This article discusses peasants’ attitude to cows, the foundations and mechanisms of this attitude’s semiotization, and the mythological and poetic interpretations of the images of the cow (and of the calf) in various types and genres of Belarusian traditional spiritual culture. Inna Shved examines folkloric and ethnographic material recorded in the Brest Polesie region in the period 1990–2018. She identifies and describes the “cow-bull code”, which covers a wide range of phenomena in the spiritual and material culture of peasants and relates to objects of peasant life. Deriving its origin from mythology, this code is reflected in ritual terminology and in folklore texts used in rituals and otherwise.

In classical social science paradigms, interpersonal conflicts are treated as impediment to achieving goals or as an inherent element of social life which result from the existence of hierarchy and inequalities building tensions in the social structure. It is not infrequently acknowledged that the culture constitute an armor protecting people against their animal nature, which is the source of aggression. It seems that it is rather the armor which allows legitimizing violence through the use of altruistic punishment. The authors put under discussion the problem of aggressive behavior of a modern man from the evolutionary perspective. Is the occurrence of mobbing, harassment, symbolic violence or stigmatization of strangers and discrimination against minorities a result of conditions common to a man and other hominids shaped over millions of years, or the aftermath of activation of the mechanism of extermination of other species by the representatives of our species which took place tens of thousands years ago? Homo sapiens does not belong to predators, which is the reason why both intraspecies and interspecies manifestations of aggression results in brutality, but also in moral dilemmas for this ape endowed with empathy.

Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie wizerunku węża w literaturze staroskandynawskiej oraz analiza jego poszczególnych wyobrażeń w literaturze staronordyckiej. W artykule zawarta jest dogłębna analiza obrazu zwierzęcia w ważnych tekstach Północy, takich jak mit stworzenia i utworów ściśle z nim związanych. Ponadto przedstawione zostają przykłady zaczerpnięte z najistotniejszych sag legendarnych: Sagi o Wolsungach oraz Sagi o Ragnarze Lodbroku. Węże okazują się nie tylko przerażające, lecz także majestatyczne i przede wszystkim wszechobecne w mitologii askandynawskiej.

The article presents and discusses phenomena related to fauna appearing in Szymon Szymonowic’s bucolic poetry. The subject of the analysis is the works published in the collection Sielanki i pozostałe wiersze polskie [Idylls and Other Polish Poems]. The bestiary from the poems of this Renaissance author, the creator of the Polish idyll, is analyzed in the context of biblical and mythical tradition. Attention is also paid to the Old-Polish and European cultural heritage, conventional
and convention-breaking approaches, and affiliations with Polish-Russian ethnography. In the article, natural and cultural dimensions of animal and human relations are also explored. The exemplification of the animals found in Szymonowic’s idylls has also made it possible to determine the functions they play in the world created in those works.

This study addresses “The Pigeon”, a novella by Patrick Süskind. Its protagonist is Jonathan Noel, an aged bank porter. This man subjected his whole life to the regime of work, discipline and routine, while limiting his social relations to the minimum. However, one day his predictable existence is disrupted by a pigeon appearing at the threshold of his room. It triggers a series of events followed by fatal outcomes. The protagonist’s response to the pigeon surprises and opens space for psychological considerations of Jonathan’s nature. The bird disorganizes his life forcing him to undertake new, risky actions that are far from his habits. In my article I undertake an attempt to analyze the reasons underlying the protagonist’s phobias and his internal conflict that lead him to total alienation and estrangement. The phenomenon of solitude as well an attempt to understand the pigeon metaphor and its function in the novella make a significant aspect of my considerations.

Pigeons are not domestic animals. They often live in the centers of big cities — like Paris — waiting for food. Birds are associated with billing, mating dance and diseases. They are so-called nuisance animals. Nevertheless, these animals are important in William Wharton’s books. There are multiple viewpoints how to analyze them — as a part of the landscape, witnesses of newborn affection between Mirabelle and Jacques or independent characters. Wharton emphasizes the presence of birds in the novel Last Lovers. Mirabelle has been taking care of pigeons for thirty years. Her care of them contrasts sharply with Jacques’ views. He does not like pigeons at first because they interrupt him and change his creative vision of the Statue of Diderot in the background. When the characters meet, the birds will consider it.

In nineteenth-century literature, cats were presented as witch helpers (familiar spirits or animal guides) and Satan’s tools. These motifs have been freely used by modern writers specializing in the fantasy genre. They have created many cat protagonists inspired by mythology, medieval tradition and witch-hunting documents. This list of references explains why literary cats are often associated with dark magic. The purpose of this article is to show the connection between culture and literature that will explain the modern idea of the magic cat.

The main objective of this paper is to pinpoint the possible linguistic expressions of animals and human-animal relations. The analysis is based on two publications documenting the growing interest of literature in environmental issues: Michał Książek’s “Droga 816” (2015) and “Północny wschód” (2017). They represent the so-called ‘nature writing’: a well-established literary tradition in the Anglo-American literature, little-known in Polish literary landscape.

Eating (consumption) is a life activity characteristic of both humans and animals. Therefore, it determines a certain common area combining two different perspectives of interdisciplinary research, which are respectively referred to as food studies and animal studies. The article focuses on the discussion of the most common linguistic stereotypes related to eating. On the basis of the analysis of the most frequently used Polish phraseologisms, including verbs ‘eat’ and ‘gobble’, an attempt will be made to detect the basic connotative components of their meaning, and at the same time, to reconstruct the emerging linguistic image of food stemming from them. In the course of the analysis of the investigated language sample, the author uses selected research procedures formulated in the area of culture semantics (elements of cognitive definition, notational metaphor, animalisation).

Phytonyms are an extremely interesting category of lexis and they contain the significant semantic properties of the Polish language. Trying to recreate the nomination process of individual species, we see how much it depends on the perception of man and observation of the surrounding reality. The meanings contained in the colloquial, dialectical and botanical names of plants reveal to us an extremely rich and colorful world observed by man. Detailed semantic analysis of names such as jaskółcze ziele, kaczeniec, kurzyślad, kacze pyski, rdest ptasi, ptasie oczko and others leads to surprising conclusions – plant names often carry metaphorical content based on sensory perception and experience, and also many times on associations connecting flora with the world of birds. In her speech, the author will show that the system of nominating plants around us is largely based on the conceptualization of the world by people and the categorization of the nearest reality known to man.

Nota o książce: Katja M. Guenther: The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2020. 295 pp.