From the editor

Abstract

The present issue of Scando-Slavica offers readers seven articles and three book reviews. The topics addressed by the contributors include contemporary Russian transcultural prose, works by Aleksandr Puškin, Marina Cvetaeva, and Olga Tokarczuk, as well as contemporary Macedonian grammar, Slavic historical grammar and Balto-Slavic accentology. Andrey E. Bochkarev’s article brings a close reading of Aleksandr Puškin’s short story Metel′ (The Snowstorm), showing how a small detail, the motto Ut duo unum componant, plays an important role in the narrative. Eleni Bužarovska discusses the reintroduction in standard Macedonian of the potential mood marker bi-. The spread of the bipatterns, which, it is argued, entered the Macedonian conditional system under the influence of neighboring Slavic languages, is investigated through the analysis of examples from literary works from different periods. Anna Ljunggren discusses contemporary Russian literary guidebooks as an important hybrid genre with simultaneously informative, autobiographical and historiosophic functions. By analysing works by Joseph Brodsky, Andreï Makine and Michail Šiškin, Ljunggren shows how transcultural writing can include a particular fusion of pragmatic and aesthetic aspects. Marek Majer analyses the origin of the Proto-Slavic abstract suffix *-ostь, proposing a reconstruction of a class of adjectives in *-ostъ (< *-osto-), which has not been directly preserved as such but which has parallels in other Indo-European languages. Ellen Mortensen explores the theme of revenge in Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. The plot structure and the characters are analysed from an ecofeminist perspective, showing how the powers of nature play a crucial role in the development of the story. Yulia Pasko studies Marina Cvetaeva’s poetic cycles Achmatova and Poems for Blok, analysing the spatial organisation of the texts through Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia as interpreted by Rainer Warning. Vytautas Rinkevičius’ contribution to the ongoing discussion of the origin of the Balto-Slavic mobile accent paradigms reveals how the Lithuanian dialectal Žemaitian accent retraction presents important typological parallels to proposed reconstructions of early Baltic and Slavic accent developments.