Publications

This paper argues that as Dostoevsky endeavored to affirm a moral ideal in his struggle against nihilism—attempting to overcome the “inertia” of his protagonist the Underground Man—he gave lucid articulation to the moral-aesthetic values that would later become a staple for Russian revolutionaries, particularly the “conscientious” terrorist.  Within this context the case of Vera Zasulich will be examined as an unanticipated realization of Dostoevsky’s moral ideal.

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.

This paper outlines the complexity of interactions between Russian Orthodox monasteries and fish resources of the Russian North in the White and Barents Sea basins. The authors consider the complete cycle of monastic fishing activities as a complex of routine practices of an organizational, managerial, and commercial character. They demonstrate that the monks developed the organizational structure and management system that crucially contributed to the transformation of traditional fishing practices into the market-oriented exploitation of the natural resources of the White and Barents seas.

We now know that the Iron Curtain was not an impenetrable wall but, rather, a porous imaginary boundary through which people, ideas, and goods could travel. This volume is a fresh attempt to look across two blocs to examine variations, similarities, and connections between what we used to call East and West. As editors Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and John R. McNeill explain in the introduction, the volume aims to challenge a traditional question about the East-West divide. It focuses on the environment and its connections to politics, culture, and society.

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.

It has been acknowledged that the null subject of a converbial clause in Russian is canonically controlled by the Nominative subject of a main clause (Nominative subject control). Non-Nominative control has been considered ungrammatical. On the basis of two experiments (acceptability rating and speeded grammaticality judgement tasks) the paper shows that the non-Nominative control (by u menya ‘PREP I.GEN’) with mental converbs is evaluated lower than grammatically correct but higher than grammatically incorrect sentences. Moreover, according to the data from the RNC, the frequency of non-Nominative control increased in more recent written texts (approximately since the second half the 20th century). Furthermore, the paper reveals a new effect of the linear position of the converbial clause relative to the main clause (preposition vs. postposition). Preposed converbial clauses are judged as more acceptable than postposed converbial clauses. In more recent written corpus texts, there is also a tendency for non-Nominative control to occur in sentences with preposed converbial clauses. Last but not least, the paper demonstrates that sentences with the 1SG pronoun controllers are more acceptable than sentences without an overt subject.

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

The theory of foregrounding, developed by St. Petersburg scholar Irina Vladimirovna Arnold in the middle of the 20th century, was rather revolutionary for its time as it aimed to establish connection between formal levels of the language and textual meanings that allowed the reader to decode the author’s message. Arnold identifies four principal elements of foregrounding that disclose conceptual textual meaning: the strong position of a text, repetitions on different levels of language, the convergence of stylistic devices and defeated expectancy. The professor states that these elements of the text are always intentional and, thus, give a key to understanding the author’s message and position. This theory, being universal and easy to apply, has been widely used by Russian scholars working in the domain of textual linguistics and stylistics until nowadays. Such an approach increases the objectivity of the scientific findings in this area and enriches the overall text analysis with extra details and more meanings disclosed. The paper gives an overview of the theory of foregrounding, emphasizing the role it plays in text analysis and stylistics of decoding, and illustrates its principles with examples of practical analysis of the text conducted by the author of the paper.

This article examines interconnections between politics and culture in the early Soviet era, using Leon Trotsky’s activities in the campaign for a new everyday life (novyi byt) in 1923 as a case-study. Traditionally, scholars pay attention primarily to Trotsky’s writings on literature and art. In contrast, this article shows the important role of Trotsky’s brochure ‘Problems of Everyday Life’ in the development of a new field of political communication that became the space for criticism of different political and cultural aspects of Soviet power and Bolshevik rule. Using archival and press sources, it shows how the campaign was spread both from below and above, and what were the reasons for its failure to become an alternative cultural revolution.

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 paper gives an analysis of the metaphors of old age that are well-established in German culture. The aim of the study is an empirical analysis of how old age is represented in the German language, reflecting the attitudes of society to old age.

The material for the study was a selection of aphoristic and proverbal text fragments that include the lexeme Alter (hohes Alter).

The methodological basis of the study is the cognitive theory of metaphor of G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, who argue that metaphors are not limited to the sphere of language and that the processes of human thinking themselves are metaphorical.

The study also relies on  metaphorical modeling, a theory which makes it possible to identify a system of metaphorical models in the discourse of old age, reflecting the attitude of members of society towards this discourse and its participants, forming a linguistic picture of the world.

The analysis identified several metaphorical models;  the most popular is the time cycle model (daily cycle, annual cycle), which represent old age as the evening or autumn of life – the time to prepare for the end of the cycle: winter/night is the time of death, when all life in nature freezes, “falls asleep”.

Old age is personified as an evil tyrant, robbing an elderly person of external beauty, energy, sometimes even clarity of thoughts.

The natural metaphorical model proclaims the physical and mental functionality and attractiveness of old age: an old person is compared with natural phenomena (gray hair – foam after a big storm at sea).

The architectural model represents old age as a building (a prison with the semantics of involuntary alienation from life, limiting the possibilities of movement and communication) or as its element (a balcony, which makes it possible to see wide surroundings and to evaluate what is happening).

The semantics of metaphors include an emotional assessment of old age. The high degree of influence of the considered metaphors on the opinions and beliefs of society necessitate further study of the metaphors themselves and the discourses of their functioning.

The paper examines the early history of environmental concerns in Russia. It focuses on a case-study – the debates about a potentially detrimental impact of deforestation on water regimes, which took place in the 1830s-1840s. It examines two sets of issues: the role of ideas about a growing scarcity of forest resources in Europe, and the actual state of forests in Russia that provided some evidentiary basis for these debates. It argues that these debates were possible at the convergence of several trends: an expanding role and objectives of the forest administration well-versed in European scientific debates of the age and at the same time a visible danger of deforestation in some regions of a strategic significance to the empire. The author also considers different expert cultures and evidentiary standards that could be observed during the debates.

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.