2013 Vol. 4 №2

This article offers a historical sketch of the life and activities of the Russian diaspora in Gdansk in the 1920-1930s. The author considers the participation of Russian emigrants in the political, business, and cultural life of Gdansk and their relationships with the local authorities. Special attention is paid to the political competition among the Russian minority, the activity of religious, cultural, and educational organisations. The article offers a review of Russian periodicals published in Gdansk. It is emphasised that a specific feature of the social and political life of the Russian minority in Gdansk over the mentioned period was the dominance of political activity over other aspects of social life.

This article addresses the problem of “prophetic” dreams. It considers the issue of compiling a new dictionary of dreams, which should contain such necessary elements as a corpus and an index of its symbolic images. The index will help perform the following: easily find certain symbolic dream images, conduct their qualitative analysis, and compare them with symbolical forms of culture. The articles of the proposed dictionary can contain information on other aspects of dreams — cognitive, psychological, gender-related, etc.

This article addresses the issue of the specific features of the metaphor in “prophetic” dreams. The following features are identified as specific: the representation of the specific through the specific (abstract semantics is ensured by metonymy), spontaneity, integration into cultural contexts, elimination of functional borders between nominativity and predicativity, closeness to the object and cognitive metaphors. The author arrives at a conclusion that, in dreams, the metaphor brings together the rational and irrational spheres.

This article addresses the issue of the underlying cognitive unity of the symbolic forms of culture and the symbols of “prophetic” dreams. In this connection, the author justifies, in particular, the introduction of similar objects in the object area of modern cognitive linguistics, gives a definition of prophetic dreams, and identifies the position of this issue in the cultural tradition. The article identifies three basic characteristics that bring together the symbolic forms of culture and the symbols of dreams: the nature of imagery, the semantics of certain images, and the common mechanisms of symbolisation.

This article considers the temporal constants of the holiday of Christmas in I. S. Shmelev’s novel The Summer of the Lord. The key to understanding the verbal image of a holiday is the lines based on Christmas chants. An analysis of lexical and grammatical means of expressing temporal semantics shows that the past and the eternally present amalgamate in the description of a holiday: in the supra-temporal reality of a holiday, everything abides in the atemporal “now”.

This article analyses the role of the cathedral and the icon in the lives of V. Shukshin’s characters: the author shows the most important features of the Russian national character of the second half of the 20th century, as well as the peculiarities of the axiological system characteristic of a non-clerical, but religious consciousness. The author identifies typological features of the characters according to their attitude to the society and nature. The article shows how the tradition of Russian classical literature with its focus on the spiritual development of a person is followed.

The analysis of the problem of “hereditary sin” in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov is considered in the light of the discussion on the theory of “hereditary sin” within modern Orthodoxy. The author examines the “threshold situations” faced by the novel’s characters and arrives at a conclusion about the role of the “hereditary sin” problem in Dostoevsky’s literary system.

This article offers a review of the activities of I.P. Khmelnitsky at the Königsberg University of the 1760s, examines the ideational and philosophical context, and identifies the role and position of Khmelnitsky in the intellectual polemics of the mid-18th century. The author emphasises that D. Weymann referred to Khmelnitsky’s works when debating with I. Kant.

This article provides an analysis of the situation around studying the problem of the human being that developed in Soviet medieval studies in the 1950—70s. Emphasising the characteristic of the period monologue nature of assessing the meaning content of the image of the human being, the author compares the ideas of D. S. Likhachev and V. P. Adrianova-Peretz, and S. S. Averintsev about the nature of the human being in ancient texts and identifies the underlying internal polemical nature of their concepts.