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Translation, Paraphrase and Metrics in Old Church Slavonic Kontakia. I. Metrics of Old Church Slavonic Poetry A Critical Survey of Studies of the 19th-21st Centuries The main goal of the paper is to describe two main trends concerning the metrics of Old Church Slavonic liturgical and paraliturgical poetry. The first trend was established by Aleksej Ivanovič Sobolevskij at the beginning of the 20th century, who studied the metrics of ‘ Old Church Slavonic poems', comparing them with Byzantine models and counterparts. The second one has been represented by numerous articles by Roman Jacobson and his disciples and followers, who considered Old Church Slavonic hymnography to be influenced by folk poetry and inspired by the independent and original spirit of Slavonic writers. This led scholars in the middle and third quarter of the 20th century upon both sides of the ‘ Iron Curtain', to a so-called ‘ philological estrangement' from the main question, and also contributed to introduce the theory of the socalled ‘ kontakarian, or prayer, verse' in Church Slavonic literature, which has nothing to do with the metrics of Byzantine hymnography. In order to correctly study the metrics of Old Church Slavonic hymnography, one should first establish the rules and laws of adaptation of Byzantine metric models on Slavonic ground regarding musical performance of liturgical hymns and the different translation techniques applied by early Slavonic writers and ‘ bookmen'. Recent studies in which the problem of Old Church Slavonic metrics is methodologically and correctly solved are analyzed in the present paper. The metric hymnographic and paraliturgical compositions have comprehensively been observed.

The Vita of Ioann from Novgorod Genesis of the Text and Hagiographic Function The article focuses on the Vita of Ioann from Novgorod (Žitie Ioanna Novgorodskogo), a document composed in Novgorod at the end of the 15th century. The author considers the text within the historical context of its genesis and analyzes its literary form and function. In the middle of the 15th century Archbishop Ioann (1165-1186) became the symbol of Novgorod independence in the face of the centralizing policy of the Muscovite State. Evfimij II (1428 [ 1434]-1458) founded the local cult and ordered Paxomij the Serb to compose a liturgical office in celebration of the Ioann's memory. The gathering and literary (re-) elaboration of some ancient, pre-existing tales about Ioann began then, and these materials were included in the Vita. The Vita of Ioann (in its main redaction) is composed of three different parts : the Story about the sign of the Mother of God (Skazanie o Znamenii Bogorodicy), the Narration of Ioann's journey from Novgorod riding the devil (Povest ´ o putešestvii Ioanna Novgorodskogo na bese), and the Sermon on the discovery of the relics of the Saint (Slovo o projavlenii moščej svjatogo). Their inclusion in the biography created an apparently anomalous vita. Textual analysis shows the repetition and the unifying role of some topics (i. e. miracles) and the lack of others. Above all, however, the analysis of the Vita of Ioann establishes its substantial regularity, accurate elaboration, and conformity to the paradigms of traditional hagiography. In the 16th century the Vita of Ioann was included in metropolitan Makarij's Velikie minei chetii.

V. K. Trediakovskij and the French Theories About the ‘ Good Usage' During the 17th and 18th Centuries This article questions a rather widespread interpretation of the ‘ Good Usage' as seen by the early Trediakovskij. According to this interpretation, which is curiously based on a statement of the late Trediakovskij, the ideas of the young Russian scholar were dependent on Vaugelas and Buffier's theories concerning ‘ Good Usage'. Several elements from Trediakovskij's biography and his conception of rational purism speak more in favour of a direct influence on the late, but also on the early Trediakovskij, of the linguistic theories of the supporters of Port-Royal. Our study also brings into relief the different sources of Trediakovskij's Discourse on Eloquence (1745) and the hidden controversy between the Russian philologist and Bernard Lamy's ideas on the origin of the diversity of individual styles.

European context. One of its exemplifications originates from German Aufklärung writer Christoph Martin Wieland, author of The Abderites (1774), which argument was to be adapted in the first decades of the 19th century in other modern national contexts and languages : these ‘ Neo-Abderas' are the German Krähwinkel, Hungarian Peleske, Czech Kocourkov, Polish Ciemnogród, and so forth. This article scrutinizes the constellation of these acclimatizations and variations in Vormärz Central Europe. It aims at delineating a corpus of texts, especially in the field of the farce (in German, of course, from Kotzebue to Nestroy, but also in the cases of the Slovak writer Ján Chalúpka and Serb Jovan Sterija Popović), and of the humorous writings from heroicomic poems to the proses to be found in the nascent satirical press, mainly in Hungarian (József Gvadányi and József Gaál), Polish (Ignacy Krasicki), Czech (Josef Jaroslav Langer and Josef Kajetán Tyl but also František Jaromír Rubeš). Modes and processes of caricatural representations are analyzed in connection with the Neo-Abderas, a significant step of the satirical tradition, which has been so far unfairly neglected by critics. They will be apprehended in two linked dimensions : as a socio-political ‘ anti-myth', since the neoabderitan comic can be seen as the systemic counterpart to a ‘ serious' discourse on national identities, but also as an aesthetical temptation : the triviality they carry compels writers to kick into their own romantic pathos, anticipating the taste for kitsch and plebeian style in literary practices.

The ‘ Imaginary Germans' of Osip Senkovsky and Vladimir Odoevskij A Case Study of Romantic Imitation This paper explores the question of the influence of German literature and thought on two prose writers of the romantic period in Russia, Osip Senkovskij and Vladimir Odoevskij. Besides the strong intellectual influence of Germany which, as it has been often argued, constitutes the core of Russian romanticism, the article investigates the importance of being germanophile or germanophobiac in the modes of representation of the literary society during the 1820' s to the 1840' s. The point is to insist on the significance of the German reference not only as a sign of intimate knowledge of a foreign culture from the part of the educated society, but also as a way of expressing literary moods and transcending them. This shift in conception allows us to stress that German allusions also take the form of non serious, mundane imitations, which is used both as an instrument of distinction and as a common ground for dialogue.

Is the Circumstantial Phrase a Facultative Element in a Russian Sentence ? Since the grammatical circumstance concept has been introduced, it has been considered as a facultative part of the sentence. In fact, it is frequently so if to do a strictly syntactic analysis, but when information and discourse coherence are concerned, the speaker nearly always has to express the circumstances if he wants the addressee to understand properly what the matter is. In this article we consider the cases when a circumstance expression is necessary on the syntactic level, too. The circumstantial phrase can be the Rheme of the utterance, and if the expression of place, time or reason is deleted, there is no utterance at all. But when the addressee already knows the circumstances, we wonder why the speaker considers it necessary to repeat the already known information. However, he does it when he thinks that the addressee might forget about these circumstances, when he wants to define a time and space framework in which the utterance will be correct ; when the sentence is built on a binary opposition, a circumstance expression is compulsory on the syntactic level. So, we can say the circumstantial phrase is not as facultative as it is usually said. And it may be compulsory in some situations.