No 2 (2024)

The paper examines the siege of Chomutov undertaken by the Prague Hussites and Taborites in 1421. Three the most detailed testimonies deriving from the 15^th century are analysed, i. e. the «Hussite Chronicle» of Lorence of Březová, the anonymous «Chronicle of the old Prague Collegiate» and the narration «About the defense of the town Most against the Hussites in 1421» composed by Johann Leonis. It has been shown in the paper that the Hussites did follow the instructions and prophecies of the Old Testament. According to the Book of Deuteronomy (20:10– 15) they did murder the whole male population of Chomutov which had undertaken a military resistance. The Prophecy of Jeremia about the Babylon (51:58) was applied by them to the Jews whom they considered to be pagans. The Hussites did kill the sons and daughters of the town following the Prophecy of Ezechiel about harlot Ooliba who had been associated with the town of Jerusalem by the prophet. Author has come to the conclusion that the Old Testament was considered by the besiegers as the handbook of warfare. Thus, the Prague Hussites and Taborites did show themselves as the ultimate Christian fundamentalists and social archaists, inasmuch as their Hussite insight as well as the old Hebraic insight did not make any distinction between religion and politics: the Hussite politics became the continuation of the religion, thus being realised uncompromisingly and cruelly.

The article observes the debates in the contacts of Moscow and Hetmanate of the question, if it is necessary to defense the city of Czigirin or to give up to the Osmans. The differences in the views were reasoned not by the differences of principal positions, but by the concrete defects in organization of the Czigirin defense.

The paper deals with an issue of integrating the secondary ethnic community into a unified historical memory discourse in the Habsburg empire. Since the Holy Roman Empire suffered from disintegration processes and the Habsburgs shifted their attention towards their Empire in 1804–1815 due to Napoleonic wars, the Habsburg state required a new historical discourse. It was designed to assist the mobilization of citizens against a common enemy, and to enforce the emerging conservative ideology alongside with the Austrian imperial patriotism.

In order to enforce the Habsburg legitimacy in Czech lands, Joseph von Hormayr, the Austrian historian, conservative ideologist and politician included several essays devoted to Czech princes and kings from Premyslid dynasty into «The Austrian Plutarch». These texts have tapped into the identitarian policy of the early Austrian conservatism. In addition to it, they turned out to be one of the Romantic historiography manifestos and demonstrated the role of historical memory in political life of the Habsburg monarchy. The «Austrian Plutarch» also put a deep impact on the Austrian Empire in general, and so on integration of Czechia, Moravia and Silesia into an imperial community. The works by Hormayr faced a growing interest later, when the «national» historical narratives were coined without reference to the Habsburgs and Austria in order to assist the emerging Czech national identity with the following autonomy or sovereignty acquisition.

The article is dedicated to the lexical peculiar features of the speech of residents of the capital of the Republika Srpska, the city of Banja Luka, who are native speakers of the Serbian literary language, compared with the speech of residents of central Serbia and Belgrade. The article analyzes the oral and written texts of the residents of Banja Luka, as well as questionnaires in which the respondents had to fill in the gaps in the sentences with semantically suitable words. The study showed that the regional ‘western’ vocabulary is not very frequent in the speech of the residents of Banja Luka; their speech is characterised by significant lexical variability manifested in the parallel use of ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ vocabulary, both by the language collective as a whole and by individuum; neutralisation of regional differences in the media is also an important feature of the speech of Banja Luka. The regional specificity of the vocabulary of the inhabitants of Banja Luka is not reflected in the Serbian lexicography, in which the concept of regionalism requires clarification by the compilers.

The paper аnalyses the process of development of polysemy of international lexemes pilot/пилот on the material of Polish and Russian languages. On the basis of the analysis of word definitions in lexicographic sources of different historical periods their topological structures are characterised. Comparison of lexemes’ epidigmatics in synchronic and diachronic perspective becomes the basis for identifying universal and linguistically specific features in their semantic evolution. A common tendency for the two Slavic languages is the emergence of new lexical-semantic variants as a result of specialisation of the primary meaning. Under the influence of extralinguistic factors, they begin to denote varieties of professions, depending on the vehicle being driven. The peculiarities of the development of the semantics of the word pilot in Polish include the emergence of meanings based on the metaphorical transfer from human to device («autopilot» and «remote control»), as well as on the transfer from the field of transport means driving to the cultural and entertainment sphere («tour guide»). Differences in the development of the semantics of lexemes are also characteristic for the current stage of their evolution under the influence of the processes of Anglobalisation. In Polish, the lexeme pilot starts to be used in the sense of video announcement in parallel with the autochthonous lexeme zwiastun; in Russian, the Anglo-semantism trailer functions in this sense. The innovative meaning of the lexeme pilot «experimental testing to reveal the effectiveness of an object» is transferred from English in the form of similar combinations пилотный проект and projekt pilotażowy, which in Polish functions simultaneously with the polonised variant wdrożenie pilotażowe.

The paper analyses the biblical quotation layer in Meletius Smotrytsky’s Slavonic Grammar with Correct Syntax (Gramatiki Slavenskija Pravilnoe Syntagma, 1619). Until now this issue has not been studied, and only some quotation attributions were listed in the index sections of Grammar’s academic editions. The article introduces three levels of the biblical quotation layer in the Grammar: biblical formulae, biblical names, and biblical quotations of two types, i.e. marked (marginalia written by Smotrytsky), and unmarked (without indication of their biblical sources). The author discovered and attributed 110 previously unknown quotations, corrected inaccuracies in quotation attributions in Grammar’s academic editions. As a result, the author could develop the corpus of all biblical quotations from the Grammar.

This is a publication of a letter written by G. K. Venediktov to the distinguished linguist V. A. Dybo on the occasion of his 85 years jubilee with the questions of his scholarly biography, and two responses of the academician. The correspondence sheds light on the facts of Dybo’s education, interests, books he read, and participation in the public life of the USSR.