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The author reflects on the fiftieth volume of the periodical "Canadian Slavonic Papers". The author ackowledges all the editors and contributors of the issue referred to as a milestone, a testimonial piece that depicts the periodical's contribution in history, language, literature, and social sciences in Canada and across the globe.

This paper analyses the changes in ethnic self-identification of the population of Ukraine from the last (January 1989) Soviet census to the first (December 2001) Ukrainian census. It begins with a comparison of the census data and describes the remarkable changes observed. Given the incomplete nature of published data on international migrations and their differentiation by ethnic groups in the inter-census period, the paper applies a method to fill in the gaps and calculate net migration balances for each ethnic group. Also, since no data is available on the net reproductive rates for separate ethnic groups in Ukraine, it sets out a method to estimate net reproduction rates for Ukrainians and Russians in the inter-census period. Using these methods, it establishes that differences in net migration on the one hand and the differences in net reproduction on the other contributed 11.1 and 4.4 percent of the growth in the share of Ukrainians and 6.8 and 5.2 percent in the sizeable decline in the share of Russians. The remaining lion's share is a shift in identity among members of ethnically mixed (mainly Russian-Ukrainian) families. Mothers of ethnically mixed families, identifying the ethnicity of their newly born, contributed 11.4 percent to the Ukrainian gain and 9.2 percent to the Russian loss. The remaining 73.1 percent of the Ukrainian gain and 78.8 percent of Russian loss resulted from lifetime identity shift from Russian to Ukrainian, the most likely candidates being members of Russian-Ukrainian families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proceeds from the premise that Russian iurodivye—or fools for Christ—display a remarkable resemblance to the Hebrew prophets. As it explores the genealogical link between these two cultural paradigms, the paper shows that, during the various stages of the developmental history of holy foolery, the figure of the Old Testament prophet served as the holy fool's literary and behavioural model. The influence of the prophetic paradigm on the cultural phenomenology and hagiographic imagery of iurodstvo was exercised through the prominence assigned to the prophet in the written, visual and audible texts available to the Eastern Slays from the beginning of Christian era. On the literary level, this enduring influence is discernable in the prophetic topoi that reached holy foolish hagiography directly and indirectly. While the direct venues are confined to Old Testament texts, which described the lives and acts of the Hebrew prophets, the indirect ones include New Testament texts and hagiographies. When the holy fool finds his place in the urban setting, his paradigm undergoes crucial changes, losing its ascetic aspects and acquiring the prophetic ones. This shift of emphasis defines Russian hagiography and cultural tradition, where the iurodivyi often emerges as the Russian version of the Hebrew prophet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data from the 1995 and 2000 World Values Survey to examine and compare the relationship between social capital, education and political participation in Western and Eastern Europe. The concept of social capital is measured using indicators of trust and membership in voluntary organizations, while the concept of political participation is put into operation through indicators of political action. The research uncovers clear indicators showing that social capital is a factor in political participation in Eastern Europe and that the existence of general social trust is a characteristic of the most successful transitions. The paper finds evidence to support the theory that a trust-building mechanism based on reciprocity and a "critical mass" is indeed at work in the democratization process and that social capital is an integral part of transition for the Eastern European states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of a number of papers presented during a conference on the aspect of Slavic languages is presented. Aspect is divided into categories such as saliency, grounding, states, activities and achievements or consummations and has engendered much research in the field. These papers by far are the most comprehensive works done in the field. The study of linguistics provides an insight into the nature of man.

The article presents a bibliography of collections of articles and papers related to Slavonic studies which have been sent to the editors, but not reviewed due to scope limitations.

This article analyzes the popular response to Soviet myths in the post-Soviet period through the lens of the complicated treatment of Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia. As arguably the most famous Soviet World War II martyr, Kosmodem'ianskaia's image splintered after glasnost' and has been located at the nexus of debate in various media since 1991. This paper poses questions about the fracturing of national memory when a nation has undergone upheaval: about the stability of heroes, about citizens' responses to them, and about heroes' transformation in the new regime. Catriona Kelly has demonstrated that the treatment of a national hero can illuminate the circumstances that produced the hero and the cultural climate of subsequent decades. Building on her work, this article asks "Why and how has the image of Kosmodem'ianskaia remained relevant while other Soviet heroes have been neglected since 1991?" This article posits that Kosmodem'ianskaia's continued significance lies above all in the flexibility of her image and the transitional aspects of her body. Her depictions in various contexts represent prominent responses to the authoritarian regime which gave birth to both Kosmodem'ianskaia and her legacy. The variety of her images demonstrates the continued relevance of this figure two decades after the collapse of the USSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called Bulldozer, Rose, Orange, and Tulip Revolutions have reminded us that as repressive as a regime may be, the real power ultimately belongs to the masses, especially when its forces are supported and channelled into non-violent action in pursuit of clear and concrete objectives. This article shows how the first of these events, the "Bulldozer Revolution," unfolded in Serbia resulting in the ouster of the dictator Milošević. The lessons were then absorbed by Georgian activists who were similarly successful in replacing Shevardnadze with Saakashvili. In Ukraine, the election of Kuchma's protégé, Yanukovych, was foiled when the "Orange Revolution" installed Yushchenko instead. The author also chronicles the "Tulip Revolution" of Kyrgyzstan. A notable feature of this paper is that, in addition to analyzing these "successful" revolutions, it also looks at some clearly unsuccessful ones, namely those attempted in Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Belarus. But the current global economic crisis could lead to more political changes in the former Soviet Union, whether in Belarus, the Caucasus, Central Asia, or even Russia itself. The article argues that the "colour revolutions" of 2000-2005 present a real danger to the authoritarian regime of Medvedev-Putin in Russia, and that their fear of them is hence thoroughly justified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the social meaning behind the use of both Ukrainian and Russian in various media texts in contemporary Ukraine. I begin by situating the language issue within the current socio-political context; specifically, I briefly summarize recent language debates relevant to this paper. Secondly, I analyze selected media texts from television programs, films and popular magazines—all instances of the simultaneous and parallel use of Ukrainian and Russian. The analysis is then extended to a discussion of the media's stake in framing the linguistic situation in Ukraine. The texts in question are approached on the premise that "media usage influences and represents people's use of and attitude towards language in a speech community" (Bell and Garrett 1998: 3). I consider the media's choice of language an institutionalized means of framing reality (Popp 2006: 6) and therefore the use of language in the media acts symbolically, creating prevalent ideas about what language can and should do in a particular society (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994, cited in Popp 2006: 5). My analysis of communicative exchange is carried out from the perspective of code-switching that takes place within a larger social and political context. I address the social dichotomy of "we/they" or what Gumperz (1972) calls "metaphorical code-switching." My analysis rests also on Auer's code-switching framework, specifically his notions of "preference-related switching" and "sustained divergence of language choices" (1998b). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kosovo's education system is divided along a Serb-Albanian line, with consequences for the non-Serb minorities. While Serb-Albanian relations have been researched and analyzed extensively, relations among non-Serb minority communities have typically been neglected. Although there are some studies addressing the treatment and rights of individual minority groups in Kosovo, there is very little written on the dynamics and relations those groups establish among themselves. This article uses education as the backdrop for analyzing the emerging inter-minority relations in Kosovo. The paper provides some background about minority education rights and the consequences of their partial implementation for those minority groups—i.e., the Kosovo Bosniaks and Turks—whose members opt to follow the Albanian (Kosovo) educational system. In addition, it offers insights into some of the economic and political considerations behind the decision of the Gorani community to endorse the Serbian educational system. Finally, I analyze the relations between the Goranis and Bosniaks that have been developing around education and language rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguably, few popular films during the last decade have caused so much debate, and been more frequently quoted as film The Matrix (1999), written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski. This paper analyzes allusions to the film in four works of contemporary Russian prose fiction. These works exploit, to various degrees, The Matrix in order to evoke visual representations from the film, and to draw on structural concepts and similarities. Further, I argue that references to The Matrix are made in order to benefit from the film's eclectic mythological concepts and transpose them to the literary realm. This kind of cross-fertilization could be seen as a growing trend where the borders between different media are becoming more fluid, and where they benefit from each other, be they novels, films, or computer games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Russian, the statistically dominant order of the subject and the verb in the clause is SV. However, there are many environments in which VS orders also occur, not all of which have been noted in the scholarly literature. This paper outlines some models of Russian constituent order that have been put forward in both generative and functional frameworks, and it suggests how they may be modified to improve their adequacy. Its central claim is that an improved model of Russian clause organization would take the form (VS)Theme/(VS)Rheme. It offers analyses of a large set of data collected from literary and academic writing in support of its claim, in so doing presenting a more or less comprehensive overview of environments in which clauses containing post-verbal subjects are found in written Russian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics have noted similarities between Nikolai Gogol's three early horror stories (Vecher nakanune Ivana Kupala [St. John's Eve], Strashnaia mest' [A Terrible Vengeance] Vii) and the works of his famous German predecessor Ludwig Tieck. There also exists some speculation concerning the relationship between his Ukrainian tales and the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann. However, a detailed comparison between the two authors focused only on Gogol's "St. Petersburg" stories. His early tales have been ignored because they were presumed to depend mostly on folklore. This article argues that there are intertextual connections between Gogol's St. John's Eve and A Terrible Vengeance, and Hoffmann's Der Sandmann [The Sandman] and Ignaz Denner. The paper contends that Gogol was recapitulating, consciously or unconsciously, Hoffmann's oeuvre in his works both in terms of plot detail and on a deeper psychological level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article lists the papers related to Ukrainian studies including the "Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics," edited by Sander Brouwer, "Die slavischen Grenzen Mitteleuropas. Festschrift für Sergio Bonazza," edited by Stefano Aloe, and "Kapitel aus der Poetik: Die zehner Jahre in der tschechischen Literatur – zwischen Symbolismus und Avantgarde. Beiträge zum Internationalen Bohemistischen Symposium an der Universität Potsdam," edited by Birgit Krehl and Herta Schmid.

This paper deals with J.B. Rudnyckyj (1910-1995), a leading Ukrainian émigré scholar of the Cold War period, and his manifold contributions to library science in Canada and the West in general. Although he was a philologist and lexicographer by training and profession, Rudnyckyj took a keen interest in all Ukrainian books and libraries to which he had access during this period. From his very immigration to Canada in 1949, he traveled extensively in this country, in the USA, and in Western Europe. Everywhere he went, he investigated local private Ukrainian, public, and academic libraries, museums, and cultural centres, met with resident scholars, both émigré and Western, and wrote about them in his voluminous publications. These included both travelogues with a strong cultural bent and also more formal library descriptions. For two decades he also compiled extensive yearly bibliographies of Slavic publications in Canada. Rudnyckyj's motivation, it seems, was a desire to document and preserve the Ukrainian cultural heritage which he thought was under threat in his ancestral European homeland. Today, all this material forms a valuable resource for the history of Slavic studies in Canada during the time of the "Long Cold War" (1945-1991). It also says much about Ukrainian culture in North America in general during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Russia, post-communist reforms to state social benefit policies have shown contradictory views of gender. On the one hand, reform showed a desire to promote gender equality between individuals, a view in which men and women alike were considered autonomous citizens. On the other hand, there was an impulse to consider women as a needy group dependent on special help from the state. This paper examines three related areas of policy: pronatalist policy, child welfare benefits, and old age pensions, in order to reveal unresolved issues in Russian social policies towards women and children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sources cited in the journal "Canadian Slavonic Papers," are presented including "Bulgarien-Jahrbuch," vol. 2004-2005, edited by Wolfgang Gesemann, Rumjana Ivanova-Kiefer, and Rumjana Zlatanova, "Linguistische Beiträge zur Slavistick: XIII. JungslavistInnen-Treffen in Leipzig," by Uwe Junghans, and "Liguistische Beiträge Slavistick: XIV. JungslavistInnen-Treffen in Stuttgurt," by Ljudmila Geist and Grit Mehlhorn.

Scholarship on Radishchev has so far neglected his fascinating letters from exile (1791-1801), using it primarily as source material on the writer's biography or ideas, instead of analyzing it as a part of Radishchev's text. The present paper examines how the writer uses his letters to build his new public image, after it has been destroyed by his arrest and trial. But Radishchev also uses them to stage his intimate body, in order to arouse his addressees' interest and pity. Finally, he at times turns this real body into a rhetorical one, which fulfills different functions, from staging a fictitious intimacy in place of Radishchev's real one when it is not satisfactory, to serving as a symbolic gift for his protector Count Alexander Vorontsov. The study of this specific issue sheds a new light on the writer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out a case for identifying a Carpathian Sprachbund comprising Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Kajkavian Croatian, Hungarian, Yiddish and the Bavarian-Austrian dialect of German. It investigates the distribution of eleven possible Sprachbund-forming features: five phonological (absence of tones, initial stress, phonemic opposition of length in vowels, absence of a palatalization correlation, the presence of medial 1), six morpho-syntactical (a basic three-tense verbal system, an analytical future formed with an inchoative plus the infinitive, an original perfect as the only simple preterite, a pluperfect formed from a double perfect, a pre-posed definite and indefinite article). The information gathered comfortably satisfies the minimal conditions for establishing the existence of a Sprachbund set out by Sarah Grey Thomason, W.P. Schmid and others. The levels of participation of the individual languages also seem to be commensurable with those of the languages of the well known Balkan Sprachbundas set forth by Jouko Lindstedt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This presentation aims at addressing an apparent minor discrepancy between citations in Shevelov's A Prehistory of Slavic (1964) and his Historical Phonology of the Ukrainian Language (1979). Shevelov (1964: 403) cites Russian "Multiple line equation(s) cannot be represented in ASCII text", 'drake', also occurring in Ukrainian, and gives an Old Irish form selg, glossed as 'hunt', as a cognate. In Shevelov 1979: 94, however, Old Irish selg, unglossed, is offered as a cognate for Ukrainian "Multiple line equation(s) cannot be represented in ASCII text" 'spleen' id., and other related Slavic forms, see also Trautmann 1923: 256, Pokomy 1959: 900-901, 987, Vasmer 1964-1973: III: 594-595, while his comment on Russian "Multiple line equation(s) cannot be represented in ASCII text" cites no other cognates. For Old Irish seig itself; which, like "Multiple line equation(s) cannot be represented in ASCII text" and "Multiple line equation(s) cannot be represented in ASCII text" has two meanings, see Lewis & Pedersen 1961: 18, 33; Thumeysen 1946: 139, Vendryes 1974: S-80-S-81. Superficially, this would provide a very rare example of East Slavic *TolT reflexes developing to *Telel, and not the regular, and expected *ToloT, but such examples should be treated with caution, cf. Shevelov loc. cit. Indeed, a glance at proposed Indo- European cognates of "Multiple line equation(s) cannot be represented in ASCII text"/selg 'spleen' shows a degree of irregular development that points to a need for closer scrutiny by scholars, cf. Greek "Multiple line equation(s) cannot be represented in ASCII text", Avestan "Multiple line equation(s) cannot be represented in ASCII text", etc., raising the question: what has happened to the Slavic *-p-? In contrast to Celtic, Slavic preserves Indo-European *p under most circumstances, and therefore one would expect it to be preserved in any cognate of the Greek and Avestan forms cited above. By simply juxtaposing Old Irish seig here, without further comment, Shevebov bc. cit. introduces a note of confusion for those interested in Slavo-Celtic cognates, and it is the purpose of this paper to disentangle such confusion, and to account for a situation whereby Slavic and Goidelic appear to use the same forms for the concepts of 'duck'/'hunting' and 'spleen'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on questions of Macedonian standardization at the most micro-level, i.e., within the individual. Through examination of archival materials of Macedonian writers of the early twentieth century, questions of language shift and standardization are addressed. While much research has been conducted on the state processes of language standardizing, on access to the media in newly standardized linguistic codes, and on access to education, this work refocuses discussion of language standards on individual speakers and writers: how and why they shift their language to the emerging norm. Two writers from this period, Anton Kavaev and Radoslav Petkovski, serve as models and provide the first step in a larger study of processes of standardization in the early decades of the twentieth century leading to codification in mid-century. The written works of the authors under study demonstrate that language codification is not an act, nor a series of acts, but a process, a process that takes place within individual speakers who are committed to the project of language standardization while subject to external political and linguistic pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proceeding from Lord Acton's insight that "exile is the nursery of nationality," this paper examines a peculiar historical instance of dislocation as a relevant matrix for the articulation of national identity. I inquire into aspects of the elaboration of French national consciousness among French émigrés of the revolutionary period in Russia, approaching the subject at two levels: first, the maîtres à danser, the run-of- the- mill émigrés who abandon cosmopolitan certitudes or pretensions of a "monde français" and abstractions of dynastic loyalty, in favour of nostalgic attachment to a tangible paine, very much at odds with the Russian otherness into which they have been thrust. Second, the maîtres à penser, those émigré thinkers in whom the Revolution provokes a reconsideration of established universals and who conceptualize Russia in terms of a project to reconcile universal and particular or national values. I examine the dilemmas and ultimate failure of such a projection by focusing on the work of Joseph de Maistre. On both levels, the historical case studied here is an exemplification of the proposition that nationalism is founded on a disenchantment with the world, and that physical estrangement from both the world to which one believes oneself to belong as well as spiritual estrangement from the world in which one treads, may provide a critical context for defining collective identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]