David S. Danaher is Professor of Slavic Studies in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His teaching and research interests include cultural and cognitive linguistics, Václav Havel and the Central European culture of dissent, and Slavic science fiction. He is currently co-editing a volume tentatively titled Václav Havel’s Meanings: His Key Words, Their Context and Legacy.

Michal Ajvaz was born on October 30, 1949 in Prague. His father was a Crimean Karaim and his mother was an Austrian Czech. He graduated from Charles University in 1973. During the 1970s and 1980s Ajvaz worked at various jobs, as a janitor, night watchman, and pump attendant and did not publish his first book until 1989. Currently he is a researcher in philosophy at Prague’s Center for Theoretical Studies of Charles University and Academy of Science of the Czech Republic. He has published a book of poetry, a book of short stories, six novels, including Druhé město, 1993 (The Other City, 2009) and Zlatý věk (The Golden Age, 2010), books on Jacques Derrida and Edmund Husserl, an extensive book of philosophy Kosmos jako sebeutváření (The Cosmos as a Self-creating, 2007) and three books of philosophical correspondence with Ivan Havel. His books of fiction have been translated into twenty-one languages.

Paul, the protagonist of Michal Ajvaz’s novel Lucemburská zahrada (The Garden of Luxembourg), has his life upended by a single typo. An accidental combination of letters brings Paul in contact with the mysterious Yggur language that exerts an inexorable transformative power. This article demonstrates how Ajvaz has engineered Yggur to wield its power over Paul, thereby showing the reader that potent messages can be embedded in seemingly random patterns. I reveal that Yggur is a “real” language and that it is possible to interpret it, despite the obvious (and probably intentional) shortcomings of the documentation presented by the author. I argue that further important factors in the spell of Yggur are the facts that it is an apriori constructed language (not transparently derived from any known language) and that it is, with a few minor exceptions, typologically normative for a human language. This article details the genius of Ajvaz’s creation and addresses the reason why the author went to such pains to create something that most readers will never bother to make sense of.

Laura Janda, since earning her PhD in Slavic Linguistics at UCLA in 1984, has taught at UCLA, the University of Rochester, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and since 2008 has been employed as professor of Russian at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. Janda has been a Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters since 2018, and has published on a wide range of topics mostly focused on the linguistic analysis of Slavic languages from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.

This is a companion piece to Laura Janda’s article in the same volume. Using some of the rich and varied literary and philosophical allusions in Lucemburská zahrada (e.g. Plotinus, Hölderlin, Kitaro, Husserl, de Mandiargues, Ladislav Klíma), as well as his personal correspondence with Michal Ajvaz from 2017-18, the author attempts to explain why the Yggur language was invented and what it is doing in the novel. Also included are the reasons as to why this explanation can only be of limited nature.

Andrei Rogatchevski is Professor of Russian Literature and Culture at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. He has a long-standing interest in Czech language and occasionally writes about Czech film and theatre productions. He has reviewed Czech fiction for EuropeNow, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement.

In Vyrozumění (Memorandum) Václav Havel introduces Ptydepe, an artificial language. In this play, Ptydepe is conceived as a much more “precise” language than natural languages – its grammar is “maximally rational” and its words tend to be long and numerous because they are maximally (redundantly) differentiated from one another. Ptydepe lacks not only homonyms, but also words that are minimally differentiated. Use of this language leads to increasingly long texts and becomes thus unusable. Finally, it is replaced by Chorukor, another artificial language built on similarity, which leads to extreme ambiguity.

This study examines functions of Ptydepe in the play from several angles: direct observation of the Ptydepe texts, the metalinguistic description of the language, the discourse features of the characters’ first language (L1), and a comparison between Ptydepe and socialist political speeches. The quantitative analysis of Ptydepe empirically demonstrates the degree to which Ptydepe departs from a natural language. Both qualitative and quantitative data show the mechanism by which language can be manipulated to the point of sheer automation. Ptydepe exposes the extreme essence of the socialist language, which in turn reveals features of a more subtle manipulative language found elsewhere, including in a democratic political system.

Masako Ueda Fidler is Professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University. As a specialist in sound symbolism, she published the book Onomatopoeia in Czech: A Conceptualization of Sound and Its Connections to Grammar and Discourse (2014, Slavica Publishers), which received the 2015 AATSEEL Award for Best Book in Linguistics. Fidler’s research interest is in discourse analysis dealing with topics such as the representation of minority languages in the Czech media and political speeches in the socialist Czechoslovakia. Her research collaboration with Václav Cvrček includes a co-edited book on corpus-based analysis in languages with rich inflection (Taming the Corpus: From Inflection and Lexis to Interpretation, 2018, Springer).

Václav Cvrček is Associate Professor of the Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. He focuses on corpus linguistics and quantitative analysis of language. Besides the corpus-assisted discourse studies, Cvrček’s main interests involve corpus-based methodology, descriptive grammar of Czech and language variation. He is the leading author of the first corpus-based grammar of Czech (Mluvnice současné češtiny (Grammar of Contemporary Czech), 2010, Karolinum). Another book on language variation (Registry v češtině (Registers in Czech), Nakladatelství Lidové noviny), for which he is also the leading author, is forthcoming.

Among Evgenii Baratynsky’s lyric poems, “Nedonosok” (“The Stillborn,” 1835) is famous for being eccentric and enigmatic. The questions I pose in this article concern the literary genesis of “Nedonosok” and its generic strangeness. Taken separately, every line and every stanza of the poem is semantically clear; what causes us to perceive the text as a whole as enigmatic? What leaves the reader, post-reading, with a feeling that there must be more to what the poem says? I explore the pockets of ambiguity that might be responsible for this effect: lexical ambiguity (what did the word nedonosok communicate to Baratynsky’s contemporaries when used directly and figuratively?); generic ambiguity (what is it that signals that “Nedonosok” is not a canonical lyric poem?); and the pragmatic ambiguity related to the text’s speech situation (who is speaking in “Nedonosok,” and to whom?).

О несвоевременном: смерть, роды и стихи в «Недоноске» Баратынского

Дарья Хитрова

Стихотворение Баратынского «Недоносок» (1835) в корпусе его сочинений представляется уникальным в силу своей предзаданной энигматичности. Работая с текстами той поры, исследователь редко сталкивается с задачей, хорошо известной, например, мандельштамоведам – расшифровки текста. «Прекрасная ясность» «школы гармонической точности» скорее сопротивляется комментарию, чем провоцирует разгадывание. «Недоносок» стоит признать исключением: ясный в рамках строки или строфы, цельный текст остается темным до самого конца, побуждая к разгадке. Этот прием сам по себе нуждается в анализе, для которого автор статьи привлекает металитературные контексты употребления слова «недоносок», литературную позицию Баратынского и его отношение к «легкой поэзии», разбор речевой ситуации текста, представляющей собой сплав лирической и драматической установок, а также парадоксальной темпоральной структуры финала стихотворения.

Daria Khitrova is Associate Professor in the Slavic Department at Harvard University. She has published over twenty scholarly articles on a variety of different topics, from Russian poetry and film to the history of dance. She recently published her first book, Lyric Complicity: Poetry and Readers in the Golden Age of Russian Literature (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019).