From the Editor

Abstract

Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine continues. The Swedish and Norwegian Associations of Slavists and the Society of Finnish Slavists strongly condemn Russia’s unprovoked and brutal invasion of its peaceful neighbour Ukraine. The Nordic Slavists express full support for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people in their struggle against the invaders for democracy and human dignity, and also express their solidarity with those courageous Russians who stand up in protest against the war. Many Nordic Slavists work on a daily basis disseminating knowledge of the Russian and Ukrainian languages, literatures and cultures. This work has now become more complicated, but also more necessary than ever. Scando-Slavica will do its utmost to continue to publish on topics within Slavic and Baltic linguistics, literature, culture, history and society, promoting the spread of research, irrespective of the country of origin of our colleagues. The topics addressed by the contributors to the present issue of ScandoSlavica include language and literature in several Slavic countries: In her article, Katarzyna Glinianowicz discusses the discourse of sexuality in the prose of the Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko (1856–1916), but also attempts to examine more broadly the genealogy of the representation of sexuality and gender in contemporary Ukrainian culture. The articles by Alexander Lifshits, Pavel Uspenskij & Tatiana Krasilnikova, and Tintti Klapuri & Jenniliisa Salminen offer analyses of different aspects of both classical and modern literature written in Russian: the creation of the psychological authenticity of the protagonist in Nikolaj Gogol′’s comedy Revizor, Ivan Chlestakov, the role of idioms in Boris Pasternak’s collection of poems Vtoroe roždenie (‘The Second Birth’, 1932), and the connection between collective memory and fictional spatiality in recent works by Ljudmila Ulickaja, Elena Čižova, and Guzel′ Jachina. Evgeny Steiner offers an analysis of Russian attitudes to Japan, based on the memoirs of the Russian priest, Esperantist and utopist Innokentyj Seryšev (1883–1976), who lived in Japan at the beginning of the 1920’s. In their article, Anna Litvina & Fjodor Uspenskij discuss the medieval Russian anthroponymic system through a detailed analysis of the personal names of the sixteenth-century Muscovite official Andrej Ščelkalov. Articles by Tore Nesset and Andrey Gorbov analyse grammatical issues in contemporary Russian: Russian constructions corresponding to Norwegian