Action-thoughts and the genesis of time in linguistic semiosis
The genesis of time is explained in the spirit of constructivism combined with the activity approach to cognition. The cardinal temporal categories of present, past, and future are discussed in terms of action-thoughts understood as elementary units of activity whose structure is determined by linguistic semiosis. Husserl’s tripartite model of the phenomenology of time (prime perception, retention, protention) is applied to the analysis of the subject’s experience of his actions. It is demonstrated...
Ironic assessment in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel The Golovlyovs
Irony is considered as an evaluative category in literary and artistic discourse. The authors point out such typical features of ironic evaluation as implicit character, i. e. the ability of irony to present the evaluative position of the author in a veiled form, subjectivity, which is directly dependent on the author's attitudes and ideological intentions, negative colouring of ironic evaluation and a high degree of its impact on the reader. The authors identify the basic techniques of expressing...
Events and narration in socio-cultural practices
The article deals with the dynamic interaction of events and narratives. As a result of this interaction, stable links ‘events-narratives’ appear; they influence the formation and transformation of social and cultural processes in society. Event-narrative links form the basis of the system of norms and values of society. The corpus of ‘event-narrative’ links creates behavioural patterns, serves as a motivator for members of society, a cause and reason for actions and an initiator of terraced events...
Translation Historiography
The article offers an overview of the development of translation history during the past decade. It focuses on recent debates, research areas and methodological avenues in translation history with special emphasis on interdisciplinarity. Driven by a move away from a Euro-centric view of translation, researchers have become interested in producing connected and comparative histories of translation. The dialogue with the general field of history has led to the adoption of new methods and forms of analysis...
Time and eternity in the literary image of the church procession: Pushkin’s Boris Godunov and Shmeleff’s The Year of the Lord
This article considers the depiction of the church procession to examine the literary interpretation of time and eternity in Alexander Pushkin’s historical drama Boris Godunov and Ivan Shmeleff’s novel The Year of the Lord. The two texts share fundamental similarities in literary images. The church procession is portrayed as a manifestation of eternity in the tangible reality of this world. Despite their common temporal nature, images in Boris Godunov and The Year of the Lord differ in terms of...
Emotional and receptive-axiological aspects of the speech act of threat in everyday conflict communication in Russian
The article analyses the emotive aspect of the production and perception of the speech act of threat and the specificity of the perception of this act by a modern native speaker of Russian. The act of threat is an instrument of influence exerted on the listener. Its effectiveness depends on the strength of the negative emotions of anxiety, fear, etc. initiated in the listener. At the same time, the production of threatening statements is often associated with the speaker's emotional state, which...
On the Pushkin text in the poetry of Perestroika
This article is devoted to Perestroika poets referring to the Pushkin text as a ‘tuning fork’ in reconfiguring poetics. The study aims to show that, in this case, intertextual connection create a special text-within-a-text. The corpus, intertextual, and compositional methods are used to analyse Pushkin-invoking texts by Yuri Arabov, Vladimir Druk, Timur Kibirov, and other poets. It is concluded that these authors perceive Pushkin’s poetry as a lexicon whose units can be used for building countless...
Argumentum ad morti in the violence discourse: the semantics and pragmatics of ‘radical’ argumentation
The appeal to death is a type of argument that either explicitly or implicitly invokes human finitude. This rhetorical device contributes to the credibility of requests, wishes, etc., or blocks communication. The illocutionary power of the appeal to death is determined by the means it uses, which range from inductive generalisation and deductions to approaching the limit of this generalisation, to the threat of going beyond the existential boundaries of the discourse, to the problem domain losing...
A synthesis of genres in Andrey Bolotov’s memoirs
Although the genre status of the memoirs of the Russian writer Andrei T. Bolotov has been repeatedly raised in the literature, it has never merited a separate study. This article analyses the structure of Bolotov’s memoirs in terms of their genre peculiarity. Text analysis shows that, when writing his memoirs, Bolotov used techniques borrowed from across various genres with which he was well acquainted. Those were the novel, the epistolary genre, the travelogue, the historical essay, etc. In the...
Historical perspective on the word gospoda as a form of address
Using the method of corpus analysis, this article explores the history of the Russian honorific gospoda and related forms of address: damy i gospoda, gospoda-tovarischi, and other noun-noun and adjective-noun collocations (gospoda publika uvažaemye gospoda). It draws on examples from literature to demonstrate that although, contrary to popular belief, the honorific damy i gospoda is not a neologism of the end of the 20th century, it was marginal to pre-revolutionary speech. It is also shown that...
“The point of departure of peoples determines their fate”: Peter Chaadaev and Alexis de Tocqueville
In 1836, Peter Chaadaev in his private letter to Alexander Turgenev mentioned that the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville had stolen from him a “deep thought” that the point of departure of peoples determined their fate. Russian and foreign scholars interpreted these words differently, trying to assess the seriousness of Chaadaev’s reproach. The article explores the history of the expression ‘le point de départ’ and the use of it in the works by Tocqueville (“Democracy in America”) and Chaadaev...
Literary communication: from semiotic models to a theory of linguistic aesthetics
The article explores literary communication as one of the types of linguistic communication. The main objective is to develop a linguo-aesthetic model of literary communication based on the models of the sign, semiosis and communication adopted in linguistics, semiotics and poetics. The author employs semiotic methods of modelling the sign and communication, developed in the works of Frege, Peirce, Shpet, Mukařovsky, Jakobson, Lotman, Eco, Novikov, and Zolyan. The emphasis is laid on the models...
“Russian people” in the literature and documents of the 19th century: an experience of linguistic portraiture
The article describes the ideologeme “Russian people” and its use in the texts of fiction and documentary literature of the 19th century. The authors explored both the socio-political concept “'Russian people” and its verbalization in Russian. The research material included examples from the Russian National Corpus, which were analysed using corpus, content-analytical and cognitive methods. This research aims to identify and to characterise the concept “Russian people”. The authors argue that it...
The concept “people” in the Cadet Party rhetoric
The article considers the interpretation of the concept “people” by the Constitutional Democratic Party supporters. This concept is of fundamental importance for the analysis of Cadet ideology. The concept “people” was of great political value for the Cadet party. The author correlates this concept with such notions relevant for the Party as society, nation, and nationality. The author examines the relations of “people” with the authorities, the state, the Cadet Party, the Parliament, and humanity...
The journal “1812”and the 100th anniversary of the Patriotic War of 1812
The author explores the perception of the characteristic traits of Russian people that was widespread among military intellectuals and their associates — publishers, authors and subscribers of the journal “1812” at the end of the 19th — the beginning of the 20th centuries. The same group of military historians, academics and popularizers initiated the foundation of the Museum of 1812 and the Borodino panorama, painted by F. A. Roubaud for the 100th anniversary of the Patriotic War of 1812. On the...
Pushkin texts in the description of characters by Dostoevsky and Nabokov
In his novels, Dostoevsky refers to the Pushkin text to describe characters. For Dostoevsky, Pushkin is an ethical and aesthetic touchstone; the writer’s voice is consonant with that of the poet’s persona. In some cases, the Pushkin text is embedded in religious discourse (the parable of the prodigal son). In interpreting the Pushkin text, Dostoevsky’s characters present and disclose themselves. The ‘dreamer’ from ‘White Nights’ invokes the Pushkin text to convey the values of his own. In her peculiar...
The concepts of citizenship and estate in Russian history — continuity and / or intermittence
The author studied the development of the concept “people” in contemporary history taking into account its possible interpretation as a bearer of sovereignty. This concept goes back to the time of early bourgeois revolutions. The author holds that there are certain parallels between the ideology of citizenship, the development of the concept “people / nation” and the interpretation of the concept “citizenship”. Contemporary theoretical debates about citizenship are fully applicable to the history...
The Book of Life in the hermeneutics of Johann Georg Hamann
In this article, I consider the philosophy of the Book in the context of reflections on hermeneutics in the works of the 18th-century Königsbergian thinker Johann Georg Hamann. Hamann’s bibliocentric hermeneutics treats the ‘philosophy of the Book’ as the question as to whether the experience of truth as such is possible. In the light of his hermeneutics, the fate of ontology is a function of the quality of reading since its dialogical nature directly determines a person’s special hermeneutic responsibility...
Textonics: an introduction to electronic philology
Digital philology studies texts and textuality in electronic networks and the ways of their reading, writing and transformation. Electronic texts are much more fluid and transformable than paper texts and oral utterances. Textonics is a combination of theoretical and practical work with digital texts, the use of the Internet and all the capabilities of computer technology to create new sign ensembles, to develop new genres of intellectual creativity, and to rethink and reorganize existing textual...
A philosophical framework for presenting novelty in a poetic text
Texts of different eras relate to varying degrees to the question of generating and presenting novelty. Recent poetry has been undergoing visible changes in poets’ attitudes to demonstrating linguistic novelty in texts. Young poets write texts that do not use the established algorithms of presenting and perceiving the new but disguise or surreptitiously reveal apparent novelty. One must explore the current practices of hedging against the new in the light of the philosophy of the text and in the...
Meaning in life and meaning in the text (roundtable proceedings)
The roundtable discussed the key problems of meaning formation in narrative and performative practices. In free discussion, experts analysed various factors and parameters determining the meaningfulness of action and examined mechanisms for their interpretation. These mechanisms can be considered as manifestations of various modally different types of textualisation. Interpretation and textualisation make it possible to identify and describe the interaction between some causal and functional relations...
The formation of the narrative and the performative in public communication
Since the British philosopher John Austin, narratives and performatives have been considered as opposite concepts covered by the generic concept of speech act. At the same time, these concepts were separated according to whether a narrative, inducement, a description, or an imperative was present in the text. Similar to the narrative, the performative is created under pressure from various external factors associated with the system of public communications, to which the author is exposed, and...
Embedding imagology in Translation Studies
Imagology, the study of national and cultural images as represented in textual discourse, is a fruitful approach for disciplines dealing with textual change, such as translation studies. Both imagology and translation studies have gradually extended their area of research, which has revealed growing commonalities. Journalistic texts have for instance been included in research that was previously almost exclusively dealing with literary discourse. Moreover interest in imagological research, sometimes...
Hybrid texts as a form of interaction between avant-garde artistic and political discourses
This paper explores hybrid texts as a special type of text that forms within ‘inter-discourse interaction’ and relates to the ‘convergence of discourses’. The analysis focuses on the interaction between avant-garde art and political discourses, which have been in close contact since the 20th century and have common typological features. The main methods used in this study are the linguistic pragmatic method, the linguistic poetic method, and discourse analysis. The article proposes a definition of...
The philosophy of the text as texts of philosophy
The conceptualization of the philosophy of the text requires a preliminary idea about the ways of the textual presentation of philosophy as such. At the same time, philosophical views per se are difficult to classify and systematize — at best, they are arranged by eras and cultural-ethnic factors. In this regard, it seems fruitful and justified not to build various rationalistic constructions but to take an open look at the very existence of philosophizing. From such perspectives, philosophy appears...
The intertexteme as an instrument in the past — present — future dialogical space of urbanism practices: an intersemiotic analysis of graffiti and inscriptions in Gdansk and Kaliningrad
This paper discusses intertextual and intervisual tools for creating the past — present — future dialogic axis in urban practices, using the example of graffiti and inscriptions in Gdansk and Kaliningrad. The authors describe the urban space as an object of research, give a definition of the urban inscription, characterize the semiotic nature of the latter, consider terminology problems relating to the category of intertextuality, and broadly interpret the intertexteme as a tool in the ‘past —...
‘Reaching out’ beyond the text: philosophical notes
In this article, I define the concept of text and briefly discuss the related concepts of speech and discourse. I demonstrate how the humanities treat texts and examine the structural-semiotic and the hermeneutic approach. Further, I identify both the differences between these approaches and the similarities in the ways they interpret texts. I argue that the philosophical approach seeks to go beyond the text as far as possible without leaving it altogether and stress that the divide between the...
A. G. Baumgarten’s aesthetic-semiotic concept
In this article, we consider the semiotic concept developed by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, a founder of modern aesthetics. We describe the principles of the semiotic theory, as expressed in Baumgarten's Metaphysica, particularly in the parts ‘Ontology’ and ‘Psychology’, in which he introduced the basic semiotic terminology. We pay special attention to the general context of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica. This context had determined the characteristics of the semiotic ideas that he developed later. In...
Consilience or fragmentation in Translation Studies today?
Translation Studies has branched out into a heterogeneous interdiscipline during the past few decades. This development is not only the result of the emergence of different kinds of translation practices, research questions and new technologies, but also of different epistemological and ontological assumptions about the object of study. Four major areas are outlined: linguistic, cultural, cognitive and sociological. Connections between them are briefly discussed, but the main tendency has been...
Indirect translation: Main trends in practice and research
This article concerns indirect translation (ITr), understood broadly as translation of translation, and has the aim of facilitating systematic research on this long-standing, widespread yet underexplored phenomenon. The article thus provides an overview of some of the main patterns in ITr practice and research and explores suggestions for related future studies. The overview follows the ‘Five W’s and One H’ approach. The what question concerns terminological and conceptual issues related to ITr and...
Ontological taxonomy as a means to inventory the elements of the semantic metalanguage of cognitive analysis (based on E. V. Rakhilina’s monograph Cognitive Analysis of Object Names (Semantics and Collocations))
In this work, I address the problems of inventorying the semantic metalanguage used in cognitive analysis to describe the meaning and collocation characteristics of object names. I establish correlations between elements of the semantic metalanguage to explain the meanings of linguistic units and speech sections in E. V. Rakhilina’s monograph Cognitive Analysis of Object Names (Semantics and Collocations) (Rakhilina 2010). I focus on the units of the semantic metalanguage, i. e. words and phrases...
Ergonomics and the translation process
The translation process can be regarded as a complex system involving many agents, organizational factors such as workflow, communication processes, project management, job security, and translator status. Environmental factors in the physical sense (e. g. lighting, temperature, air quality, space) as well in the broader sense of the role of translation and translators in the economy and society as a whole can also influence the process. Viewing translation from an ergonomic perspective can provide...
V. The hagiographic topic in I. S. Shmelev’s novel The Inexhaustible Chalice
In this article, we discuss the hagiographic topics in I. S. Shmelev’s novel The Inexhaustible Chalice, which are expressed through different components of the novel’s literary structure — ranging from the individual traits of the main character, Ilya Sharonov, to twists of the plot and the milestones of his biography. We maintain that in terms of the genre this novel resembles both the lives of the righteous and the lives of the venerable. The novel conforms to the canons of hagiographic texts because...
Audiovisual translation and reception
Reception of translated texts has thus far received relatively scant, uneven attention in Translation Studies, even though reception studies theories have been applied in the last decades, first to literary translation and then touching upon other areas and text types. This chapter reports on audiovisual translation in particular, exploring the very concepts of audience and reception. Adjacent concepts are also discussed, all having a bearing on the approach and the methodology, and all chosen for...
Age-related characteristics of English, American, and Russian compliments
In this article, I identify and analyse the linguistic features of the generation and perception of compliments by people of different age identities from English, American and Russian cultures. Language is not the same across different age groups, which necessitates a thorough examination of age-related parameters in language and the identification of semiotic markers of age identity. The promising area of linguistic research — social semiotics — lends an urgency to such a study. To achieve the...
Discursive practices of the Russian diaspora in Estonia: language contacts
In this article, I use the concept of discursive practices to consider the speech practices of the Russian diaspora of Estonia. The findings of the study suggest the existence of an invariant discourse generated by an exemplary member of the diaspora. Such a discourse has formal (borrowings, code-switching, etc.), semantic (referential shifts, semantically re-oriented vocabulary, etc.), and pragmatic features. The results of the diasporic speech analysis show that the key components of a typical...
The rhetoric and logic of the representations of the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–1878 in Russian public discourse
The Balkan crisis of 1875—1876 and the ensuing Russo-Turkish war of 1877—1878 were the first major foreign policy challenges for the Russian Empire in the entirely new public sphere situation. The military reform of 1784, which replaced recruitment with conscription, translated in the involvement of the general public in the current events. The new public sphere, which had been developing from the 1850s, required new languages both to describe and to transform reality, as well as to produce a collective...
Crimea in the legacy of B. D. Grekov, fellow of the Academy of Sciences
Crimea holds a very special place in the biography of B. D. Grekov (1882—1953), an outstanding Russian historian and a fellow of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Crimea was his long-standing research interest and a place of work and leisure. Some of his years spent in Crimea were very productive, and others were hard and lean. This article presents archive materials and other publications to analyse the stages and episodes of the scholar’s life and oeuvre in Crimea.
1. Office of the Federal Security...
Competition and Interaction between Languages: A Sociolinguistic Approach
The author offers a review of M. J.Tagaev's monograph "Dialogue of Languages and Cultures" (the functioning and interaction of cultural and linguistic spaces of the Kyrgyz and Russian languages). Bishkek: Kyrgyz Russian Slavic University Publishing House, 2015. 240 p. The reviewer notes the acute character of the problem, typical of the post-Soviet states and analyzes the functioning of the state and official languages in Kyrgyzstan.
The Image of Contemporary Russia n Language and Culture: the Thematic Issue of «Russian Review»
The article is an overview of the thematic issue of the Polish research journal "Russian Review" dedicated to the image of modern Russia in political, media, poetic, marketing and didactic types of discourse. Both national and international research works are taken into consideration. Nowadays researchers become increasingly interested in the category of image. A noticeably stronger position of anthropological, communicative and pragmalinguistic approaches to the analysis of linguistic...
Was there ever realism? On the periodisation of Western European literature
This article revisits the traditional perspective on realism as a prevalent trend in the European literature at the end of the 19th century. The author examines the perception of the concept of realism at the end of the 18th century (Friedrich Schiller) and in the 1850s (Champfleury and Duranty). It is stressed that Stendhal and Balzac did not associate themselves with realism and Flaubert objected to being called a realist. The author emphasizes the diversity of schools, trends, and literary techniques...
The Art of «Leftist Obscenity» as a Way to Discredit the Imperial Regime: the Works of Eisenstien, Babel, and Lunacharsky
This study deals with the method of ‘leftist obscenity,’ which emerged within left art in the early Soviet period. The article aims to define this method, describe its procedures, and identify the purpose it served at the time. The author assumes that ‘leftist obscenity’ arose within pro-Soviet art, when the Soviet government was seeking legitimation, which was impossible without discrediting the imperial regime. ‘Leftist obscenity’ was intended to discredit the imperial regime and to give a new...
The Name of Prophet Abraham in the Old Russian Literature of XI—XIII centuries
The spread of Christianity in Russia contributed to the development of writing and had a direct impact on the thematic, genre, figurative features of spiritual, and later secular literature. In this article, we consider the image of Abraham, one of the Biblical forefathers, along with Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, who are central to Old Testament. The author analyzes the mentioning of his name in various contexts of ancient Russian literature of the 11th-13th centuries — the Tale of Bygone Years, the...
The mythical-historical images of Bruno Schulz’s ‘Spring’ in the context of Kafka’s mythologism
Myths and history are different but related forms of consciousness. They date back to the archaic and new periods of world history. New forms of synthesis between history and myths translated in the ‘mythical-historical imagery’ of the 20th-century art. For the first time in the history of world culture, modernism has created a synthesis between the seemingly divergent elements — history and myths. This article analyses Schulz’s short story ‘Spring’ in the context of Franz Kafka’s mythological oeuvre...
Image, eidos, figura, pattern. How words help to recognize patterns and understand their reference and sense?
The article explores the process of image recognition. The author analyses everyday language to identify correlattions between cognitive patterns of the image and a set of alternative etymons and cognitive patterns in Russian and other languages — Greek, Latin, English, German. Links between them form a vast conceptual space associated with image recognition. The author proposes a pattern of image recognition, which is, in its simplified form, unfolding from a quantum automaton, to its "saturation"...
Events as a semantic framework for the construction of reality: the prospects of a transition to a dynamic ontology
Events are the main element in the formation and presentation of a worldview across all the research disciplines in the humanities and other sciences. Cognising and understanding reality requires the consideration and construction of data, descriptions, correlations, and narratives, to all of which concrete events are the key. In this article, we analyse the connection between an event and reality, with a special focus on social events in the context of management. Such an approach does not confine...
The literary revision of Négritude in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop
This article analyses the problems addressed in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, through the prism of imagology — the study of cultural stereotypes as presented in literature. Within the ideational structure of the novel, the author analyses the theory of négritude, which holds that the African civilisation plays a special role in the world. It is concluded that the négritude philosophy is expressed in the novel through grotesque and the theory of négritude should be analysed in the context of philosophical...
The Image of the World Revealed In Words: Ludwig Wittgenstein and The Iсonic Semiotics
The article discusses an alternative version of semiotics in which the process of semiosis is based not on metonymic symbolization (substitution), when one entity stands for another, but on the metaphorical (iconic) representation. The author suggests considering iconicity as a basis for relating the signifier and the signified. This relation is understood as a construed one rather than something determined by physical similarity. The basis for such a revision of iconicity can be found in Lessing's...
The Text and Discourse in the Light of Communicative Meaning Formation
This article analyses differences between the static and dynamic interpretations of the text and discourse. The concept of a communicative action (a semiotic act) is considered as the main distinguishing factor that is crucial for the communicative model of text but is ignored within the language model. The communicative (dynamic) model postulates the following: 1) the text is a sequence of verbal elements of communicative actions; 2) the verbal manifestation of an utterance differs fundamentally...
On the Semiotic Model of Image
The article is devoted to the development of a fundamental semiotic model of images that is based on the categorical apparatus of Ch. S. Peirce (on the concepts of Firstness, icon, hypoicon and metaphor). The image is proposed to be defined as a complex sign (two-level hypoicon- metaphor), which has a certain “primary” sign as its sign vehicle that represents the object constituted by all the facts (cases of semiosis) that are similar to that primary sign. Three key functions of the image are defined:...