Slavianovedenie

The article examines the characteristics of the Kyiv prince Vladimir Monomakh in the Russian historiography of the 19th – 21th centuries, it is concluded that research assessments of the activities of Vladimir Monomakh are both apologetic and critical, thanks to which is revealed in different ways the role of the politic of Monomakh in the crisis of Ancient Russian State, which was provoked by wars between his sons and grandsons and resulted in a weakening of the power of the Kyiv princes. Particular attention is paid to historiographical assessments of Monomakh's will, according to which it was assumed that the principalities in Pereyaslavl and Kyiv would be inherited in the family of his eldest son Mstislav Vladimirovich to the detriment of the interests of his younger brothers Yuri and Andrei Vladimirovich.

The article examines how the images of the Ottoman authorities are presented in the Slavic hagiography of the 16^th century (the vitae of the Balkan martyrs): first of all, the sultans, but also individual mayors («eparchs») and viziers. Despite some of the negative features the Ottoman Sultan acts most often as a neutral figure or even as a kind of arbitrator, to whom both a Muslim judge and some Christians turn for advice. It is the «tsar» who can decide what sentence to impose on a Christian martyr. This peculiarity of the image of the Ottoman ruler can be explained by the fact that for the compilers of the vitae he represents the only legitimate «tsar» to whom, despite his belonging to the «Hagarites» and their faith, they must obey as subjects. The contrast is presented in the image of some local rulers and senior officials: they often act as persecutors of Christianity. Moreover, in order to achieve their goal and destroy the future saint, these «eparchs» or «voivodes» resort to deception and flattery, forcing the «tsar» or judge himself to believe in their lies and pass a death sentence on a Christian. The image of a Muslim city or prison guardian given in the hagiography is also quite ambiguous. The guardian can act as a fairly positive character who is imbued with respect for the martyr and tries to alleviate his suffering, as well as organizes meetings of the future saint with other Christians. At the same time, Ottoman guards are characterized by human weaknesses: they can doze off on duty and take bribes.

The paper deals with the history of the emergence and spread of summaries (arguments) of the Gospel chapters in the editions of the Church Slavonic liturgical Tetraevangelia and the New Testaments from 1657 to the beginning of the 19th century. The emergence of this element of the biblical paratext is associated with the conversion of Moscow scribes to the practice of European book publishing of the early modern period. The only manuscript containing gospel summaries identical to the printed ones is the translation of the New Testament by Epiphanius Slavinetsky and Euthymius Chudovsky of the 1670–1680s. Linguistic analysis of the summaries allowed us to attribute their authorship to Epiphanius Slavinetsky. Lexical and word-formation features inherent to Epiphanius, as well as textual coincidences of the summaries with the translation of the New Testament by Epiphanius and Euthymius, are revealed. It has been established that the Church Slavonic arguments of the chapters reveal an obvious orientation toward the Latin summaries of the printed Greek editions of the second half of the 16th century. Epiphanius' summaries are not a literal translation from Latin, but a transformation of the Latin model, which presupposes both freedom of translation and of structuring of the summaries, which takes into account the features of the Slavonic text and its division into pericopes. Epiphanius' summaries have syntactic and stylistic originality (the word order that is atypical for the Church Slavonic, the combination of predicative and nominal constructions in the headings, the use of continuous multi-component headings and single-component predicative ones), and also reflect some linguistic traces of the Latin original.

The article deals with three mythonyms that are represented in Russian dialects of the north and east of the Kostroma region – казúм, кажимóт, ве(и)дéнье [kazím, kazhimót, ve(i)dénye]. These words are introduced into the linguistic turnover for the first time, as they are not recorded in the main dialect dictionaries of the Russian language and were recorded mainly in the field. Mythonyms have overlapping sets of features, which helps to carry out semantic-motivational reconstruction of lexemes and etymologisation of the ‘dark’ word казим. The mythonym веденье is based on the calendar sign (the character punishes for insufficient amount of spun out yarn by Vvedeniye, 4.XII); the word кажимот reflects the formula Кажи моты [Kazhi moty – show the skeins of yarn], designed to control the volume of spun out yarn; the lexeme казим is formed from the verb казить ‘to wonder, to seem; to spoil; to mischief’ and realises most likely the perceptual sign of the character's ‘seeming’, which is also the basis of the folk-etymological reinterpretation of the word виденье.

The article deals with the axiological characteristics of the concept ‘old age’, revealed on the basis of the phraseological material of Bulgarian and Modern Greek languages. The working corpus contains phraseological units of different degrees of stability: both idioms and more or less fixed collocations. Special attention is paid to the complexity and ambivalence of the evaluation of the concept ‘old age’, as well as to the transition within its framework from value to anti-value. Our results confirm our preliminary hypothesis that, despite significant cultural and axiological parallels, there is a high degree of linguistic specificity in the encoding of the concept ‘old age’. In both languages, phraseological units in which old people are the object of irony and ridicule quantitatively exceed all others. In addition, this category includes units with relatively low interlingual equivalence and a high degree of linguistic and cultural specificity.

The article deals with ethnobotanical information about Russia given in the works of J.S. Presl, the founder of Czech natural-scientific terminology and nomenclature (1791–1849), a representative of the second generation of the Czech national revival. When creating his scientific works, J.S. Presl often resorted to foreign Slavonic sources, primarily Polish and Russian. The article shows that the most important source for J.S. Presl in the process of creating an extensive botanical encyclopaedia on the flora of the entire globe in the description of the Russian flora were the works of academician P.S. Pallas, and he turned not only to his most famous botanical works, such as «Flora Rossica» (1784–1788), but he also used less known works. From the works of P.S. Pallas, J.S. Presl drew information on the use of plants for food, economic and medicinal properties of plants used by the peoples of Russia. The information borrowed by J.S. Presl from the works of P.S. Pallas was in some cases supplemented by the author on the basis of other sources. It was also revealed that some Russian lexemes cited by P.S. Pallas, through the works of J.S. Presl, entered as exotisms of Russian origin into the first dictionary of the Czech language of a new type, created in 1835–1839 by J. Jungmann.