Gods of the Ancient Slavs when it was published provided a valuable and comprehensive review of the literature on Slavic mythology, with extensive notes and bibliography, making it a superlative springboard for further research and interpretation in this interdisciplinary crossroads of Slavic history and philology. In granting permission to post this scanned version of the text, the author expressed the fervent wish that it could be retypeset. This illustrates the pre-computer state of many Slavica publications, which in 1980 were often “typeset” on an IBM Selectric III typewriter, with dozens of specialized or custom-designed typing elements. But a free reprint like this one simply cannot support the expense of OCR-ing the work, and then doing the extensive cleanup required for the necessary degree of accuracy. So we apologize to the author, and other authors, and take refuge in the assumption that content is more important to scholars than form.

Slavica would like to express its sincere thanks to Myroslava Znayenko for graciously granting permission for this reprint. We welcome comments on this and other forthcoming titles to be released in this series.

Click 08_SLAVICA_REISSUE_Gods of the Ancient Slavs.pdf to begin download

The poetry of Georgia, a country of ancient culture in the South Caucasus, is the crown jewel of its exceptionally rich literary heritage. Secular poetry, having emerged from the fusion of folk poems and religious hymns and homilies of the early Christian era over a thousand years ago, remained a dominant genre of Georgia literature well into the twentieth century. Even today poetry is held in the highest esteem as a particularly noble form of art, not just a domain of academic studies, but a part of daily life…. Poetry is indeed the key to understanding Georgian culture. The present anthology offers the English-speaking reader a first-rate collection of Georgian poems in translation, a valuable glimpse into the treasures of Georgian poetry.… (Lyn Coffin) has shaped the material into poems in English, while maintaining the distinctive voice and flavors of the originals, and staying as true to their forms as possible. Although the selection of poems is limited to the works of a handful of the most outstanding names, every single one of these poems is a masterpiece… — Dodona Kiziria, from the introduction to Georgian Poetry: Rustaveli to Galaktion. A Bilingual Anthology I praise and thank Lyn Coffin for bringing us these Georgian poets in such finely polished translations. — Sam Hamill, Poets Against War Lyn Coffin is a widely-published American poet, fiction writer, playwright, and translator. In 2007 she was awarded an honorary Ph.D. from the World Academy of Arts and Culture (UNICEF) “for poetic excellence and her efforts on behalf of world peace.” Lyn teaches literary fiction at the University of Washington (Department of Professional and Continuing Education), and leads translation seminars at the Shota Rustaveli Institute (Tbilisi) in the summer. Thirteen volumes of her poetry and translations have been published, and her plays have been presented in Singapore, Off-Off-Broadway theaters, and elsewhere. Many of her short stories have been published: one appeared in the collection Best American Short Stories edited by Joyce Carol Oates. A bilingual collection of her fiction is set to appear in 2013. She is currently working on a translation of Rustaveli’s The Knight in the Panther Skin. In 2014, Lyn will present her translations of Mohsen Emadi at the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs in Seattle. See her website at http://lyncoffin.com

A Grammar of Macedonian is the first comprehensive reference grammar to this language couched in the framework of generative grammar. The author has ensured cross-framework accessibility of the data by the constrained use of technical terminology and frequent reference to non-generative grammars of Macedonian, in particular to the works of Blaže Koneski and Zuzanna Topolinjska. The volume focuses on the structure of the nominal phrase and the clause as the principal intersection points of morphology and syntax. Preliminary chapters are devoted to sociolinguistic issues, historical development of Macedonian, the Balkan Sprachbund, and the phonology of the contemporary language. The core of the volume, however, is represented by extensive analysis of the nominal phrase (spanning four chapters) and clausal structure (six chapters). It is in these areas that the rich complexity of Macedonian morphosyntax emerges in full detail. A wealth of examples in the book and tables provides ample data for students studying Macedonian, as well as linguists who would like to get a taste of its unique features. Copious examples are given in full clausal form, illustrating a range of clausal types, including the range of tenses, mood structures, and interrogative and relative clauses. This book is recommended for library collections at community colleges, four-year colleges, and research universities.

Carpatho-Rusyn literature, which dates back to the sixteenth century, emerged as a distinct creative movement only after the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, where the ancestral Rusyn homeland straddles the borders of five countries: Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. For much of the twentieth century, however, Rusyns did not officially exist, since Soviet-dominated governments stubbornly denied the existence of any such ethnicity or language. Only the former Yugoslavia recognized a small community of Rusyns, descendants of immigrants from the Carpathian region to the Vbjvodina. Shortly before the fall of Communist rule, however, it became clear that Rusyns had not disappeared, and since that time a Rusyn cultural renaissance has been underway. As the language was standardized, writers who had previously used Ukrainian, Slovak, or Polish now applied their talent and expertise to rejuvenating a Rusyn national literature in several variants of the Rusyn language. Not surprisingly, one of the most important thematic concerns is Rusyn identity-its history, survival into the present, and its preservation for the future. Collected here, for the first time in English translation, is a representative sampling of contemporary Rusyn poetry and prose by twenty-seven authors from six countries. An introduction surveys Rusyn literary history, and an appendix provides selected texts from each country in the original Rusyn, as well as an extensive bibliography of language resources. This book is recommended for library collections at four-year colleges and research universities.

This guide to contemporary Polish language and its usage is primarily intended for English-speaking learners of Polish. It is a practical grammar, designed to facilitate the learning of forms and to explain their uses in a way that is accessible to the non-specialist. At the same time, this book aims to be a fairly complete and reliable technical guide to the rules, regularities, and principles which underpin Polish grammar, taking into account important exceptions and irregularities. No attempt is made to simplify or gloss over matters which are in actuality complex, as many matters of Polish grammar are; at the same time, the aim of this book is to present complex things as simply as possible. Oscar Swan's treatment of the complex phonology and morphology of Polish is thorough and of interest to linguists, but sufficiently non-technical and self-explanatory to be useful to advanced students of Polish and non-linguist Polonists as well. An especially welcome feature of the book is the extensive coverage of syntax and usage. The treatment of case and prepositions is sure to answer many questions for even fluent non-native speaker of Polish.

For additional materials, visit the author's website at: http://lektorek.org

Winner, 2004 AATSEEL Award for Best Book in Linguistics (American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages)

This book is intended for students who have completed the equivalent of a first-year Georgian course. Designed to be used either in the classroom or for self-instruction, the book presupposes only a command of basic Georgian grammar and a basically passive recognition of basic Georgian vocabulary. The philosophy of the course is to expose the student to a rich and broad range of Georgian grammatical constructions and vocabulary in order to facilitate the conversion of passive constructions and words to active. The aim is not to enable the students to achieve full fluency in Georgian, but rather to give them sufficient background to enable them to live and work in Georgia using Georgian and by so doing to attain a high degree of fluency.

Contents:
Dialogues; Anthology of Georgian Literature;
Introduction: The Course of Georgian Literature;
Prose;
Poetry;
Grammar Sections;
Translations;
Vocabulary;
Indexes.

I. The Un/Sayable

1. Renate Lachmann The Semantic Construction of the Void

2. Jurij Lotman The Truth as Lie in Gogol's Poetics

3. Mikhail N. Epshtein The Irony of Style: The Demonic Element in Gogol's Concept of Russia

4. Christopher Putney Gogol's Theology of Privation and the Devil in Ivan Fedorovič Špon'ka

5. Susi Frank Negativity Turns Positive: Mediations Upon the Divine Liturgy

II. Emptiness/Plenitude

6. Mixail Vajskopf Imperial Mythology and Negative Landscape in Dead Souls

7. Boris Gasparov Alienation and Negation: Gogol's View of Ukraine

8. Michael Holquist The Tyranny of Difference: Gogol and the Sacred

9. Boris Groys Who Killed the Dead Souls?

 III. Unexpressing

10. Sergej Gončarov The Metaphysics of Silence in Gogol's Early Fiction

11. Sven Spieker Esthesis and Anesthesia: The Sublime in Arabesques

12. Natascha Drubek-Meyer Gogol's Negation of Sense Perception and Memory

13. Mikhail Yampolsky Double Being: Laughter and the Sublime Works Cited Index

Professor Aronson's book, originally published in 1982, was the first grammar of Georgian for beginners to be published in English. The goal of the book is to enable a student to read Georgian literature (primarily scholarly) with the aid of a dictionary. The course consists of fifteen lessons, the first of which is devoted to the sound and writing systems of Georgian. The remaining fourteen lessons cover grammatical information, with exercises for translation from Georgian into English (lessons 2-13) and reading passages taken unedited from modern Georgian sources (lessons 5-15). Reading passages deal with history, geography, linguistics, philology, art history, music history, anthropology, plus a long selection from a contemporary Georgian popular novel.

"This textbook is an exemplary product of the reading-knowledge approach..." (MLJ)

"...the best Georgian grammar in English and the best reading-knowledge grammar in any language." (MLJ)

"The publication of Aronson's textbook represents a major advance in the study and accessibility of Georgian..." (SEEJ)

"This grammar is destined to be the standard work, and our debt to Aronson is enormous..." (SEER)

Accompanying audio files are available here https://celt.indiana.edu/portal/Georgian/readingrammar.html

For at least a hundred and fifty years the Gypsies and their language have attracted much scholarly attention. Curiously enough, although the presence of Gypsies in Greece has been attested since the 14th century, the Greek Gypsies have been much less studied than many other Gypsy populations and their form of Romany has been largely unexplored. Since the sedentary Gypsy community in the Athens suburb of Agia Varvara is both large and fairly uniform, this seemed a particularly promising site to carry out the linguistic research on which this glossary of Greek Romany is based. There is good reason to believe that this Gypsy group originally came to Greece from Turkey. Though only older persons speak Turkish, a notable feature of the dialect is its incorporation of some Turkish verbal conjugation. Adult speakers are bilingual in Greek and Romany and their vocabulary has drawn extensively upon both Greek and Turkish. In grammatical structure the dialect shows clear affinities with the Turkish Romany speech ably described by A. Paspati over a century ago. The present work aims at an overall picture of the dialect though in small compass. A brief grammatical sketch precedes the glossary, together with a few specimen texts. The Romany-English glossary occupies the main part of the work, which is rounded off by a skeleton English-Romany glossary. "The result is a valuable contribution to the study of Gypsies and their language." (Newsletter of the Gypsy Lore Society) A Glossary of Greek Romany As Spoken in Agi

The book is divided into 14 chapters (Transport, Knizhnyj magazin, Pervyj vizit v gosti, etc.). Each chapter contains 15 to 20 dialogs, typically 4 lines long. The dialogs are written in a very colloquial style. The book contains no grammar explanations, and no glossary. Side-by-side translations make clear what each line means, and a number of footnotes explain cultural differences. The dialogs have worked well with students in their fourth or fifth semester, and fit conveniently into a course that has a conversation class once a week. They can also be useful to graduate students, exchange scholars, and anyone residing in the Soviet Union for a period of work or study. They're easily memorized, and should be, to be acted out with another person. Once performed, the situation can be developed -- ask directions, take a taxi, and so on. The 39 photographs, taken expressly to go with these dialogs, provide a context and a starting point for new situations. Additional materials for this title are available through the Cornell Language Resource Center at: http://www.lrc.cornell.edu/sales/links/russian

Based on original research in Russian syntax, this book explores the intersection of sentence intonation, syntactic structure, and grammatical function in the case of the adverbial participle (deeprichastie) of contemporary Russian. An adverbial participle clause constituting an intonational unit separate from that of its matrix clause is detached (obosoblennyi). The core of the book documents in detail a range of specific syntactic and semantic properties differentiating detached and non-detached adverbial participle clauses. These properties include, for example, the range of understood subjects, the temporal relation between the participle and matrix clauses, and aspectual choice in the participial form. Taken together, these properties indicate that the presence versus absence of detachment intonation is correlated with a distinction in the grammatical function of the adverbial participle clause. The final chapter generalizes and extends these results, providing a formal apparatus for describing the observed properties in terms of constituent structure and lexical representations. The study concludes with an explicit statement of the distinction in grammatical function signaled by detachment.

"The book is a fine example of competent mainstream work in syntax." (MLR)

From the Brown University Slavic Reprint Series:Originally published in Leningrad in 1924, this is one of the best books ever written about Gogol. With impressive scholarship it gives "in short sketch... all that is basic in Gogol's personal and artistic development." Donald Fanger, the original series editor, notes in his introduction that:

Vasily Gippius' book, for all its physical slightness, is one of the very best things ever written about Gogol and, among that select company, one of the least read and cited. Published in 1924 in an edition of 3000 copies (not an unusual printing for a scholarly work in those days), it apparently failed to receive proper distribution, with the result that although the Malaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya in 1930 could praise its "thoughtful analysis...of Gogol's artistic work" and its revaluation of previous scholarly literature on the subject, it has been largely unavailable to students and critics for almost forty years.