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As part of the survey conducted in Ukraine, we collected the opinion of the inhabitants of this country about the (desired) languages of the TV programs watched and the press and literature read. The analysis of the respondents' answers, the study of the legal aspects and the relevant statistical data at the time of carrying out the questionnaire allowed us to reveal an inconsistency between the distribution of roles between Ukrainian (the only official language) and Russian (the language spoken on a daily basis by part of the population) in its fields and the preferences of the respondents and to establish an interdependence between the linguistic practices of Ukrainians and the real sociolinguistic situation in their country. Particular attention is paid in this article to the presence in the media and in the literature of a linguistic hybrid resulting from the contacts of the Ukrainian and Russian languages.

This paper aims to examine how the elaboration of imperial nationalist discourse makes use of fictional representations of Ukraine and its people in 19th century Russian literature. Analysis of a series of topoi regarding Ukrainian people (freedom-driven, war-loving Cossacks, colossal but good-natured simpletons, “dancing and singing folk”, sly witches, local versions of Robin Hood fighting Polish tyranny…) allows to show how little this collection of stereotypes evolved during the century. The same goes for representations of Ukraine, more often named Little Russia, or Southern Russia, ranging from the idyllic Avzonija, comparable to ancient Greece and Rome, to a backward country where, nevertheless, true folklore and popular traditions were preserved and awaited their artistic incarnation. Nearly all the writers whose works are briefly analyzed here, Narezhnyj, Somov, Gogol′, Kuprin, Chekhov, concur in showing a country, oppressed by foreigners and ultimately reintegrated in the Russian Empire so as to find its identity: the origin of Russia.

Freed from Moscow tutelage during the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (VUFKU) had broadcasted its first films in Western Europe and in the USA between 1928 and 1930. Thanks to the film clubs and the collaboration of the filmmaker Eugène Deslaw, seven films were screened in France, including two masterpieces of the world cinema – Dovzhenko's Earth and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. Emanating from the Henri Herriot's decree, Censorship of Soviet films was the main obstacle to the establishment of film exploitation with french distribution company Pathé-Nord. The relative economic independence came to an abrupt end in 1930, when VUFKU was absorbed by the Soyuzkino State Film Trust in Moscow.

The first objective of the article is to present the Dictionnaire français-polonais [French-Polish Dictionary] of Wojciech (or Albert) Kazimirski de Biberstein, published by Bourgogne et Martinet in Paris in 1839. This little-known dictionary is very interesting because of its author (drogman, orientalist, translator) and because of the impact it probably had on the Vilnius Słownik języka polskiego [Dictionary of the Polish Language] (1861). If it is undoubtedly true that Kazimirski's dictionary, like any other bilingual dictionary by definition, played a role of intercultural mediation in the Franco-Polish context, the question arises as to where to place and how to interpret in this exchange the traces left by the Near and Middle East, to which Kazimirski was not indifferent. The dictionary contains culturemes such as caaba, calender or kabin, which are practically untranslatable. We propose to examine the lists of terms extracted manually from Kazimirski's dictionary and to compare them with the data of the biggest and most important French dictionaries of the time: Dictionnaire de l'Académie (1835), Dictionnaire de Littré (1863), de Darmesterer et Hatzfeld (1893) and Trésor de la langue française.

In 1922, the Parisian publishing house “Bossard” issued in French translation the first book by Russian émigré author Ivan Bunin. French critics, like Russians a few years earlier, drew attention to the short story Son, which is set in Algeria at the end of the 19th century. The notorious “Chambige Affair” or the macabre romance that took place in Constantine is the source of the story. The author of the article returns to the real criminal trial that nourished French journalism and literature for several decades at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and the vicissitudes of which the Russian writer took advantage. However, the consideration of the poetics turned out to be the Bunin's very special interpretation of the well-known plot. The article indicates the source of the short story, puts for the first time forward a detailed commentary on it, and offers an interpretation of its poetics based on literary comparative studies.

This paper focuses on the Czech translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poems by Milan Kundera which were published before Kundera's emigration to France in various Czech regional journals and newspapers. Kundera's translations are analysed and confronted with Czech renderings by Jiří Taufer, who later became the “court translator” of Mayakovsky in the Czechoslovakia. On the basis of critical assessment of both translation variants by means of lexical and stylistic analysis, it identifies the different attitudes of both translators, and – comparing both translation variants with the Russian original – it pays attention to the structural shifts that occurred during the translation process (mainly in case of Milan Kundera's rendering). The paper also brings a list of all known and traceable Czech translations of Mayakovsky by Kundera, and it tries to present Milan Kundera as a literary translator, an area rather overlooked by research in context of Kundera's novelistic work.

The aim of the present study, which is situated in the perspective of French-Polish contrastive research, is to examine the exclamatory nominal utterance Quelle galère! and its Polish functional equivalents: Co za koszmar! and Ale koszmar!. Press discourse and current usage of language were examined, especially on social media sites, Facebook, Twitter, and various forums. In both languages, these utterances have the same syntactic structure, consisting of an intensifier (quel (le), co za, ale) followed by a predicative noun: Quel (le)//Co za/ Ale + Npredicative. This syntactic pattern is characteristic of intensive formulas expressing the positive or negative attitude of the speaker. In both French and Polish, the formulas in question express the negative attitude and may be used either alone as a commentary to a situation not presented in the utterance, or in extended structures as a commentary to a situation presented in a rightor left-side context of the analyzed expression (dislocated syntactic structures).