“Bavaria, which I will never forget”: to the image of German space in “Travel letters from England, Germany and France” by Nikolay Gretch
The paper deals with images of Bavarian space based on the travelogue “Travel letters from England, Germany and France” by Nikolay Gretch from the imagological and semiotic points of view. The representation of the metropolitan and provincial imagery of Bavaria is analyzed. Its liminality, fixed in Gretch’s text, is revealed, i. e. intermediate position between North and South. A connection is established between the analyzed loci and such spatial types as the spaces of demi-natural idyll, historical...
Basic notes of the conception of the German-Russian dictionary of neologisms
The article contains some conceptual considerations about structure and contents of the German-Russian dictionary of neologisms, which is positioned by authors as the specialised bilingual dictionary of passive type for the Russianspeaking user and has to supplement the existing general German-Russian dictionaries.
1.
Большой
немецко-русский словарь
: в 3 т. / авт.-сост. М. Я. Цвиллинг, Е. И.
Лепинг, Н. П. Страхова и др.; под общ. рук. О. И. Москальской. 8-е изд., стереотип. М., 2002. Т. 3...
A Königsberg society of friends without Kant
The legends about dinner parties of Immanuel Kant’s friends have been known since the times of his first biographers and other contemporaries. However, there were other communities of friends in Königsberg. Gathering friends at a dining table for the purpose of intellectual communication became a tradition in Königsberg in the 17th/18th centuries. This tradition created a sub-system of creative communication and leisure bringing together both nobility and aristocracy and ordinary curious citizens...
Amber as an economic and cultural phenomenon in the history of the Aesti and Prussians
This article emphasises that, in the history of the early Balts (the Aesti and Prussians), amber was a principal means of trade that was exchanged for necessary goods from Europe. In these conditions, amber played a dual role: on the one hand, it stimulated trade connections between the Balts and other peoples, on the other hand, it decelerated their own cultural and technological development. The author’s assumptions are corroborated by archaeological data.
1. Давидан О. И. Янтарь Старой Ладоги...
Russia and the European Union in the Baltic region: a treacherous path to partnership
This article examines policies of Moscow and Brussels in the Baltics since the launch of the European Union’s Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region in June 2009. An increase in the efficiency of Russia’s policy in the region requires not only the development of bilateral relations with the region’s countries but also a dialogue with the European Union, the key player in the Baltic. The author identifies Russian economic, military, political, and humanitarian interests in the region, and describes the...
The “Polish question” in Soviet-German relations in the second half of the 1920s (based on the materials of the USSR consulate in Königsberg)
On the basis of earlier unknown documents of the Soviet consulate in Königsberg retrieved from the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, the author analyses relations between the USSR and Germany in 1925—1930. The author focuses on the role of the “Polish question”, which largely affected the nature of bilateral relations. The consulate documents indicate that Soviet diplomacy aspired to exploit the differences between Poland and Germany over a wide range of issues (the geopolitical...
Electric energy cooperation in the Baltic Sea region and the role of Russia in it
This article examines cooperation in the electric energy sector in the Baltic region. The author explores the existing undersea HVDC power exchange projects. It is emphasised that cooperation in the electric energy sector is concentrated largely in the EU member states despite earlier plans to establish the Baltic energy ring, which would also include Russia and Belarus. The author stresses that one of the most acute problems for the EU today is overcoming isolation of the energy systems of the Baltic...
Organisation of scientific research in Germany
This article considers the structure of research system in Germany. It describes the federal and state levels of research management. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) bears primary responsibility for science and technology policy at the federal level. At the state level, this responsible is shared by the Ministry of Education and Science and the Ministry of Economy. The author emphasizes the role of the National Academy of Sciences “Leopoldina”, whose principal objective is to...
The doctrinal factor of legal communication
It is a matter of scholarly consensus that legal doctrine has significantly influenced the development of law — at least within the Romano-Germanic (continental) legal tradition. However, the mechanisms through which doctrine exerts its law-shaping influence remain insufficiently explored in Russian legal scholarship. One may also note conceptual gaps and inconsistencies in the terminology employed in studies on this subject. This article attempts to describe the functioning of doctrine in the formation...
Pragmatics of epistemic warrants of the real, the possible and the probable in discourse
The ‘pragmatics of language’ is a set of pragmatic means of a particular language, the meanings of which not only change the world, but also themselves change in the framework of discourse. At the same time, ‘linguistic pragmatics’ is a branch of linguistics that examines linguistic units from the point of view of their use. The ‘pragmatic turn’ of the 1970s in linguistics meant an interest in using language as an action in which words acquire their actual meanings, sometimes radically different...
Memory phenomenon in the German literary criticism after 1989
This paper focuses on different theories proposed by German literary scholars currently addressing the concept of "memory", and reconsider the role of literature as a medium for keeping and transferring cultural legacy through space and time. It is discovered that literature-as-a-medium and memories are interconnected. It is also demonstrated how reading evokes spe-cific memories and forms a certain image of the past.
1. Ассман Я. Культурная память: Письмо, память о прошлом и политическая...
The memento mori genre in medieval German literature
This article addresses the memento mori genre in the German literature if the 11th-12th centuries. The works in this genre present a literary expression of the category of reminder of mortality. It is close to the sermon calling for repentance. The typical texts by Heinrich von Melk include lamentations about the deceitfulness of the world, the brevity and vanity of earthly life, a reminder of the Last Judgement, and a prayer to God. Heinrich von Melk’s memento mori contain criticism of emerging...
On the toponymic purism in North-East Prussia in the first half of the 20th century
This article analyses the large-scale renaming campaign held by the German leadership in the late 1930s in order to Germanise the Prussian territories of the state. It is concluded that the puristic activities of German National Socialists widely discussed in the modern scientific community were inconsistent.
1. Басовская Е. Н. Советский лингвистический пуризм: слово и дело (на материале периодики 1920—1930-х годов) // Вестник Российского государственного гуманитарного университета. 2011. Вып. 7...
The literary domain of Germany after the reunification
This article deals with the key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu’s literary domain theory as applied to post-1989 German literature. The major extra-literary factors that affected fictional discourse after the Unification of Germany are described. Special attention is paid to the inter-discursive nature of contemporary literary landscape.
1. Emmerich E. Das literarische Feld Deutschland — 15 Jahre nach der Wende //Revista de Filología Alemana. 2006. Vol. 14. S. 113—130.
2. Greiner U. Die deutsche Gesinnungsästhetik...
The scientific text for PhD students in interdisciplinary aspect
The author of the article attempts to generalize the means of language in scientific texts through the example of certain natural-scientific specialities on purpose to form linguistic and translating competence of the PhD students studying German.
1. Кузьмина Е. С. Язык специальности и особенности его преподавания (на материале немецкого языка) // Актуальные проблемы государства и права на рубеже веков. М., 2001. С. 452—454.
2. Мельникова О. А. Формирование готовности студентов к пониманию...
Thematic parallels in the hagiographies of Adalbert of Prague and old Russian narratives
This article presents a comparative hagiographic analysis of the life and martyrdom of Adalbert of Prague, who was extremely popular in Central Europe X—XII centuries, and hagiographies and old Russian chronicles related geographically to the events that took place in the basin of the Upper Oka. The author identified several direct and indirect parallels of the plot. Among them, there is a description of the activities of the Adalbert-Gaudentius brothers and the legendary Radim and Vyatko brothers...
Origins and beginnings. The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle as a reference point for literature in the Teutonic Order
Almost all recent historical and literary studies agree that the Livonian Chronicle conveys an impression of a poetical work containing archaic elements. The affinity between the Chronicle and German heroic epic poetry is often stressed. The established perspective, which distorts the image of the Chronicle, requires adjustment. This literary study into the Chronicle’s text complements research on the development of corporate identity in the Teutonic Order.
1. Arnold U. De primordiis ordinis Theutonici...
Subspecies affiliation of some nesting bird species in the Kaliningrad region — 1. Non-passeriformes
This article presents data on the taxonomy of birds in the Kaliningrad region in comparison to the materials of taxonomic surveys of birds in Belarus and other areas in Europe. It is the first part of the work focusing on the issue of subspecies affiliation of some breeding species of the orders Falconiformes, Galliformes, Gruiformes, Charadriiformes, Strigiformes, Piciformes. The second part, which is to be published in 2014, will consider the order Passeriformes.
1. Alex U. H. Zur Vogelwelt Ostpreußens...
Maritime transport as a system-building element of the Baltic transnational transport region
The object of research presented in the article is maritime transport as a system building type of the Baltic transborder transport region identified within the Baltic region. The author describes maritime transport as a key element of the transnational transport region ensuring the activation and development of new forms of international cooperation in the Baltic area.
1. Йонниеми П. Стратегия ЕС для региона Балтийского моря: чего мы достигли? // Балтийский регион. 2010. Вып. 2(4). С. 44—47...
The Kantian Concept of Human Dignity Today
Although Kant was born three hundred years ago, his practical philosophy is still relevant and helpful for understanding difficult and crucial issues of today. One example is the strange transformation the concept of human dignity has undergone in post-Soviet Russia — in everyday language, in ideological doctrines, and in legal documents. While in ordinary life dignity is increasingly reduced to access to material benefits, in its legal sense — above all in the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation...
On the Poetic Dispute between Paul Celan and Johannes Bobrowski
The main purpose of this work is to explore the experience of confronting guilt ‘after Auschwitz’ in the creative dialogue between two significant poets of the twentieth century — Paul Celan and Johannes Bobrowski. Despite their importance, their works remain inadequately studied, particularly in the context of the interaction between language and existence, or more precisely, poetic semiotics and the ontological foundation of existence. Sander Gilman, an American Germanist, in his work “Why and...
Really: syntactics without semiotics?
I discuss the relation of linguistics and semiotics on the basis of the Old Russian discourse particle TI1 ‘indeed’, ‘verily’, ‘truly’ discovered by Andrej A. Zaliznjak in 1993. Linguistics and semiotics are different research programmes: the first one deals with specific features of language structures, while the second one discusses general characteristics of all sign systems, from a perspective of interpreting most or all of them as secondary respective to natural language. Formal models of language...
Idyll, history, rationality: city images in “Real Journey to Germany in 1835” by Nikolay Gretsch
The article explores the images of the German cities, Lubeck and Hamburg, presented in Nikolay Gretsch’s travelogue “The real trip to Germany in 1835”. The author determines the link between the images of the two cities and the tradition of describing Germany as an idyllic place. This tradition was widespread in Russian literature at the end of the 18th century — first half of the 19th century. In Gretsch’s text, Lubeck and Hamburg are depicted as idyllic but to different degrees. The locus of Lubeck...
Immanuel Kant in the Historical Philosophy of Gustav Shpet
This article assesses the role of Immanuel Kant’s ideas in the historical philosophy of Gustav Shpet (1879—1937). This theme has been largely ignored by Shpet scholars who have concentrated on comparing his logical-methodological theories with the ideas of representatives of phenomenology (E. Husserl, R. Ingarden and others) and hermeneutics (F. Schleiermacher, W. Dilthey, H. Lipps, H.-G. Gadamer and others). Accordingly, the authors consistently reconstruct “the sphere of conversation” within which...
On the forms of manifestation of the magical function of language
The article explores linguistic phenomena as a form of manifestation of the magic function. Systemic classifications, taxonomies, and linear phenomena such as euphemization and performativity reflect the beliefs and socio-spiritual functions of societies. This set of linguistic forms and means is determined by the existing religious beliefs. The article studies the foundation of beliefs in the form of elementary "primary performatives". They cannot be denied from the standpoint of logic...
Reception of Kant’s Epistemological Ideas in Fyodor Golubinsky’s Metaphysics
Kant’s views on space and time as well as his doctrine of the categories of understanding attracted the attention of thinkers belonging to the Russian spiritual-academic philosophical tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A prominent representative of these was Fyodor Golubinsky. He was among the first to react to Kant’s “Copernican turn”. He did not merely study the epistemological ideas of Kant but embraced them and modified them in the framework of his own philosophical teaching...
Peritext of the Russian translation of William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty: a case study
Translation of philosophical texts is a special challenge because of specific philosophical idiom and conceptual complexity of the narrative. It is not surprising that such translations are often accompanied by commentaries where the translator steps out of the shadows to justify the translational decisions. This kind of supplementary text called the “translational peritext” is under study in this paper aiming to reveal the cognitive effort the translation process involves, and to explore the author-translator-reader...
Kant’s Dissertation for the Master’s Degree On Fire and the Transformations of his Ideas of Ethereal Matter
Kant’s dissertation for the Master’s degree Succinct Exposition of Some Meditations on Fire was written in Latin in 1755 as a sample (specimen) preceding a Master’s exam, but its first printing did not appear until 1838. What is the relevance of this Master’s dissertation for historical and philosophical studies? To answer this question I analyse the structure and give a brief summary of the dissertation, look at the history of its writing and try to identify the place of this work among Kant’s other...
Deduction of Freedom vs Deduction of Experience in Kant’s Metaphysics
My aim is to demonstrate the specificities and differences between transcendental deduction of concepts and deduction of the fundamental principles of pure practical reason in Kant’s metaphysics. First of all it is necessary to examine Kant’s attitude to the metaphysics of his time and the problem of its new justification. Kant in his philosophy explicated not only the theoretical world of cognition, but also the practical world of freedom. Accordingly, the fundamental means of proving metaphysics’...
Kantian Philosophy and ‘Linguistic Kantianism’
The expression “linguistic Kantianism” is widely used to refer to ideas about thought and cognition being determined by language — a conception characteristic of 20th century analytic philosophy. In this article, I conduct a comparative analysis of Kant’s philosophy and views falling under the umbrella expression “linguistic Kantianism.” First, I show that “linguistic Kantianism” usually presupposes a relativistic conception that is alien to Kant’s philosophy (although Kant’s philosophy itself may...
The phenomenology of Pushkin’s ‘universal sympathy (based on ‘Аscene from ‘Faust’, ‘The feast in the time of plague’, and ‘the Wanderer’)
This article attempts to approach the discovery of what Dostoevsky called Pushkin’s ‘great secret’. In his essay ‘Pushkin’, Dostoevsky wrote that the poet had ‘a capacity for universal sympathy’. The ‘secret’ of Pushkin is analysed in this article in the context of the general cultural problem of fundamental ontological predicates, which determined the main cultural codes of the literary worlds reflected in the poet’s oeuvre. The methodological approach is based on Valentin Nepomnyashchiy’s concept...
OPOIAZ and Bakhtin: the Decision Science’s perspective
Decision science is a relatively new discipline: the product of a cross-pollination among mathematics, psychology, economy and a few other branches of knowledge. It studies how humans make their choices and purports to provide a “rational framework for choosing between alternative courses of action when the consequences resulting from this choice are imperfectly known.” In and of itself decision science is a vast field of intersecting theories and methodologies that I will exploit only in a limited...
Hagiographic genre in the works of Konrad von Wurzburg
I analyse three hagiographic poems written by Konrad von Würzburg, a German poet of the XIII century. The poems describe the lives of Saint Alexis, a Man of God, Saint Pantaleon and Pope Sylvester. These saints are worshipped both by the Catholic and the Orthodox churches. Special attention is paid to Konrad von Wurzburg’s concept of ‘genre’, its essential features and the reader’s perception of hagiographic texts. I hold that German medieval writers tended to create spiritual literature in a poetic...
The problem of antinomy of pure theoretical reason in Kant’s system
A thorough analysis of the structure of the treatise constituting the first Critique and its comparison with the analogous structure of the second and third Critiques show that the Critique of Pure Reason lacks such an important element as the antinomy of pure theoretical reason. Of course, it is implied in the text: Kant’s reasoning is based on it and takes it into account. However, it is not explicitly expressed. Instead of this crucial structural element, which would significantly simplify the...
Conceptualisation of transfer and translation in modern linguistics
This paper studies the vision of translation developed within structuralism, cross-cultural studies, and semiotics and compares them with the theory of cultural transfers. The authors identify key notions of each theory or school. Some of these notions — code, opposition, discretion, and border — permeate the scientific vocabulary of many linguistic schools. However, these terms easily acquire new meanings and interpretations in research works. The continuity of communication space is key to semiotic...
Sambia belts and their prototypes
The article shows that an important detail of Sambia female outfit, the estias, a mixed form of Sambia belt originated from German and provincial-Roman patterns, dates back to the middle or the third quarter of the I century AD. The emergence of a number of tools of intercultural origin (Sambia belts are among them) presupposes the co-existance of different ethnic groups in Sambia in the Julio-Flavian time.
1. Казанский М. М. Реки восточной части Балтийского бассейна и античные географы. Еще раз...
Systematicity of the Critique of Pure Reason and Kant’s system (IV)
This article concludes the analysis of systematicity of the Critique of Pure Reason — the work that underlies the entire system created by the great Königsberg philosopher. The author considers the role of transcendental dialectic (it accounts for more than half of the book) in Kant’s methodology of science and the system of criticism. In the context of traditional epistemological theories, it was an entirely new instalment supplementing these theories and understanding knowledge as a continuous...