Publications

Статья посвящена описанию феномена агитпропа в современном искусстве.

Статья посвящена описания художественныъ институций в России.

There is a paradox in the aftermath of the global imperial crisis in the region of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. The Habsburg Empire which had been thought about as the katechon of future world of federalism broke into nation-states with regimes of accommodation and repression of national minorities. The Russian Empire which had been thought about as the future centralized nation-state transformed into a federation with layered forms of autonomy and decentralization. The exploration of this paradox begins with the critique of the image of the Russian Empire as a centralized and centralizing state and exploration of inclusive and differentiated governance and ways in which this political formation was reflected in political discourses of reformist and oppositional movements which in one way or another imagined the post-imperial order. The paper then traces the constitutional debates in the revolutionary contexts of 1905 and 1917 and assesses how these debates reflected local and global discourses of imagining the post-imperial order and how they were incorporated into the constitutions adopted on the territory of the former Russian Empire. The global imperial crisis which brought down the Qing, Russian, Ottoman, German and Habsburg empires stimulated imagination of post-imperial order not only in the named contexts, but also in the British, French and other cases. The circulation and synthesis of ideas fostered by the miscellany of the crumbling empires and the diversity within each of them produced a great variety of imaginations. The non-Soviet constitutional projects of 1917–1921 and the Soviet constitutions of 1918 and 1924 incorporated the experience of the Russian Empire and other imperial and post-imperial formations. The Constitution of the Far Eastern Republic, for instance, borrowed the concept of non-territorial autonomy from the Ukrainian Constitution of 1918, while the ineffectiveness of the formal right to territorial autonomy resembled that in the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920. The multilateral transfers and borrowings, both from the Russian imperial and other contexts, resulted in the departure of the 1924 Constitution of the Soviet Union from the initial Bolshevik plans. Instead of establishing a non-national class-centered formation, it became a mere preamble to a multinational confederation to be developed by its sovereign participants, which included two federations.

Since the nineteenth century, access to and the development of natural

resources became an important element of national and international politics. Resource

security emerged as an issue vital to national security; and resource competition and

crises gave rise to international tensions as well as to technological innovation and new

modes of transnational cooperation. This paper discusses ongoing collaborative research

activities in the Tensions of Europe network. Three broader themes are presented: (1)

perceptions and constructions of resources, resource crises, and resource futures; (2)

globalized resource chains and environmental transformation; and (3) managing crises:

technologies, expertise, and the politics of natural resources.

In the Archive of St Petersburg Institute of History, a fourteenth-century codex of Manuel Moschopulos' Greek grammar is kept (Western European Department, 1/666). The article attempts to trace back its history.

Статья посвящена описанию современного художественного контекста Москвы.

The chapter is devoted to the study of surrealist exhibitions and the collective creativity of surrealists.

The article suggests using the «discursive emblem» term, understood as a specially organised way of presenting literary commonplaces, doctrinal or philosophical principles, which is also capable of structuring texts of various genres. Article presents an overview of scientific approaches to postulating and solving the problem of emblem, presented in a literary text. Based on that, we introduce a discursive notion of emblems, allowing us to usefully fit it not as a inscription–image–subcription «triad», but as a non–visualised symbolic construct. Article then analyses premises for diffusion of emblematics in literature and there are presented some theoretical notes and remarks on conceptist nature of emblematics and on dominant role of metaphor in baroque poetics and aesthetics, all of which leads the author to conclude that emblematics took part in forming a unique poetic style. Agrippa d’Aubigné’s “Avantures du Baron de Faeneste” are taken as a specimen of a baroque work of emblematic nature and the two main protagonists – Enay and Faeneste – are shown to have served as prototypes of two key emblematic aspects: verbal and visual. It is argued that their charactonyms, their speeches and what happens to them demonstrates dialogics of Word and Image not only in an emblematic, but also in religious aspects of the XVIIth century: more specifically, in contrasting a catholic view of visuality against a protestant’s one. In conclusion three key components of the text are singled out: a visual (Faeneste), verbal (Enay) and the total process of emblematic reading, showing characters’ genuine relationships with the world around them.

The article deals with the problem of the relationship between various reading strategies by the censor and ideas about his social role during the pre-reform era of the late 1850s. The authors explore on the one hand the curious history of the journal publication of essays by P.M. Kovalevskij, a nephew of the minister of public education, in 1858, which is reconstructed on the basis of censorship documents, and on the other hand the colourful review by P.A. Efremov. Thus they demonstrate the difficulties I.A. Gončarov as a censor was faced with, who, being forced to remain in the confines of the persistent censorship practices of “petty”, “hypercritical” reading, tried to reform them in accordance with the new circumstances and his literary persuasions.

Fear of stars was frequently expressed at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It was rooted both in apocalyptic fears and in the rejection of modern cosmology current at that time. Besides, morbid fears, of great interest to the contemporary psychiatry, included the so-called “astraphobia”, fear of lightning, gradually re-interpreted as fear of stars, which contributed to the attention to the topic. All of these contexts have to be taken into account when commenting on Andrej Belyj’s “Sphynx” (1905) and “Second Symphony (Dramatical)” (1902).

This article explores the reader community in surrealism. Surrealism, a inherently verbal and literary movement, devotes special attention to reading: quotes and allusions, the "lives" of poets play a key role in the surrealistic works. However, the ideology of surrealism is constantly changing, becoming more complicated, undergoing theoretical evolution, and the movement itself, after verbal practices, turns first to visual and then to hybrid forms of interaction. The increasing complexity of the theory leads to the formation of a special “prepared” “reader” whose perception is “brought up” by surrealistic techniques. The key here is the development of special sensuality - a kind of hybrid perception of reality, due to the complexity of the surrealist theory. The opposition of the author / reader is gradually being destroyed by the surrealists, and the community of surrealists and their readers takes on the form of an interpreting community (S. Fish).

Avant-garde art, and especially surrealism, is characterized by a specific set of collective practices aimed at realizing non-artistic goals: gaining legitimacy, fighting competitors, and acquiring symbolic power. However, sometimes collective statements and interactions serve to reveal the creative potential of both the entire group and its individual members. For surrealists, the period of “creative collective interactions” falls mainly on the 1920s, and the group in this period is perceived as a field of artistic experiment. Together, surrealists create a number of works, hone techniques and develop a surreal canon. The influence of collective thinking on individual creativity in the 1920s leads to the fact that the surrealists begin to introduce references to the members of the group into non-collective works, actually turning them into heroes of the novel, now making them part of a mutable surreal text.

Examples of such inclusion of group members in an artistic text can be considered works of R. Desnos “Rrose Sélavy” and J.-A. Boiffard “Nomenclature”: in them, the authors deliberately introduce the names of the surrealists, in order to then transform them in the spirit of automatic writing. On the one hand, the appearance of proper names in the texts serves to consolidate the group, create and strengthen intra-group ties, but, on the other hand, such “quoting” is a guarantee of surrealism and confirms the materiality of the word game. Being a part of the surreal world, the surrealist by his presence in it proves the reality of its existence.

The paper discusses plural forms of Russian nouns (in particular, of the surnames) like vsjakie tam Ivanovy (‘various Ivanovs’, ‘all sorts of Ivanovs’), expressing negative opinion about the referents. The co-occurrence patterns of the Pl.Pej forms by Web-corpus data is revealed. Pl.Pej forms foremost fit together with universal quantifiers including ‘all’, ‘all of these’ etc., and can be easily integrate in quantificational expressions, e.g., combinations with numerals, collective nouns, and expressions that include number words like mnogo (‘many’). These elements are able to convey and support the meaning of multiplicity, non-uniqueness of the objects, denoted by forms of Pl.Pej. Among the usages of Pl.Pej the names of “oligarchs” and “right-wing, liberal politicians” predominate. The form mainly appears in heavily politicized texts. The studied form and co-occurrence patterns are a legacy of the Soviet sociopolitical discourse and originate from the language of Soviet newspapers. The Pl.Pej form is still a part of an aggressive leftist discourse, directed against a “group of the rich”. The addressant of such discourse is a representative of a “group of the poor, oppressed, socially humiliated”.

Digital technologies provide new possibilities for studying cultural heritage. Thus, literature research involving large text corpora allows to set and solve theoretical problems which previously had no prospects for their decision. For example, it has become possible to model the literary system for some defi-nite literary period (i.e., for the Silver Age of Russian literature) and to classify prose writers according to their stylistic features. And more than that, it allows to solve more general theoretical problems. The given research was conducted on Russian literary texts of the early 20th century. The sample included 100 short stories by 100 different writers. The measurements were carried out for 5 syntactic variables. For each of these distributions, the most popular statistics were calculated. Basing on these data, we consider empirical verification of Lyapunov's central limit theorem (CLT). The article validates the effectiveness of CLT theorem and the conditions for its implementation. Besides the normal (Gaussian) function we used another analytical model — the Hausstein func-tion. It turned out that both theoretical distributions for each of five variables do not contradict the experimental data. However, the alternative analytical model (Hausstein function) has shown even better agreement with the experimental data. The obtained results may be used in computational linguistic studies and for research of Russian literary heritage.

A short undated note to Vladimir Beneševič filed under 192.2.43.1r and housed in St Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences is a postcard written by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and dispatched at some point in the course of the correspondence around what turns out to be a request for photographs of certain Sinai MSS. Further archival documents and published letters instrumental in setting the scene are cited to the result that the key to the correct understanding of the note offered for publication here lies in the Zutritt to the Sinai holdings Beneševič enjoyed.

This article explores the intellectual history of the concept of “feeling of justice” and related concepts and the attempts to make them central to legal practice in the context of early 20th century Russia. It starts by tracing the emergence of new modes of thinking about judicial emotion in fin-de-siècle Russian Empire and accounts for both international and local influences on these ideas. It further examines the development of these theories after the 1917 Russian Revolution and notes both continuities and ruptures across this revolutionary divide. Finally, the article explores the attempts to put these radical ideas into practice by focusing on the experimental legal model of “revolutionary justice” that was employed in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1922 which highlights the discrepancies between bold utopian projects and harsh material realities of the revolutionary period.