Time machines do not exist, but books are good substitutes. This book takes you two thousand years back in time and explains how the Russian language came to be the way it is by reviewing all major changes in the grammar and sound system. In addition to chapters on syntax, morphology, and phonology, the book offers brief introductions to Russian...

This richly illustrated volume’s innovative intersciplinary approaches and engagement with the newest scholarly literature presents a new basis for exploration of holy foolishness in Russia as a unique expression of national identity. Its articles elucidate the genesis, nature, and development of the foolishness in the medival period and its on-going significance as a broadly cultural and religious paradigm. Sweeping in...

Although there are over nine million Roma (plural of Rom, the correct name for those people who have been more often referred to as "Gypsies" in English) in Europe and North America (plus many more all over the world), no usable modern grammar of their language, Romani, exists in English. Of all the different kinds of Romani, the Vlax dialects...

This is a concise dictionary of Russian affixes, classified into Prefixes (total 60) and Suffixes (Nouns -- 219, Adjectives -- 100, Verbs -- 20) -- a grand total of some 390 affixes, which is a virtually exhaustive list of all Russian affixes. It is a much fuller list than is found in either Townsend's Russian Word Formation or Gribble's Russian...

After an introduction which addresses the problem of humor in Dostoevsky's works and discusses previous approaches to it -- especially those of M. M. Baxtin and R. Hingley -- this study devotes a separate chapter to each of Dostoevsky's five major novels: Crime and Punishment(1866), The Idiot (1868), The Demons (1871-72), The Adolescent (1875), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). The...

UCLA Slavic Studies, Volume 15 Ever since the first decades of the sixteenth century a Christian variant (as advocated by Erasmus and Melanchthon) gradually replaced the Greco-Roman orientation of the traditional Italian Renaissance humanism in Central Europe. This new direction took a peculiar and fascinating form in Hungary and Croatia. It developed amidst conflicts between townships and the new aristocracy,...