The article concerns very typical issues of Ludmila Ulitskaya’s prose, namely childhood and maturity as well as relationship between human and things (objects).

In the novel entitled The Big Green Tent the process of moral development is described. It involves, among other things, sudden events of crucial and initiatory character, which have the features of special ritual. During rituals the heroes are submitted to physical and mental resilience tests.

There are some objects inherent to heroes’ initiation. In the novel they go beyond the inanimate matter, which is passive and submitted to human will. They are personified, have their own history and what is most important they are the driving force, the initiators of turning points which affect heroes’ future. Those objects are: a camera, skates and a knife.

Revealing the objects’ “agency” is one of main aims of the article. Agency of above mentioned objects manifests itself by the way they influence heroes’ behavior, interfere in their future and play significant role in heroes’ development to maturity. 

The main aim of the article is to show complicated processes of self-identifi cation of Croats living in Bosnia and Herzegovina and to analyze the defi nition of national and cultural identity of Croats from Bosnia and Herzegovina. This question interests me especially in the context of recent political changes in Croatia but also deepening economic crisis, which has caused a major social unrest in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Changing the course of Croatian offi cial policy in 2015 brought to the public the need of redefi ning the concept of being Croatian. Also in the case of the Bosnian Croats – consistently infl uenced by strong Croatian national policy approaching them since the 90s of the twentieth century by the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). In such turbulent times one may again come up with very up-to-date questions about whether the true homeland of Bosnian Croats could be only Croatia, or Bosnian Croats can be Bosniaks too, because it is still possible for Bosnia to be „Croatian, Serbian, Muslim” at the same time. National identity is the example of the Bosnian Croats tool used in everyday political clashes. As the researcher of culture I am the most of all interested in how it is defi ned and manifested in the public space. An important point of reference for my research is Ivan Lovrenovic’s publications, he fi rst described the situation of Croatians in Bosnia in such a comprehensive way.

The article presents an attempt to answer the question whether Polish-Croatian translation school can be discussed within the framework of literary translation. Features of the potentially existing school are discussed, namely, the conditions of formation and functioning, chronological and geographical scope, accomplishments in the area of translation and translation studies, as well as the impact on the contemporary translation practice and teaching translation. There are several arguments in favour of the existence of the Polish-Croatian translation school. For example translators from 60s and 70s used a specifi c strategy for translating culturally marked elements (terms specifi c for a given culture, that are not present in the other) defi ned here as didactical source-orientation. Although neither their traductological discourse nor the ideal of a translator-popularizer (meaning that they weren’t only translators but also authors of guides, organisers of cultural events, etc.) differs broadly enough from the Polish equivalents to advocate distinctiveness of those translation schools.