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.

Настоящее учебное пособие предназначено для  обучения академическим навыкам письма и подготовки к сдаче международного экзамена IELTS по аспектy «Академическое письмо».  

Целью пособия является формирование и закрепление академических навыков, необходимых для создания  англоязычных текстов учебной и научной направленности на микро и макроуровнях. Пособие направлено  на формирование компетенций, необходимых для использования английского языка в учебной, научной, и профессиональной деятельности. Пособие включает разделы, посвященные особенностям написания параграфа, изучения структуры академического эссе, а также эссе формата международного экзамена IELTS.

Материал пособия рекомендуется использовать для аудиторной и самостоятельной работы  студентов. Пособие может быть полезно студентам преподавателям  вузов,  а также для всех желающих приобрести академические навыки письма на английском языке.

Focusing on the accelerated use of limestone as a building material in Russia, and government sponsored scientific studies of widespread limestone deposits throughout the nineteenth-century, this contribution investigates the process of transforming common rocks into measurable and valuable natural resources indispensable for actualizing industrial development on a national scale. Special attention is given to the production of a new body of expert knowledge on the specific properties, qualities and practical uses of raw stone materials, to the actors involved in producing this knowledge, and to their crucial role in forming a scientific support system for the mining and construction industries, which gradually developed an institutional hierarchy in its own right. One of the important points of the article is, on the one hand, to show that scientific engagement with the material was closely interrelated to ‘resource nationalism’ policies that became an influential driving force of material sciences institutionalization on the national scale. On the other hand, it is argued that the international circulation of knowledge, technics, and standardization of testing procedures also greatly influenced that process.

This article argues that the history of Russian constitutional and parliamentary reform in the early 20th century can be cast in a new light in view of the global transformation of political life under the challenge of imperial diversity and mass politics. The article points out that imperial diversity as a challenge to democratic government was not unique to the Russian Empire. The character of the Russian Empire was marked by peculiarities; it was shaped by composite and hybrid imperial space, which placed the challenge of imperial diversity at the center of political practices and imaginaries. The article traces the history of political reform in the Russian Empire in the early 20th century focusing on the reform of the Sejm of the Grand Duchy of Finland and the novel practices and political imaginaries of imperial diversity in the first and second State Duma. The exploration of the history of the constitutional reform in the Russian Empire of early 20th century demonstrates that rather than being absolute antagonists to representative government, Russian imperial politics and traditions of imperial sovereignty nested possibilities of compromise and redefinition of political solidarity in the space of diversity.

Keywords History of the Russian Empire, history of the State Duma, global history of parliamentarism, pseudo-constitutionalism, Russian liberalism

In the late 18th century the word “legenda” entered the Russian language, and several decades later it started to be used by Russian writers as a generic label. The present paper analyses short prosaic texts written in the 1820-1830 with this label in their titles or subtitles. The aim of the research is to ascertain whether such texts followed a similar generic pattern. As the literary legend was a fully developed genre in the late 19th century Russian literature, the research will presumably enable us to trace the formation of the genre. I argue that the chosen texts share a network of constituent properties, which indicates their generic cognateness and allows the reader to attribute them as literary legends. Roughly, the Russian literary legend of the 1820-s1840-s may be characterized as a historical narrative relating some extraordinary, often criminal events. Though the audience is likely to disbelieve the story, the narrator finds it necessary to communicate it, as it contains an important truth or idea missing from conventional sources. Despite the similarity of the generic pattern, the genre had fuzzy boundaries in the first half of the 19th century, which is revealed in numerous title alterations, inconsistency in using cognate labels (skazanie, predanie, byl’), absence of legend cycles, and insufficient speculations on the genre. However, it can be concluded that the literary legend of the time was a grain from which the late 19th century genre developed. 

Статья посвящена описанию современного художественного контекста Москвы.

The monograph is the result of the joint efforts of linguistic scientists working in different cities of our country and abroad. It presents the materials of a scientific discussion on the problem indicated in its title: rationality and emotionality of language and speech. The study of these areas relates to cardinal and quite popular linguistic problems, since they are associated with feelings and attitudes towards the addressee and subject of speech. But despite the good luck and achievements in the field of their study, there are still many gaps waiting to be filled with new research. Rethinking the well-known and repeatedly discussed linguistic material in this direction can therefore help to clarify information about it in the general linguistic plan.

Ethnographic conceptualism takes its cue from conceptual art and uses

artistic interventions as an anthropological research tool. The term

‘ethnographic conceptualism’ was coined to sum up the method of the

exhibition project Gifts to Soviet Leaders (Kremlin Museum, Moscow

2006) as simultaneously a reflection on the vast and complex economy

of public gifts to heads of Soviet state, a distinctly post-Soviet political

and cultural artefact, and as a tool for ethnography of post-socialism.

This article explores ethnographic conceptualism’s contribution to

performativity theory. I look at how it makes visible the tension between

what such projects perform and describe. In doing so, I use

ethnographic conceptualism as a vantage point to revisit the

foundational distinction of performativity theory between the constative

and performative statements (Austin). Drawing in this artistic and

research method, I redefine the performative, not as a domain or a type

of utterance that is distinct from the constative, but as an act of drawing

this distinction.

This paper explores word frequency patterns when considering text length, authorship and random distortion of texts. Through a series of experiments, we determined an optimal text size, a phenomenon that was predicted by George Zipf, which sees a minimal discrepancy between calculated and observed frequencies. A graphic representation allowed a plausible explanation behind the existence of this phenomenon. Working on the assumption that distorted texts might disobey Zipf's Law, we explored correlations among frequencies and text entirety compared to text distortions. Results revealed the crucial role of text length for maintaining Zipfian distribution: randomly chosen sets of words and fragmentary texts of optimal size still obey Zipf's Law. Findings show that authorship manifests itself through the author constant, defined as the relative frequency of the most frequent words, which remains constant throughout the works of any given author, including randomly chosen text chunks and fragments of sentences of various sizes.

This chapter builds on the author’s previous work on the history of marginalized social groups, such as users of psychoactive drugs, female criminal offenders and GULAG prisoners. Taking the notion of ‘positionality’ as the point of departure, it traverses some of the methodological and ethical issues arising from the author’s experience in writing and publishing on such sensitive topics in the Russian context.

Exposure to violence has been shown to negatively affect mental health and well-being. The goal of this Facebook-based study was to describe the rates of exposure to violence in a sample of Russian adults and to assess the impact of these experiences on subjective well-being and victimization-related psychological distress. Three types of victimization were assessed: physical assault by a stranger, physical assault by someone known to victim, and nonconsensual sexual experiences. The 5-item World Health Organization Well-Being Index (WHO-5) was used to assess subjective well-being, and Primary Care PTSD Screen (PC-PTSD) was employed as an indicator of victimization-related psychological distress. Data were obtained from 6,724 Russian-speaking Facebook users. Significant levels of lifetime victimization were reported by the study participants. Lifetime physical assault by a stranger, physical assault by someone known to victim, and sexual assault were reported by 56.9%, 64.2%, and 54.1% of respondents, respectively. Respondents exposed to violence were more likely to report posttraumatic stress symptoms and lower levels of subjective well-being. Participants who were exposed to at least one type of violence were more likely to experience symptoms of traumatic stress (U = 1,794,250.50, p < .001, d = 0.35). Exposure to multiple forms of violence was associated with more severe traumatic stress symptoms (rs = .257, p < .001). Well-being scores were significantly lower among participants exposed to violence (t = 8.37, p < .001, d = 0.31). The study demonstrated that violence exposure is associated with reduced well-being among Russian adults. Our findings highlight the negative impact of violence exposure on subjective well-being and underscore the necessity to develop programs addressing violence exposure in Russian populations.

This paper considers verbal and non-verbal manifestations of the Middle English concept dwelling. The authors posit that the characteristic features of the Medieval dwelling, as well as people’s conceptual vision of the world of physical reality are reflected in the language units employed to name these artifacts. The linguistic analyses of the concept manifestants are  performed within the framework of an interpretation field, which enables one to map the mental structure of this concept. At the same time, language means alone cannot be the only object of such concept studies: integrated analyses of lexical means together with such non-verbal phenomena as architectural monuments of the Medieval Britain between the 11th and 14th cc. BC, and other artifacts make it possible to build a more or less complete picture of the Medieval dwelling. Another key aspect of the question under discussion is the  assumption that there is a strong correlation between the appearance of a dwelling place and its structure/function on the development of the semantic structure of the Middle English polysemantic words associated with the medieval abode.

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.

The article is concerned with structural, cognitive, semantic, and cultural characteristics of English fabric names formed by means of deonymic derivation. The material under analysis consists of simple and composite lexical units which are derivatives from proper nouns referring to some onomastic realia in Great Britain and Northern Ireland . The corpus of deonymic fabric names was compiled by the authors from general and specialized dictionaries, as well as from websites of the UK textile companies. The analysis of reality-conventionality of relations between proper names and their derivatives resulted in dividing the researched fabric names into 2 groups: motivated nominations and relatively conventional symbols.

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the concept of presence in the philosophical and non-philosophical texts of the 18th century. This concept is the meeting ground of two semantic fields. On the one hand, the word присутствие ‘presence’ is derived from the Old Church Slavic present-tense participle сы, сѫшти “existing, being’, and signifies God’s presence in the Holy Gifts. On the other hand, присутствие, according to the Russian Academy Dictionary, refers to ‘being jointly at one place’ and ‘сourt sitting’. In addition, one finds a philosophical use of this term, where it is associated with the presence of an object in consciousness (for example, in Descartes, Hume, Locke) as well as with the presence (actual or imaginary) of a person (Adam Smith). Due both to Radischev’s philosophical interests and to biographical circumstances, his works provide abundant material for analyzing the topoi of presence and absence in their different meanings.