine published three poems by Wisława Szymborska with a note: “translated by Anna Akhmatova”. As it was to turn out later, Akhmatova had only authored one of the translations, turning the other two poems over to Anatoly Nayman as a means for him to earn some income. The present paper supports this opinion by findings from my analysis of Akhmatova’s archive materials, viz. draft translations of the poems. The drafts of For wine ( Przy winie) reflect three phases in her translation work, while those for Ballad ( Ballada) and The Hungry Camp at Yaslo ( Obóz głodowy pod Jasłem) are only limited to corrections that merely “smooth out” the translator’s poetic style.

This article addresses the issue of the axiological and derivational specificity of the secondary names of defenders and enemies of Ukraine during the period of the Russian intervention of 2022. Its relevance is due to the need for a comprehensive study of new trends in connotative nomination, as well as the importance of outlining the value orientations of Ukrainians in the critical conditions of the war. The author defines 5 groups of secondary names of persons created during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022: 1) names of soldiers of the Armed Forces; 2) the names of the occupiers; 3) names of Ukrainian politicians; 4) names of politicians from the aggressor side; 5) names of foreign politicians who have supported Ukraine. The author emphasizes that modern Ukrainians use both traditional means of emotional and evaluative nomination, as well as original derivational mechanisms, in particular graphoderivation, a non‐standard combination of word‐forming components, witty convergence of words, etc. For the first time, the author substantiates the connotative derivation as an effective method of verbal psycho‐regulation and worldview self‐presentation of Ukrainians during the Russian aggression, since the names of defenders and enemies in the modern Ukrainian communicative space perform a number of communicative‐pragmatic and psychoregulatory functions: they enable the nomination of persons according to new value criteria, provide an outlet for negative emotions, indicate a cultural and moral superiority over the invaders, define the political position against the background of the enemy’s geopolitical and informational aggression.

Based on the author’s assembled field materials and analysis of historical, folkloristic and ethnological as well as ethnolinguistic literature, the article provides specific research into the symbolic functionality of honey in the ritual and mythological semiosphere of Ukrainians of the Carpathians and Precarpathian region, in particular – the ritualism of Christmas Eve as the prologue to Christmas. Established has been the extremely high semiotic status of honey and the presence of a stable range of polysemantic meanings. The multi‐vector semantics of honey, which was a universal symbol of sweetness, is revealed; a mediator with the afterlife; a container of the sacred; a bearer of the healing properties and connotations of the enchantment, an apotropaic, a cultural symbol that nominated the boundaries of “his”, organized by the presence of the human space. The ritual practice of tasting honey (as a separate dish or as a component of other dishes and drinks) at a pre‐Christmas dinner is considered universal not only for Ukrainians, but for many European nations.

The figure of a woman in folk songs is understood from the point of view of philosophical, moral and ethical, aesthetical criteria. The article analyses the ethnic image in different folk genres – calendar and ritual (carols, spring songs, Petrivka songs, Kusta songs, harvest songs) and the family and ritual (wedding and baptizing). The main methods of representation revealed are those by artistic parallelism, comparative expression, and metaphorical comprehension. A very important role in the architectonics of folk lyrics is played by floral, astral and other images‐symbols. Special attention is paid to the main attributes of a girl (the braid, the wreath) which distinguished her in daily life from a married woman and singled out is also the concept of the creation and perception of the traditional female image. Ukrainian ritual songs are imbued and have brought to our times the aesthetic characteristics of a young maiden. The psychology of the ethnos, its emotionality, its attentive attitude to the woman as an equal partner in the family is traced in folk songs. The conclusion drawn is one about the important role of a Ukrainian woman in the upbringing and directing of youth to marriage, sticking to the moral and ethical norms in the family, community and society.

: The article takes up the problem of autobiographical threads in the prose of Elena Dolgopyat. Although her work lacks a classic autobiography, most of her works are clearly connected with the writer’s biography. In this work I juxtapose two short, unpublished autobiographies of Dolgopiat, which are in my possession, with the writer’s prose works, trying to show the influence of the events in her life on her work. The theoretical basis for my considerations are the works of Małgorzata Czermińska, Katarzyna Citko, Georges Gusdorf as well as numerous reviews and critical texts by Russian literary scholars. In analyzing Dolgopyat’s stories, I also try to prove the thesis that her hometown – Murom – can be considered an autobiographical place.

The paper deals with the vocabulary describing the animal world in the Polish dialect of the village of Oleshkivtsi in Podolia. The analyzed thematic scope contains 255 lexical units, among them both borrowings from Ukrainian and/or Russian (75 units, i.e. 29%) and Polish indigenous words (180 units, i.e. 71%), presented in eight groups: “Animals and Domestic Birds”, “Wild Animals”, “Birds”, “Reptiles, Amphibians, Fishes”, “Insects”, “Animal Sounds and Actions”, “Animal Body Parts and Their Characteristics”, and “Animal Habitat”. Such a comprehensive approach to the present subject matter is a continuation of recent studies into Polish dialects in Ukraine, going beyond the description of “peculiar” vocabulary. The coexistence of two and sometimes three language codes results, among others, in extensive synonymy, which occurs on various levels. Due to the source from which the synonyms come, a synonymous series can consist of indigenous Polish lexemes, indigenous lexemes and borrowings, two or more borrowings. This shows, on the one hand, the strength and scope of linguistic interference, and on the other hand, the durability of indigenous Polish vocabulary. Comparison with other Polish dialects in Ukraine has revealed that 221 lexemes (87%), including 54 borrowings (72%) and 167 Polish indigenous units (93%), appear in other localities.

The current article is an attempt at demonstrating the sacred in Tychyna’s poems translated into Polish by Czechowicz. The sphere of the sacred in the works of the Ukrainian poet mainly derives from Christianity and focuses around Biblical motifs and symbols. Pavlo Tychyna (1891‐1967) was one of those Ukrainian writers whose works attracted a lot of attention in the interwar period amongst representatives of Lublin’s literary circles, including Józef Czechowicz, who translated over twenty of his poems from the collections Clarinets of the Sun 1918, The Plow 1920 and Instead of Sonnets and Octaves 1920. The volume Clarinets of the Sun is dominated by man’s harmony with God and the Universe, while in the two subsequent ones religious motifs appear in apocalyptic visions.

The subject of analysis is the opposition of two themes – boredom and pleasure – in Chekhov’s The Shooting Party. The category of “boredom” includes the characters’ daily duties and work, while “pleasure” corresponds to the unfettered Karamazian lust for life. The fight against boredom turns into the pursuit for the fulfilment of all life desires but also leads to conflicts, which leads to many tragic events related to the deaths of several of the novella’s heroes. The polarization of the world of text on the metaliterary level allows us to notice the features of parody in relation to the popular literature of the day.

Yulia Yakovleva is a little‐known Russian writer whose work has not received the attention of researchers in Russia, much less abroad. However, Yakovleva’s books are immensely interesting not only because of the fundamental themes for everyone touched upon in them, but also because of the entirely new, previously unseen genre she employs, in which the writer has combined historical events and realism with elements of fabulous fiction. With fantastical elements and the drabness of time and space, Yakovleva presents a picture of the Stalinist repression and the functioning of children within it. Plunging her protagonist into a sick, mentally distorted space and time, the writer shows his forced maturation, moments of transition from childhood to adulthood and vice versa. The main aim of our article is to show the techniques as well as the literary results that have helped the writer to present the image of “children of enemies of the people” more convincingly with the help of the mentioned literary innovation.

The article deals with a phenomenon unique for Belarusian literature of the Soviet period: the dissident, non‐conformist work of Znich (Oleg Bembel). In the context of the history of Belarusian literature, the poet is known as the author of religious‐patriotic and spiritual‐meditative poems, many of which were created outside the walls of the monastery, where the poet has lived since 1996. The author of the article explores a little‐known page in the writer’s work: the early, dissident poetry of Oleg Bembel of the first half of the 1980s, which was distributed in manuscripts, samizdat, was published in the émigré press (newspaper and the “Belarus” publishing house). In terms of genre, these were mostly short epigrams and poems dedicated to the classics of Belarusian literature (Francis Bahushevich, Janka Kupala, Maxim Bahdanovich). Thematically the article is concerned with poems about the tragic situation of the Belarusian language, culture, science in the USSR, Russification and the decline of spirituality in an atheistic country. Attention is drawn to the artistic form of the poems, emphasized is their attachment to the intellectual and philosophical trends within modern Belarusian poetry.