Suchergebnisse

This article is devoted to the reception of Ernst Neizvestny's art by the American daily and specialised press between the 1960s and 1980s. The research focuses on constructing the heroic image of Ernst Neizvestny based on several clichйs that are well-established in American culture: a fighter for freedom in art and an oppressed artist, "an artist in exile" after emigration. This article aims to fix the changes in the reception of Ernst Neizvestny's oeuvre by American critics and journalists at different stages of the Cold War. The interdisciplinary approach contains the social, historical, and political factors that underlie artistic practice and necessitate the use of methods from different areas of the humanities including media and cultural studies. The main sources are reviews of solo exhibitions, interviews with the artist, notes, and articles in the American press. They are supplemented by video interviews with the sculptor from the archives of the National Centre for Contemporary Art (part of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts) and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Neizvestny's published correspondence, as well as historical archival materials. If in the publications of the 1960s and 1970s, the authors were most interested in the relationship between Neizvestny and the Soviet authorities, at the end of the Détente, more analytical materials on art history appeared. The author concludes that the actualisation of a particular image depended on social and political factors, changes in the international cultural landscape, and the nature of the relationship between the two superpowers. The construction of the heroic image of Neizvestny in the US media became one of the tools of anti-Soviet propaganda in the cultural confrontation. An analysis of the reception of E. Neizvestny's artworks helps reveal the ways in which ideas about Soviet art were produced and spread in American culture during the Cold War.

This article examines the personality of Matvei Ivanovich Yavorsky, a leading Ukrainian Marxist historian of the 1920s. The article reveals the circumstances that led to the historian's removal from leading academic positions in the early 1930s. The historiography created an image of Yavorsky as a scholar who suffered under the attacks of Moscow Marxist historians led by M. N. Pokrovsky and his disciple P. O. Gorin. Contrary to popular belief, the author shows that the story of Yavorsky's downfall was a series of coincidences that led to the transformation of an ideological polemic into a campaign of harassment, followed by his arrest and death. The article explains why the debates of the time were not the cause of Yavorsky's downfall. Patronage from the Ukrainian party leadership allowed Yavorsky to engage in aggressive polemics with his opponents (primarily Gorin). Discussions within the Ukrainian academic community led to a softening of Yavorsky's position on conceptual differences (the driving forces of the revolution in Ukraine) rather than a public campaign against him. The author shows that Gorin and Pokrovsky did not have the administrative capacity to start harassing the scholar. The collapse of Yavorsky's career turned out to be the result of the revealed facts of his biography (service in the Austro-Hungarian army). Yavorsky's situation did not fit into any of the ideological campaigns of the time and came as a complete surprise to the local party leadership. Attempts to launch a campaign against Yavorsky ("yavorshchina") were quashed by the Ukrainian SSR leadership, which gave the historian the opportunity to move to Leningrad. There, however, he was caught by the OGPU's Operation Spring. During the investigation in Ukraine, people who had testified against Yavorsky were implicated in the case. This led to his arrest, imprisonment and death sentence.

This review analyses the biography of the celebrated Russian figure of the eighteenth century, historian, journalist, translator and statesman Prince Mikhail Mikhailovich Scherbatov, written by S. G. Kalinina with the utilisation of a substantial source base, and published in 2023. The book provides a comprehensive account of both Shcherbatov's public and private life. Conversely, it is observed that the reconstruction of Shcherbatov's intellectual activity, while offering intriguing insights and findings, also encompasses contentious elements. Consequently, it enables us to address the challenge of writing a biography of a figure who occupied both an official and an intellectual role. In addition to recounting his public service, it is necessary to reconstruct the history of his ideas and worldview.

This article examines the history behind the writing of the three-volume History of Byzantium (1967). In the 1950s and 1960s, the writing of "meta-narratives" meant covering the history of different states from the standpoint of the Marxist interpretation of the historical process and using the methods of historical materialism. In addition, collective work on them demonstrated the scholarly convention of Marxist historians. These principles were also implemented during the preparation of the History of Byzantium. A member of the editorial board and one of the main authors of the multi-volume work was Mikhail Jakovlevich Sjuzjumov (1893–1982), a Sverdlovsk scholar. Some letters kept in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the State Archive of Sverdlovsk Region reflect his participation in the preparation of the History of Byzantium, the difficulties his texts underwent during the publication process, and his assessment of the results of the collective work. The article considers the scholar's concept which he adhered to when writing the chapters, analyses critical remarks about his texts, and emphasises the discrepancy between his interpretations and the assessment of the history of Byzantium established in Russian historiography. The chapters prepared by Sjuzjumov and devoted to sources on early Byzantine history, the history of the church, and the historical role of Byzantium were criticised especially harshly. Sjuzjumov's assessment of the Byzantine opposition and denial of the progressiveness of their views, his interpretation of Byzantine feudalism and the place of the Empire in world history contradicted the spirit and concept of the collective work. As a result, his two chapters were not included in the final version of the History of Byzantium. To achieve an academic convention, it was necessary to sacrifice the original interpretations proposed by the Sverdlovsk scholar. Nevertheless, Mikhail Sjuzjumov highly appreciated the publication of the History of Byzantium, although he noted its obvious shortcomings and weak points.

This paper deals with the historical and cultural heritage of an important industrial centre of the Urals, the city of Zlatoust, namely, its constructivist architecture which emerged during the age of the first five-year plans, and which remained out of researchers' view. The specifics of the urban process of the industrialisation age in older industrial settlements of the Urals was defined by the deployment of new constructivist buildings in the existing dense urban environment and in the proximity to production sites. The author describes two key locations of new construction in detail. In the old centre, around the Square of the Third International and along Lenin Street, the old dominants were demolished in the early 1930s (cathedral, Lutheran church) and replaced by new ones (club, bank, fire station, 4-storey residential buildings). In the northern part of the town, the residential zone was developed by the Zlatoust Steel Mill, which was heavily reconstructed in the early 1930s, its settlement had a peculiar planning (terraces on the steep slope of a mountain). Drawing upon archival sources, the author traces the process of planning and construction of key residential and public buildings of Zlatoust (factory kitchen, public bath), shows the peculiarities of urban development in the industrial settlement in the Urals, and outlines the projects of particular structures as well as the course of construction. In the second half of the 1930s, the urban development of Zlatoust was stagnating, and most projects from this period (House of Specialists, House of the Soviets) remained on paper. The author specially describes the housing policy of the Zlatoust Steel Mill. Also, he demonstrates that Zlatoust was a leader among the old (pre-revolutionary) industrial settlements in terms of construction, however, due to the outpacing population growth, administrative changes in the second half of the 1930s and the complex natural landscape, the social infrastructure of the city remained underdeveloped. That, in turn, provoked an acute shortage of housing and communal crises during the Great Patriotic War. The constructivist heritage of Zlatoust was incapable of becoming a cultural symbol of the city in the second half of the twentieth century, and even suffered major losses associated with both the expansion of industrial sites and the outflow of the population from the old part of the settlement.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the content of the projects substantiating the autonomy of the Urals and the composition of its territories reviewed by the Provisional Regional Government of the Urals (PRGU) in 1918. The presence of theses regarding the formation of a special Ural identity in them gives the study relevance not only due to an extremely fragmented coverage of these projects in the previous historiography but also in terms of filling the gaps in the history of the formation of the special regional social and political thought of the Urals in the context of the PRGU's coalition activity. Also, it is interesting to consider the projects from the point of view of the continuity of territorial planning practices by Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. To analyse the content and compare projects with each other to identify similarities, differences, and traces of manifestation of regional ideas, the author considers six notes submitted to PRGU by its main departments and the final report. Also, the article refers to individual views of L. A. Krol who initiated the establishment of PRGU, reconstructed according to his memoirs and minutes of the meetings of the PRGU Commission on Borders. It transpires that not all projects contained a reflection on the subject of a special regional identity, which is the essence of regionalism since the reason for the discussions was the pragmatic need to determine the electoral system for the regional parliament. A separate and unique project by Krol, which instrumentally justified the borders of the Urals, taking into account the current, but not the future political situation, cannot be considered regional. The discussion itself where Krol's proposals were ignored characterises the PRGU as a unique coalition body for 1917–1918 based on the principles of party dialogue.

This article discusses the names of settlements in Belozerye, including designations of settlement types (выселок, городок, двор, мыза, погост, починок, слобода, усадьба, хутор), several terms with the suffix -ище (дворище, городище, погостище, селище, усадище, etc.), denoting places of former settlements, and some definitions characterising the ownership status of lands (казённый, монастырский, барский, боярский, княжий). In addition, the author examines the issue of the use of terms under consideration naming the types of settlements as a designation of the type of object in the official lists of settlements and in the speech of residents. The study refers to data from the lists of settlements of Olonets (1905) and Novgorod (1911–1912) provinces, and for the later period, to data from field collections of the Toponymic Expedition of the Ural University of the 1960s–2010s. The difference in the toponymic use of certain terms of land ownership is mainly explained by the peculiarities of the settlement of the territory and the existing types of land ownership (this is especially typical of the characterising names: казенный, монастырский, княжий, etc.). The designations of settlement types turn out to be less dependent on the established land tenure practices and more susceptible to subsequent administrative regulation, although certain historical patterns can be traced here: the terms городок and городище mark the sites of archaeologically confirmed and documented medieval fortified settlements; the Novgorod toponymic models Большой Двор and Великий Двор make it possible to clarify the zone of Novgorod development of the territory and delimit it from the more eastern Rostov-Suzdal. The term погост is most widely represented on the territory of the former Novgorod pyatinas which inherited the Old Russian system of pogosts; the appearance of the term хутор in Belozerye is clearly connected with the Stolypin reform, although it was known in other Great Russian territories before that time.

This article analyses aspects underlying the functioning of the "cold war" ideologeme in the media texts of two historical periods. The aggravation of political relations between the collective West and Russia actualises the concept of "cold war" which entered the lexicon of the Soviet media after the end of World War II and is being increasingly used by journalists to characterise what is happening today. The methodology of structural and thematic analysis employed to study the practices of functioning of the ideologeme "cold war", as well as elements of content analysis make it possible to identify and characterise the features of the use of this ideologeme in modern Russian political media texts. What makes this study original is the approach the authors use to substantiate the conclusions of the article comparing the journalistic practices of using the ideologeme "cold war" in two historical periods: Soviet and Russian (from 2014 to the present). The theoretical basis of the article is the research of renowned Russian scholars, and the analysis is based on the development of the topic in papers on philology. The empirical basis formed for the article includes more than 500 publications of the Soviet and Russian media from Sovetskaya Rossiya, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Vedomosti, Trud, Novaya Gazeta, Krasnaya Zvezda, Izvestia, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Pravda, and REGNUM news agency which contain the "cold war" ideologeme. As a result of the study, the authors demonstrate the differences in the practice of applying the ideologeme and the conditionality of these differences. They establish that the Soviet stage of the use of the ideologeme "cold war" is representative, while the Russian stage significantly expands and changes its functional possibilities.

This review analyses A. B. Kamensky's book Love, Passion and Despair — Russian Crimes in the 18th Century. The author devotes his work to the struggle between the state and the church in early modern Russia, showing this through the changing legal norms that were used primarily to regulate the sphere of marriage and family relations. Each chapter analyses the process of criminalisation of such socially reprehensible deviations as extramarital sexual relations, rape, incest, violation of marriage regulations, suicide and others. One of the merits of the publication is the wealth of empirical material that perfectly illustrates the main trends in the development of Russian law. At the same time, the abundance of data seems to be one of the shortcomings of the study, as it sometimes tends to conceal from the reader the original intention of the book.

The author of this article turns to the events of the last period of the retreat of Napoleon's Grande Armйe from Russia, starting from the French emperor's final decision to leave for Paris on December 3 and ending with Marshal M. Ney's rearguard crossing the River Neman on December 13, 1812. The author reconstructs the events with reference to a significant number of French documents, many of which, stored in the archives of the Historical Service of the Ministry of Defense and the National Archives of France, have never been an object of scholarly research previously. The data proposed by the author confirm the fact of the most difficult conditions in which the troops of the central grouping of Napoleon's army left the Russian territory. The situation was aggravated by the fact that leaving the army, Napoleon was overly optimistic about the prospects for completing the Russian campaign, counting on the possibility of the troops occupying winter apartments soon in Vilna region. At the same time, his assessment of the possibilities of conducting offensive operations by the Russian army turned out to be excessively underestimated. In any case, the last days of their stay in Russia, disastrous for the central grouping of the Grande Armйe, did not lead to a complete paralysis of the functioning of Napoleon's military machine. The prospects for restoring the combat capability of the Napoleonic army were quite real. This circumstance speaks of the correctness of the decision taken by the Russian state and military leadership regarding the need to continue active hostilities.

This article focuses on the production of Kasli castings in the 1930s–1940s (essays by N. Dobychin, M. Zuev-Ordynets, and P. Bazhov). The authors carry out a historical contextualisation of the sources referring to the travel notes of D. Mamin-Sibiryak (1887) and interviews with the inhabitants of Kasli obtained during an expedition to study the narrative landscapes of Ural cities (2021). The authors aim to comprehend the situation of alternative history with reference to the city of Kasli, which is set by options for describing the present, focused on the desired future. In the history of Kasli castings, the 1930s is considered both as a relevant present with the nearest future, and as a turn in the past favourable for local production, preserved in the memory of the Kasli people. Methodologically, the research is based on multiscalar analysis with an emphasis on the interaction of different time and space scales. The article introduces materials of the State Archive of Administrations of Sverdlovsk Region related to the biography of N. Dobychin which has never been done previously, since it is his essay Living Cast Iron that is said to have played a decisive role in the revival of the production of artistic iron casting. The authors analyse texts about Kasli castings in terms of their possible influence, due to the scale of the placement platform (central or regional press, circulation, etc.) and the accuracy of compliance with the moment of cultural politics, reflected in the composition and motif structure of the text and the communication of an external or internal view of events. The essay, which influenced the local narrative about the fate of either dying or rising production, may have become a resource for mythologising the "long-lived" Ural craftsmanship in the words of the famous "cast-iron grandmother" of Bazhov. The judgments of today's Kasli residents about the past and present of the city testify to a complex combination of pride and resentment towards their historical past and present.

Out-of-wedlock births are one of the important aspects of the demographic history in late imperial Russia. The percentage of children born to unwed mothers in the Russian Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was lower than the general average in European countries. However, in the specific context of the Russian demographic order, with earlier age at marriage and more universal nuptiality than in Europe generally, the study of out-of-wedlock births and especially their spatial distribution, acquires special significance. This work is aimed at studying the dynamics of out-of-wedlock births in Perm province in the decades around 1900. The authors pay particular attention to out-of-wedlock births in the city of Ekaterinburg, using official statistics and the "Ural Population Project" database, URAPP based on parish registers with vital events in five city parishes. The authors reconstruct the dynamics of out-of-wedlock births in each of the twelve Perm province counties, reflecting a general downward trend, especially in counties containing a significant proportion of Old Believers. It is established that the average level of illegitimate births among the rural population was 4%, and in cities — 9%. The out-of-wedlock birth rate increased during times of wars and social upheavals, especially in cities differing from parish to parish. In St Epiphany parish of Ekaterinburg, the illegitimate birth rate reached 41% during the famine of 1892. Concurrently, at least 11% of the women, including some from relatively wealthy families, baptised up to seven "illegitimate" children in the parish. This gives grounds to perceive the phenomenon of out-of-wedlock births not only because of the unfortunate circumstances for young women, but also as a sign of modernisation in the sphere of family and marriage relations, slowed down by archaic legislation.

This article verifies the congruence of the verbal and nonverbal codes of social advertising in terms of the expression of the transmitted idea, which makes it possible to adequately restore the lacunarised text (with the slogan excluded while preserving the visual sequence). It is proved that in the process of interpretation of the general idea of the restored advertising slogan, both universal and nationally specific aspects of the verbal embodiment of the perceptual image represented by the nonverbal component are revealed. The authors single out factors contributing to the perception of the meanings of social advertising: the commonality of value presuppositions, the linguo-pragmatic orientation of the advertising text (the significance of information for the addressee), the suggestive nature of the polymodal complex (the emotional power of the visual series and its auditory accompaniment in the form of music and voice in the video advertising). The article characterises strategies for filling text gaps, i.e. stereotypical (using ready-made verbal clichés, including common advertising slogans of a typical syntactic structure) and creative (using word-making innovations, metaphors, figurative comparisons, phraseological precedents, quotes, and figures of expressive syntax). A special aspect of the analysis of the experimental material is the national and cultural specificity of the associative thinking of the respondents: the Russian-speaking participants of the experiment — when perceiving Chinese advertising, and the Chinese participants of the experiment — when translating the content of the restored slogan of Chinese advertising into Russian.

This article presents the results of a study of the discourse of British identity formed between the 1990s and 2020s and includes, in addition to elements of "indigenous" British culture, foreign ethnic elements introduced by immigration — in the context of the development of multiculturalism and Islamic "immigration". Following public discourse, groups or individuals who are qualified by British society as "other" or "low-ranking" because of religious beliefs, skin colour, or origin, even if we are talking about people who have British citizenship and have lived in Britain for several generations, are referred to as "immigrants". The authors conduct an analysis of modern national and foreign historiography on the topic of research based on official documents, statistical data, media materials, and authorial ethnographic materials (including observation, in-depth interviews, testing) collected between 2010 and 2020 in England and Scotland, mainly among the Islamic population. For the contemporary UK, it is relevant to search for an adequate interracial and intersocial paradigm for a multicultural community. British society is actively discussing the question of the prospects of multiculturalism (or interculturalism) as the basis of the modern national identity of all British citizens. Such "Britishness" is rejected not only by "immigrants", but also by "indigenous" Britons due to the vagueness, idealization, and negative connotative connection of this concept with imperialism and colonialism, and antagonism towards the priority of regional and local identities of the inhabitants of the country. The authors conclude that in the 1990s–2020s, for the "immigrant" population, "Britishness" remained the highest priority of the existing national or regional identities of England, Wales, and Scotland. However, modern attempts made by both the authorities of the country and the public to form positive ideas about each other among white Britons and members of foreign ethnic communities, despite some successes in comparison with other countries, have been subjected to destructive criticism from all groups of the British population due to the difficulty of integrating "immigrants" into British culture and British identity. In most post-industrial regions of the country, the proposed strategies for integrating communities today are perceived as ineffective or even utopian.