The object of this study is a translation from Polish to Russian of the Polish historian Maciej Stryjkowski’s Kronika Polska, Litewska, Żmódzka i wszystkiej Rusi, made at the Diplomatic Chancellery in Moscow in 1673–79. The original of the chronicle, which relates the origin and early history of the Slavs, was published in 1582. This Russian translation, as well as the other East Slavic translations that are also discussed here, is preserved only in manuscripts, and only small excerpts have previously been published. In the thesis, the twelve extant manuscripts of the 1673–79 translation are described and divided into three groups based on variant readings. It also includes an edition of three chapters of the translation, based on a manuscript kept in Uppsala University Library. There was no standardized written language in 17th-century Russia. Instead, there were several co-existing norms, and the choice depended on the text genre. This study shows that the language of the edited chapters contains both originally Church Slavonic and East Slavic linguistic features, distributed in a way that is typical of the so-called hybrid register. Furthermore, some features vary greatly between manuscripts and between scribes within the manuscripts, which shows that the hybrid register allowed a certain degree of variation. The translation was probably the joint work of several translators. Some minor changes were made in the text during the translation work, syntactic structures not found in the Polish original were occasionally used to emphasize the bookish character of the text, and measurements, names etc. were adapted to Russian norms. Nevertheless, influence from the Polish original can sometimes be noticed on the lexical and syntactic levels. All in all, this thesis is a comprehensive study of the language of the translated chronicle, which is a representative 17th-century text.

The aim of this dissertation is to describe the sphere of use of the Russian Instrumental case in written sources from the eighteenth century. The research is based on approximately 11,300 instances of the use of the Instrumental and almost 2,400 constructions with other cases, excerpted from documents of various genres and styles. The corpus includes texts written by forty eighteenth-century authors, and contains works of poetry and drama, literary prose, letters, memoirs and learned tracts. Previous studies of the Instrumental case have in the main dealt with the development of the system of its meanings in the Old Russian period, or else have described its condition in modern times. The present work attempts to systematise its most typical uses and to trace the changes in the function of the Instrumental that took place during the period when a national literary language was coming into being in Russia. The research is primarily focused on the competition between the Instrumental case and other means of expression of particular meanings. In particular it describes (with statistical data) the variation in case forms within the predicate, with the function of an object, and also of the agent in passive constructions. A detailed description is given of those meanings of the Instrumental which are known from the earliest period and still in active use in the eighteenth century, but nowadays perceived as archaic. The most important of these are the Instrumental of cause, and also various uses of the Instrumental without a preposition to indicate time or place.

The materials examined here consist of 121 Russian letters dating from 1700-1715. The present study aims to  define a stage in linguistic evolution and analyze the morphological heterogeneity in the textual corpus. The letters are divided into three categories: private, semiofficial, and official. All nomina (substantives, adjectives, pronouns, and numerals) are registered and their occurrences processed statistically case by grammatical case. The focus is on linguistic features where a choice is possible and variation is in evidence. Conservatism asserts itself primarily in strongly standardized texts such as the official correspondence, while  phonetic spelling reflecting akanie and dialectally influenced syncretism between different cases (e.g., the GDLsg) is observable mainly in the private letters, which consitute the least standardized category. There is a trend break among u-genitives and u-locatives, where our findings indicate that the u-ending is losing ground. A statistically established correlation between declensional type and the presence/absence of a coordinated adjunct is noted in the instrumental plural of masculine o-, jo-stems. The choice of the archaizing Ipl-ending suggests that repetition of the –mi- element is perceived to be redundant. In the singular paradigm of the adjective the feminine instrumental forms are strongly conservative, and the modern short ending occurs in only a few instances. In the nominative plural the modern ending –ye, -ie dominates for all cases and in all letter categories. The use of samyj for the comparative degree is not particularly prominent in these 18th-century letters. Because this descriptive comparison type developed in the 17th century, its use could have been expected to rise in the 18th, but our materials do not indicate any such increase. With few exceptions, pronouns generally display forms corresponding to modern usage. One notable deviation is the occurrence of a pronoun with an adjectival ending in the genitive singular (tago), but it is an idiosyncratic feature. Numerals for the most part correspond to modern usage, although their low frequency does not invite generalizations. / <p>978-91-86071-61-5 (del 1), 978-91-86071--62-2 (del 2), 978-91-86071-63-9 (del 1-2)</p>

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