Słowa klucze kultury w sytuacji bliskiego sąsiedztwa kultur i powinowactwa językowego (dusza – serce)

The article refers to Anna Wierzbicka’s diagnosis about the existence of culture’s key words, and in particular – her opinion that the word душа ‘soul’ is the key of the Russian culture which explains the specificity of the Russian ethnopsychological model of the human being. Through a semantic and pragmatic analysis of contemporary and former Polish and Ruthenian lexis, idioms, and forms of the linguistic etiquette, the author discusses the possibility of treating the Polish word dusza ‘soul’ or the Polish word serce ‘heart’ as the key to understanding the Polish culture and ethnopsychological model of man. Former contacts with Ruthenian languages and cultures probably strengthened the significance of the concept of dusza in the Polish culture, which remains important even today. However, it is the concept of heart (serce) that can be successfully used to explain the vision of man and the Polish hierarchy of values.