The twenty-three essays contained in the volume represent the contributions of the Italian delegation to the XVI International Congress of Slavists, which takes place in Belgrade in August 2018. Written in Italian, English, Russian and Serbian, the essays are divided into three sections: linguistics, Slavic philology and literatures. As the range of themes touched is very wide, so is their chronological span, which goes from the pre- and protohistoric epoch to the present day. The topics covered in fact extend from the Proto-Slavic to the writing, linguistic and literary traditions of the ecclesiastical Slavic civilization, from the linguistic and cultural relations between Italy and Russia to a particular Illyrian dictionary of the eighteenth century. In the field of synchronic linguistics we find essays in which questions of dialectology and sociolinguistics are explored in the border area between Ukraine and Belarus, and then the ways of expressing the concept of completeness in Russian, some concessive constructs of Russian studied with the methods of ' constructionist grammar ', a particular aspect of the Russian and Bulgarian verbal systems, and the different suffixes used in the formation of aspectual pairs in the Resian dialect. In the literary field, on the other hand, it ranges from Gumilev and Chlebnikov to essays that talk about literature and ecology, from Armenian writers who write in Russian to the neo-Latin poem "Il canto del bisonte" and to humanistic and Renaissance reflections in modern Ukrainian |