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Referring to the data of the author's database of Crimean museums, this article offers a spatial analysis of the structure and dynamics of the museum network. The official digital resources (websites) of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, the Museums of Russia portal, the website of the Private and Folk Museums of Russia, and the websites of municipalities are used as the main sources of information. The database information makes it possible to reconstruct the images of the region, taking into account their geographic reference. The museum landscape of the region forms a polyphonic historical and cultural image of Crimea, which is divided into five clusters (zones): literary and historical (Southern coast of Crimea); military-historical (Sevastopol); historical and local history (steppe Crimea); historical and archaeological (Kerch Peninsula); historical and ethnographic (mountainous Crimea). Clusters differ in the structure of the museum network and the historical dynamics of its formation. The author analyses the features of the formation of each museum cluster and the images of the past it broadcasts. The image of the war is most intensively present in the museums of Sevastopol and Balaklava as the places of the deployment of the Black Sea Fleet. Literary Crimea is concentrated in cities and urban-type settlements of the southern coast of Crimea, where many famous writers rested, were treated, and created their works. Images of the Soviet past are disseminated by local history museums of the steppe Crimea. The ancient civilization and medieval Crimea are represented in the Kerch cluster and partly by the historical and archaeological museums of the South Coast and the mountainous Crimea. And, finally, the national (Crimean-Tatar) image of Crimea is preserved in the museums of Bakhchisaray and Simferopol. Such a complex mosaic of Crimean images is the result of the influence of external and internal factors — the richness and diversity of the historical and cultural heritage of the region formed over the centuries and the zigzags of the state cultural policy. The change of statehood over the twentieth century (imperial, Soviet, post-Soviet — Ukrainian and Russian — periods) has left its mark on the museum space of Crimea.

This article focuses on the role of the personal factor on the process of developing, making, and implementing political decisions in the Russian Empire in the first third of the eighteenth century, and, more particularly, in St Petersburg. First, it is claimed that St Petersburg as the new imperial capital played a dual role in the government system. On the one hand, it represented a unique precedent that was unparalleled; on the other hand, the city acted as a bridgehead for administrative experiments, the most successful of which were planned to be extended to the territory of the entire state. In this regard, the most powerful and trusted persons, whose behavioural strategies directly influenced the reform process, were appointed to key positions within the government system of St Petersburg. The author refers to the construction of several complexes of inns in St Petersburg in 1722–1723 as an example that clearly marks the role of the personal factor in the government system. The article demonstrates how prince A. D. Menshikov, governor-general of St Petersburg Province carried out the general management of construction activities, and then promoted an initiative to publish a royal decree prohibiting private hiring of housing for visitors to the city and forcing them to settle in state inns. The author examines the role of other statesmen (A. M. Devieir, P. I. Yaguzhinsky, I. I. Bibikov, P. A. Tolstoy, A. I. Osterman, F. M. Apraksin), who launched a campaign to counter the prince's initiative and the circumstances of the subsequent cancellation of the decree. As a result, it is concluded that the personal factor in the system of public administration, the importance of the tsar's trust, and a wide network of social ties that made it possible to enlist support in the context of political decisions played the most significant role.

This article considers the question of whether the Roman state was thalassocratic during the period of the Gothic-Byzantine wars of 535–554. Based on the narrative sources from the fifth and sixth centuries, primarily, the information from the writings of Procopius of Caesarea, the author of the article studies data on the time of appearance, the size of the fleet, the types of ships that the Gothic tribes had in the mid-sixth century, as well as the methods of conducting naval battles the Goths used in the Mediterranean in the face of a lack of relevant experience and skills. The author concludes that even though before the start of the wars, the Goths had warships at their disposal, they were clearly not enough to compete with the Romans, therefore, during the reign of Vitiges, the war was predominantly waged on land. The maritime hegemony of the Romans was undeniable. According to Procopius of Caesarea, the fleet was most actively used in the conflict during the reign of the Gothic ruler Totila. For some time, he managed to compensate for the lack of experience in naval battles with thoughtful tactics. The Goths pursued a policy of establishing control over the most important ports and straits of the Mediterranean. Trying to avoid full-fledged clashes with the Romans, the barbarians successfully blocked the supply of food and additional contingents to Italy. However, the information provided by Procopius should be treated with caution, since his writings are full of elements of anti-Justinian propaganda and attempts to discredit the ruler. In fact, the Goths dominated the seas as much as the Romans allowed them to. In connection with the above, it is impossible to speak of the completion of the Roman thalassocracy in the Mediterranean in the mid-sixth century. The Romans retained control of the maritime and coastal regions of the Mediterranean.

This article analyses the reforms of Tobolsk voivode P. I. Godunov (one of the most famous "profit-seekers" of the seventeenth century) in the yam messenger system (Rus. yamskaya gon'ba). To a considerable extent, it is based on unpublished sources from Moscow and St Petersburg archives. Mostly, they are documents of management and record keeping of central and local administrations (letters to voivodes, military governors' formal replies, etc.), accounting documentation (clerks' descriptions, etc.), and private documents (petitions). Many of them have never been published previously. The author uses comparative, anthropological, and genetic methods; also, the article examines both unfulfilled reforms (a plan for the distribution of organised communication to Tobolsk) and those implemented by Godunov (a reduction of government parcels sent to Moscow, transfer of residents of the Samarovo yam "to arable land", assistance in reducing the monetary salaries of Tura, Tyumen, Demyansk, and Samarovo yamshchiks enforcing state supervision over the yam lands). It is demonstrated that the reforms were devoid of innovation. Godunov adhered to the state course and followed the previous administrators, however, acting more dynamically. Generally, during his voivodship, the situation of Siberian yamshchiks worsened. However, by contrast with reforms in other areas of local life, Godunov's yam reorganisations appeared sustainable. They were kept by Moscow and partially revised only 15 years later after the profit-seeker's departure from Tobolsk. Referring to Godunov's activities and their fate, the author shows the state's contradictory attitude to yamskaya gon'ba "for the Stone". On the one hand, Moscow sought to reduce the costs of the communication system, and, on the other hand, it sometimes gave way to the yamshchiks because it needed reliable communication with Siberia.

During the years of implementation of the first Soviet five-year plans, great attention was paid to the pulp and paper industry. In the forest industry structure, this component was characterised by a weak level of development. The bet was made on the creation of medium and large pulp and paper industries. In the Urals, where there were large reserves of forest resources and rivers, they built several plants. The largest centre of the pulp and paper industry in the Urals and in the eastern regions of the USSR was formed. The purpose of this article is to study the location, design, and launch of production of the Solikamsk Sulphite Pulp Mill. In the mid-1930s, it was decided to build an enterprise. The project involved innovative technological solutions for the pulp and paper industry. The launch of the plant was postponed several times, the project was altered, and the construction was entrusted from the People's Commissariat of Forest Industry of the USSR to the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR. In 1940, the Solikamsk Sulphite Pulp Mill became an independent enterprise, but its construction continued. In March 1941, three months before the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, the company began the production of pulp. The production was only possible within a simplified scheme due to the absence or malfunction of equipment. The performance of the enterprise was set in insignificant volumes. With the outbreak of war, party-state bodies and economic departments continued the construction of the Solikamsk Sulphite Pulp Mill and providing additional equipment. The company's development was boosted by the evacuation of several industries, the start of the sulphite waste liquor alcohol plant and the construction of a defense plant nearby. This allowed the plant to develop cooperative ties and master new types of products.

This article analyses the role of the gender factor in promoting the image of an ally in the conditions of the First World War. The author shows that in the pre-revolutionary period of Russia's participation in the war, pro-allied propaganda was used as an instrument of patriotic political mobilisation of society. The main plot of such propaganda was the successes of the allies, primarily England and France, in mobilising material and human resources in the interests of the war, and the achievements of those countries in organising the rear. In the publications of the press, gender language was widely used, as well as images of masculinity and femininity as examples of proper male and female participation in the war, and the patriotic efforts of men and women. The concepts of ideal masculinity used in promoting the image of an ally included the ideas of a responsible civic attitude, decisiveness, and energy as the main attributes of a man in the conditions of the "home front" of a new industrial war. Until the February Revolution of 1917, Great Britain served as a model when it came to national mobilisation in the propaganda of the Russian media, and its leaders, like the heads and representatives of the British Empire governments, became personal incarnations of masculinity. In contrast to them, the position of W. Wilson before the US entered the war was viewed as humiliating and humble, which contained negative gender connotations and contradicted the ideal of masculinity. The images of the allied nations' women played a special role in patriotic mobilisation, embodying selflessness as the traditional ideal of femininity, while simultaneously involving new connotations and meanings associated with the proactive position of women in a new type of war. During the Revolution of 1917, in a situation of growing disillusionment with the war, the propaganda of the mobilisation efforts of the allies ceased to be a popular subject of Russian socio-political discourse. Titanic propaganda efforts undertaken by the allies themselves also failed. The public demand for gender equality actualised by the Revolution manifested itself in the movement to form women's battalions, which also became a demonstration of the patriotic civic position of women. Despite its predominantly propagandistic rather than military significance, this movement also did not work as an instrument of patriotic mobilisation, showing the persistence of gender stereotypes and society's weariness from war.

Based on D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak's shorter prose (essays, stories), the author distinguishes various types of narrative, i.e. first and third person narration and a personal type of narration. In several stories of the essay type, special markers of the presence of the personal narrator stand out expressed in characteristic motifs of admiration, interest, and curiosity. The author proves that during the period of the so-called "second debut" (1881–1882), Mamin began with the development of the form of a personal narrator, most characteristic of the genre of the essay, and gradually switched to the auctorial type of narrative, typical already of the genre of the story and assuming the form of an objective narrator author. It is also noted that in the form of an auctorial narration, Mamin successfully mastered the device of non-personal direct speech, or the speech interference of the character and the narrator author, which brings us to the rudimentary forms of "personal" narrative. From about the mid-1880s, the tendency towards a personal narrative became apparent, which is most noticeable in the stories Korobkin, Doctor Osokin's Amendment and Simply, which focus on the state of the split consciousness of the character who finds himself in a situation of "man in front of a mirror" (M. M. Bakhtin) and acts as a direct subject of cognition. In the works of the same period (stories Between Us, The Old Fife, and others) a personal type of narration emerges clearly, which continues logically in the stories of the 1900s (Influenza. Monologue, A Dumpling and a Blot). The writer pays attention to the situation of the relationship between the character and the stereotyped nickname imposed on him, a certain "foreign" word-nomination, which leads to an increase in the act of self-awareness of the character and an intensification of the personal narrative. Finally, the article concludes that the development of a personal point of view in the narrative structure of the story leads Mamin-Sibiryak to the emergence of a new genre form, i.e. a personal "monologue" or "diary", as well as to focus on the aesthetic potential of receptive poetics, which reveals points of convergence with genre variation of Chekhov's "discovery story".

Against Nature, a book of L. Daston, is devoted to the historical transformations of the term "nature" and its significance in the formation of moral categories from Aristotle to our days. Daston pays special attention to the period between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when "modern science" emerged. Daston clarifies the essential contents of such terms as "nature", "normativity", and "universal natural laws", reconstructs the contexts underlying the introduction of these categories into scholarly discourse and finds out their significance in a situation of the growing social importance of scientific knowledge. All these let Daston trace the logic of at least three ways for the "order of nature" to transfer into "moral order" and conclude that the order of nature only had a representative function. The review contains parts of the Russian translation of Daston's main ideas and conclusions, its critical and historiographic evaluation. Daston's thesis about the weakness of naturalisation as discoursive strategy is contemplated in the context of the criticism of anthropocentrism, vividly illustrated by works of M. Serres, B. Latour, D. Haraway and T. Morton.

This article presents an attempt to consider the formation of the "Martian" text in Russian literature during the Silver Age. The author studies three novels about trips to Mars (On Another Planet by P. Infantiev, On a Neighboring Planet by V. Kryzhanovskaya, Red Star by A. Bogdanov) published in Russia from 1901 to 1908. The aim of the study is to identify the main stable elements of the structure that appeared in all the three novels. The author employs methods of comparative historical analysis. All the three novels are compared with each other and placed into the context of the mystical, utopian, and scientific searches of the epoch. The author identifies common elements of the structure of the narrative in the three texts (the composition consists of three parts: description of life on Earth — flight to Mars — return) and plot (interaction between earthlings and Martians, the idea of Martians as older comrades, a love story of a Martian and an earthling). It was also possible to trace the correlation of the three novels with the utopias of place and time and find out the influence of life-creating strategies that were popular in the Silver Age. The article examines the influence of the "Martian" text which emerged at the beginning of the century on Soviet science fiction starting with A. Tolstoy's Aelita and ending with the novels of 1960s–1980s. As a result, the author concludes that the "Martian" text of the early twentieth century laid down the main questions about interaction with the inhabitants of other planets, the possibility of colonization, and the price that one must pay for the contact with other worlds. Soviet science fiction searched for answers to them.

This article analyses the graphic cycle of L. A. Epple created based on D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak's works in 1946–1952. Among the artist's works, there are both illustrations for the collection For Children (1947) and easel compositions commissioned by the writer's memorial museum in Sverdlovsk. A professional graphic artist, Epple worked thoughtfully and consistently with the works of the writer for many years, achieving expressiveness of images and artistic accuracy. The artist's special position (a labour soldier in Sevurallag in 1941–1945, then a special settler in Sosva and Irbit in 1946–1952) led to the fact that his creative activity during these years was unknown to specialists. The artist's name was not mentioned in the data of the collection of Mamin-Sibiryak's works, and his easel paintings (kept in the collection of the United Museum of Writers of the Urals) were not published. In the late nineteenth — first half of the twentieth centuries, Mamin-Sibiryak's works were illustrated and decorated by many Ural artists (S. I. Yakovlev, A. V. Kikin, Yu. A. Ivanov, A. A. Zhukov, N. P. Golubchikov, A. A. Kudrin, E. V. Gileva, etc.), but unlike L. A. Epple, the appeal to the literary heritage of the writer was for them only a brief episode of creative activity. Epple's art project developed within the framework of an official order, hence the stylistics convenient for the mass reader, and a set of visual images was thought out. The principle of narrative fits into the aesthetics of book illustration of the 1940s–1950s, but in Epple's graphic compositions, there is a feeling of intimacy, softness, some idealisation, and smoothness of images. Following the traditions of his teacher D. N. Kardovsky, Epple strives for the exact choice of the scene, the expressiveness of the entire composition and each character, the elaboration of details, and tries to reveal the psychology of the main characters. Choosing a realistic manner of performance, the artist proceeds from the nature of Mamin-Sibiryak's oeuvre, with his thoroughness and journalistic narrative, respectful attitude to historical, ethnographic, and everyday realities.

This article analyses the terrible in the works of Adamist poets to identify common features and patterns in their creative work. Adamism is both a synonym for Acmeism and the designation of its left wing, represented by S. Gorodetsky, V. Narbut, and M. Zenkevich. Accepting the basic postulates of Gumilyov's Acmeism (supported by A. Akhmatova and O. Mandelstam) about the primordial attitude to reality, the priority of objectivity in the composition of the artistic world which sought to acquire earthly contours and outlines, Adamists were much more resolute about the possibility of considering a wide range of everyday phenomena and everyday things worthy of artistic comprehension. Physiologism, the animal nature in humans, and primitive savage impulses also became a favorite basis for Adamists for their naturalistic pictorial solutions. This vitalist approach was combined with an interest in the spontaneous, pagan, and folklore and ethnographic. The bearers of the terrible in V. Narbut are disgusting and ugly things, people, animals, representatives of folk demonology, mystical creatures, and zombies. Their appearance and existence are associated with a violation of the norm, deformity or disfiguring disease, the appearance of evil spirits, and the domination of death and decay. All this, for the characters and the lyrical subject himself, was a manifestation of the Otherworldly and the intrusion of a frightening Other into everyday life. The material and biological basis presented through the prism of coarse physiology, animal struggle for existence, and aggressive struggle of the sexes determines the interpretation of the terrible in M. Zenkevich's poetry. The article examines how any layers of culture collapse and terrible crimes and murders are committed when primitive animal and wild subconscious instincts are released. The evolution of the terrible in Zenkevich is related to the movement from the eschatology of the natural-cosmic catastrophism of the Earth to the eschatology of personality, the comprehension of the tragedy of the individual's existence. Gorodetsky's poetry is associated with the folk poetic element, ethnographic excursions, interest in social issues, and anti-urbanism. Many thematic sections of the terrible combine Gorodetsky's work with the work of literary brothers in Adamism: interest in the primary and primordial, folk demonology, nightmares, and death. The peculiarity of Gorodetsky's approach to the problem of the terrible manifests itself in the artistic embodiment of the motif of the mask, hiding the conflict between the deceptive phenomenon and the essence of things: for the poet, the loss of individuality, facelessness, and alienation are terrible.

This article is devoted to the concept of "style" and the possibility of its application in the attribution of works of Buddhist metal sculpture. This aspect, which, as a rule, is peripheral for classical Oriental studies, Buddhology, and history, where it is interpreted quite freely, is one of the key ones for art history and museum attribution activities. The author notes the terminological and factual diversity of the designation of the "Sino-Tibetan style" in the circle of researchers of the art of Buddhism. The author poses the question of what exactly the concept of "Sino-Tibetan style" means and whether it is an indication of the body of technical and plastic features of sculptures, or just a designation of the geography of the origin of Buddhist sculptures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made in the western provinces of China. The author refers to three sculptures which are the most controversial ones from the point of view of attribution (Maitreya Buddha from the private collection of A. V. Glazyrin (Ekaterinburg), Shakyamuni Buddha, and Begtse from the collection of the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore), which have several similar stylistic features, and which could presumably be attributed to the "Sino-Tibetan style" of the eighteenth century. Also, the article presents the results of the study of the metal composition of these sculptures using an X-ray fluorescence analyser (spectrometer). Based on the data obtained on the content of substances in the alloy and considering the general artistic and stylistic features of metal images, the author makes a conclusion as to when the attribution designation "Tibeto-Chinese style" is the most accurate one and when it can be applied to Buddhist gilded sculptures created on the territory of China (Manchu Qin dynasty) between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This article studies the situation of contact between European and Japanese cultures and the image of Japan created in the classical work of Russian literature Frigate "Pallada" (1858) by I. Goncharov and in the novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) by David Mitchell, a contemporary British writer. The books were written during different periods of time, but they describe the same historical period and similar events; they both have documentary foundation. Special attention is paid to translators as characters of the books who play an important role in the plot development and provide intercultural communication. The research methodology combines methods of comparative literary criticism with a post-colonial approach, E. Said's ideas about orientalism and ethnocentrism in particular. Comparative analysis of the two books demonstrates that the image of Japan created by the two writers has a number of similar features, which confirms its objective nature. Conversely, the authors' perspectives and points of view of Japan differ drastically. The Russian writer looks at the Japanese down and from the outside; he considers "strangeness" and "childishness" to be their national features. Goncharov's Eurocentric position is explained by several reasons: his knowledge of Japan was external, he was a civil servant, who cared mostly about the interests of Russia, and he represented an influential group of Eurocentric intelligentsia. D. Mitchell's knowledge of Japan and its culture is deep and internal due to his biography. The English writer creates a bicultural novel in which the European and the Japanese worlds are equally significant. Thus, in the novel, the author offers a modern point of view on the world order and intercultural communication.

This article analyses the concept of "melancholy" and "post-imperial melancholy" in Orhan Pamuk's novels. An attempt is made to consider the novelist's work from the point of view of postcolonial and decolonial theories. The material of analysis is limited to his novels A Strangeness in My Mind (2016) and Istanbul: Memories and the City (2012). The crucial state of Pamuk's characters and, consequently, the object of analysis is melancholy, which, on the one hand, can be interpreted as nostalgia for the former greatness of the Ottoman Empire and, on the other hand, is an example of an "aestheticised nostalgia" as a technique of decolonial aestheticism. The article also focuses on Pamuk's own position as a cultural trickster, balancing between East and West in an attempt to find a balance. The author examines images of the "bouza" and the "dog" as symbols of the Ottoman Empire and analyses the dichotomy of the "Eastern man" vs the "European man". On the one hand, Pamuk's characters, like Pamuk himself, associate themselves with the European man, broadcasting the "Orientalist" view of the West as a backward space, on the other hand, they are representatives of Oriental culture and mentality, guardians of Turkish traditions and the history of their own city. The analysis makes it clear that the melancholy of the protagonists is primarily related to their personal past and childhood memories. It is the author's attempt to return to his own past in order to find cultural and personal integrity, to discover the origins of self-identity, and to overcome his inner "coloniser". Thus, Pamuk's melancholy is inextricably linked with pride and beauty.

This article attempts to study the process of gender roles transformation of German women under the influence of World War I. Gender history as a social history of the sexes has significant heuristic potential which is why the author uses it as a methodological basis of the research. The recent years have seen an increased interest in war history, the front, and the rear from the gender point of view among researchers. The gender perspective — precisely because it has long remained outside the mainstream — has challenged and fundamentally changed the contemporary historiography of German history. Gender studies demonstrate that debates about war and peace are always also discussions of the gendered social order, or the ideas of "masculinity" and "femininity" at a certain time. For a long time, in historiography, the opinion prevailed that World War I was a decisive factor in the emancipation of women in Germany in the twentieth century. However, studies of the last two decades have convincingly shown that this thesis needs to be corrected at least. The increase in the share of female labour in German industry during the war years corresponded to the pre-war trend and did not exceed it in quantitative terms. Women's labour in the industry was the lot of the lower classes. Measures of social support of the state for the families of military personnel, on the one hand, contributed to women's financial independence, and, on the other hand, increased their dependence on it, formed dependents. The inability of the German authorities during the war years to provide for the basic life needs of the population led to widespread illegal activities (larceny, illegal markets) and protests, which together with the military defeat, became one of the main reasons for the November Revolution.