Current issue

The intensive transformation of social communication in the digital format is radically changing business activity, forms of employment, management, education, cultural industries, personal life, and the entire lifestyle. This is a large-scale and profound problem of developing an interdisciplinary approach that would solve two tasks: it would provide a common conceptual platform for analysis and, at the same time, be sufficiently operational, preserving the accumulated results and potential for further disciplinary research and development. The Russian tradition of communication research is characterised by an expansive understanding of communication, in which social culture and personality are seen as complementary communicative entities by their very nature. Research focuses on several specific topics: meaning-making and understanding; apophatic semiosis and the role of subjectness; interdisciplinarity and convergence of a wide range of methods and approaches, both in the sciences and the humanities. Contemporary Russian communication studies are characterised by widely varying theoretical approaches and models, as well as the use of methods from a broad range of sciences. At the same time, communication practices themselves clearly tend toward integration. Any science is communicative to some extent because it is generated by and operates on the understanding of its subject as communication with and about nature, society, and one's own thoughts. If communication studies are a crossroads that many pass through but few stop at, then the Russian tradition has often focused and continues to focus on the crossroads itself. With its inherent interdisciplinary nature, it intertwines and synergises anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, logical semantics, psychology, semiotics, sociology, artificial intelligence theory and practice, cultural theory and philosophy, urban studies, and more. The Russian tradition is of interest in the context of the intensive development of digital communication and the maturation of the proto-science of communication.

This article examines the interrelationship among the key Confucian concepts known as the “Five Constants” (五常) in the ancient Chinese philosophical text “The Analects” (Lunyu). It focuses on the polysemy of the central moral concept ‘ren’ (仁) in different contexts and analyzes how this concept is rendered in Russian through a comparison of passages translated by Russian sinologists. The study aims to describe the methods and strategies used by Russian translators of classical Chinese philosophy over the three centuries of work on this canonical text, to identify shortcomings and shifts in meaning in their translations, and to offer a revised translation of selected passages. The research methodology combines descriptive, historical-comparative, and comparative analysis with inductive and deductive reasoning to clarify the meanings of key concepts and their interrelations in diverse contexts. The findings show that many Russian sinologists relied primarily on literal translation and preservation of the formal structure of classical Chinese. In earlier periods, numerous discrepancies arose from insufficient historical knowledge of the concepts embedded in Confucius’s teaching, leading above all to misunderstandings or under-representation of subtextual and connotative meanings. The highly condensed structure of the original often resulted in the loss of logical connections between clauses and a weakening of philosophical content in translation. A detailed pre-translation analysis makes it possible to adopt a translation strategy guided by the original text’s intent, including tactics for making implicit meanings explicit and supplying omitted sentence elements and connective units where required for clarity in Russian.

The article presents the results of a study of how the discourse of the social management of innovation is structured through different modes of implementing axiological strategies within the discursive trajectory model. The methodology of the analysis is grounded in the theory of conceptualization and evaluative categorization, principles of the semiotics of communication, as well as the theory of the strategic nature of discourse. In line with a dynamic approach to discourse analysis, methods of interpretative analysis of inference and cognitive modeling have been employed. Visionary and optimizing modes of implementing axiological strategies have been established. The most typical and frequent ways of implementing the visionary axiological strategy have been identified, namely axiological perspectivization, formulation, metaphorization, expressive repetition, descriptive evaluative qualification, and attractive maieutic questioning. In the optimizing strategy, valorizing argumentation of significant meaning prevails through techniques of axiological programming, syntactic parallelism, metaphorization, deontic modalization, exemplification, and evaluation. The analysis of the implementation of visionary and optimizing axiological strategies in the discourse of social management of innovations has revealed relevant and significant value meanings in the form of correlative and oppositional conceptual nodes of various types, which contribute to the formation and enrichment of the current layer of the concept 创新 (innovation), as well as its promotion in the media's axiologically parameterized communicative space. The specified meanings are interpreted by the authors as ways of adapting global discursive strategies for social management of innovations within the context of Chinese-language discourse.

The article examines the lexis of “Boyhood”, the second novella in Leo Tolstoy’s autobiographical trilogy. It considers the lexical strata and individual lexemes that shape the distinctive linguopoetics of the work. The lexis is analysed against the lexical background of the period in which it was written, namely the mid‑nineteenth century. This approach makes it possible to identify Tolstoy’s linguistic innovations and determine their role in the evolution of the Russian literary language. The study identifies words and word forms first recorded in a literary text, which are instances of occasional neology, as well as semantic shifts within the polysemous structures of established lexemes and the acquisition of new connotative meanings. Corpus analysis, based on concordance data and statistical summaries provided by the Russian National Corpus, is used to distinguish Tolstoy’s own lexical innovations from lexemes that became firmly established in the Russian literary language owing to “Boyhood” and Tolstoy’s oeuvre more broadly. The analysis also considers lexical units that acquired the distinctive imprint of Tolstoy’s individual style and have retained this association to the present day. Particular attention is paid to the role of individual lexemes in creating the novella’s specific linguopoetic structure, which is shaped by the dialectics of the protagonist’s inner life. This structure is characterised by emotionally and ethically marked vocabulary that is predominantly abstract in its lexical and grammatical properties. The article also examines stylistic shifts affecting certain words in “Boyhood” and Tolstoy’s use of colloquial lexical units to achieve semantic precision in the expression of thought and emotion, as well as specific artistic and representational effects. For most of the lexemes under consideration, the study traces the direction of their subsequent development both in Tolstoy’s individual style during the mature and later periods of his literary career and in the lexis of the Russian literary language as a whole.

This article analyses the poem cycle “Das alte Königsberg” (“Old Königsberg”) by the Dutch poet Riekus Waskowsky (1932—1977), from his collection "Tant pis pour le clown" (1966). In the four poems of the cycle, the poet describes four events from the everyday life of Königsberg in the 16th and 17th centuries: the murder of a student, the celebration of a university anniversary, an operation to remove a knife from a patient’s stomach, and the execution of a criminal. The source of the facts underlying the narrative is identified — Caspar Stein’s book “Old Königsberg.” Critics have concluded that the cycle under discussion primarily reflects Waskowsky’s interest in history and his compassion for its victims. I also attempt to demonstrate that “Das alte Königsberg” can be interpreted as an illustration of Friedrich Nietzsche’s postulate of three kinds of history — monumental, antiquarian, and critical. Waskowsky’s distinctive historiosophy combines empathy for victims with a vindication of science and art (craftsmanship), as well as attention to the nuances of the fleeting everyday. The choice of the name of the poet’s professor of poetics, Piet Calissius, is considered separately; it represents one of the few details invented by the poet. With the help of poet and translator Jan H. Mysjkin, the meaning of this allusion has been established.

This article examines personification in 20th-century Russian poetry from the perspective of interaction of tropes. The aim of the study is to determine the status of personification as a trope and metacomponent of the figurative system and model of the textual world, to identify its role in the formation of “figurative fields” and its interaction with metaphor, simile, and metonymy. The research methodology is based on a structural-semantic contextual analysis of a representative sample of poetic texts. The study established that personification functions as an independent trope in a “strong” position of unambiguous reading and as a metatextual element of complex tropes in a “weak” position, where it interacts with other tropes to create polysemantic figurative fields. Particular attention is paid to referential personifying metaphors, in which personification becomes a marker of the author’s point of view, modelling the world according to anthropomorphic principles. The findings emphasise that personification is a key tool for creating hybrid discursivity, in which the personified object becomes “potentially speaking” and serves as an expression of the speaker’s empathic position. The author sees the potential of this research in a comprehensive analysis of the cognitive, pragmatic, and semantic aspects of personification and the development of new classifications of personifications.

The paper examines the linguopoetics of Yegor Letov from the perspective of iconic grammar. The study explores the poet’s linguo-creative strategy, which is aimed at overcoming the conventionality of the linguistic sign and establishing an authentic poetic language, a goal achieved through the actualisation of the implicit iconic potential inherent in the grammatical structures of Russian. Drawing upon Roman Jakobson’s theoretical framework of “the poetry of grammar” and contemporary research on iconicity, the paper treats grammatical constructions as a significant device for modelling artistic reality. Two principal groups of syntactic constructions employed by Letov in their iconic function are identified and systematised. The first group — indefinite-personal sentences — is analysed as a means of modelling “flickering” or impersonal subjectivity, foregrounding the iterativity and automaticity of actions within a depersonalised totalitarian worldview. The second group — nominal series — is interpreted as a means of iconically rendering visual sensory perception and the effects of the cataloguing of reality. It is demonstrated that Letov’s engagement with the syntactic resources of Russian is systematic and reflexive in character, and that the grammar of constructions constitutes a fundamental level in the realisation of his linguocentric poetics. In Letov’s poetry, iconic grammar functions not merely as a stylistic device but as a regular semiotic mechanism that enables transgression beyond the boundaries of conventional language into the domain of individual artistic discourse.

The paper analyses a family of Russian constructions featuring paired demonstrative pronouns of remote and proximal reference, which exhibit rigid structural constraints: a fixed component order (t‑pronoun preceding s‑pronoun), obligatory rhyming of the second pronoun with the first, and a limited set of combinations involving coordinating conjunctions and prepositional‑case forms of pronouns. The meaning of these constructions cannot be reduced to the simple sum of their parts, allowing them to be regarded as syntactic phraseologisms. It is demonstrated that these constructions serve as a means of vague or deliberately blurred nomination in contexts where the speaker intentionally avoids maximum informativeness, assuming the addressee can reconstruct the missing details. They are particularly productive in rendering reported speech, substituting for discourse fragments that undergo deliberate reduction during citation. The analysis shows that individual constructions within this family possess additional semantic components: evaluative connotations, the meaning of unfulfilled expectation, or the function of a universal scope expander, underscoring their semantic multilayeredness and pragmatic versatility.

Contemporary émigré studies have achieved significant archival and textual advances, but the devices for describing the poetics of authors of the first wave of Russian émigrés remain underdeveloped. This hinders understanding of the work of the younger generation of poets and writers, who found themselves in a unique historical and cultural context but did not achieve the same recognition as their older contemporaries. This paper examines the work of Dovid Knut, a young poet of the first wave of émigrés, and describes the transformation of his poetics. His early poems were inspired by avant-garde experiments, but during the 1920s and 1930s, he reoriented himself toward a more traditional poetry, characteristic of the “Parisian Note” of Georgy Adamovich and the “Perekrestok” circle of Vladislav Khodasevich. The periodization of Knut's work, the distinctive features of his poetry collections, and the continuity between them are established using quantitative methods. To accurately compare the collections, their metaphors were counted, classified, and analysed. The study determined that his early work, inspired by the formal experiments of the avant-garde, is characterised by increased metaphoricity, semantic ambiguity, stylistic contrasts, and a predominance of the most elusive metaphors — substitutions and attributions. Later, Knut pursued a simplification approach: his vocabulary became neutral, and metaphors of identification and comparison started to occur more frequently. At the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, the degree of metaphoricity declined sharply but remained inconsistent, only reaching a balance in his final collection, "Nasushchnaya Lyubov", and the "Prarodina" cycle. During this period, the simplification approach transitioned to a focus on unambiguity — ultimate semantic clarity. Knut's moderate metaphoricity was comparable to the poetry of Adamovich and Khodasevich, whose influence was also evident in the structure of his metaphors. Knut's poetics evolved extremely dynamically, never reducing itself to imitations of older contemporaries. This study establishes formal aspects of the artistic language of émigré poetry, which are significant for distinguishing the individual styles of its representatives.

The article focuses upon axiological dimension of “commercial” metaphors in sports media. Drawing on historical corpora as well contemporary textual data we demonstrate that analogies from trade and economics have been extensively exploited in sports news discourse since the beginning of professional sport institutionalization. Qualitative distinctiveness of social and cultural relations that mean to be realized in sports appears to have been brought to quantifiable rational parameters — with money as their universal equivalent. Pragmatically motivated metonymic shift “sportsman → professional function” results in the multifaceted “sportsman” concept being reduced to a set of numerically verifiable professional traits, thus equating a sportsman to a thing — both characterised by “quantifiable” and countable features. In a consumer society, with money being a symbol of all things (S. Moscovici), metonymy undergoes generalisation, giving rise to a “sportsman is a commodity” metaphor. Linguistic instantiations of the latter, dating back to the late XIX — early XX centuries, include collocations of trade-related terms with proper and common names denoting sportsmen (e. g., the sale of players, to buy up players, to trade Rogers Hornsby). Signaling a shift in both lexical valency and meaning such word combinations mark the beginning of the devaluation of the sportsman. Having originated in the speech of American sports managers and club owners, the “sportsman is a commodity” metaphor has acquired cultural prominence, becoming integral to Anglo-American sports discourse. In modern media it is distinguished by a high degree of conceptual and linguistic detail and serves as an explanatory model structuring common perception of most socially significant aspects in professional sportsmen lives. In speech “commercial” metaphors vary from occasional vivid, often striking creative tropes to multiple conventionalized clichés. Used with consistent regularity, they serve as linguistic manifestation of the hyper-commodification of professional sport, which in the global media entertainment industry has been largely deprived of its original — ideal — axiological foundation.

The article analyses Julio Cortázar’s novel “62: A Model Kit” (1968) in the context of the Situationism movement. The novel is considered as part of the writer's corpus of works from the 1960s and 1970s, a period when he underwent political reorientations in connection with the aggravation of the political situation in Latin America (the military dictatorship in Argentina, the socialist revolution in Cuba). Political events in Europe at this time, particularly the student riots of May 1968, were reflected in the almanack “Last Round” (1969). However, beyond the general socio-political context, typological and contact links are discovered between the Situationists and Cortázar. The novel “62: A Model Kit” describes a group of characters reminiscent of the Situationists in their language and the form of their activity — the psychogeographical practices of drift. It is also established that Cortázar was familiar with “The Situationist Times” journal. Both Cortázar and the Situationists share a focus on the city and a desire to transform the everyday: for the former, the artistic goal was to liberate literature from the confines of art through an appeal to the reader's urban subjectivity; for the latter, it was to disrupt the specialised structures of power and test methods for creatively exploring the urban environment. The similarity between the Situationists' texts and Cortázar’s works is reinforced by a shared philosophical pretext — namely, Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”, which outlines the concept of ‘situation’, the key concept for the Situationists. These points of intersection between Cortázar and the Situationists suggest a connection not only at the level of the socio-political and intellectual environment in Europe in the 1960s, but also at the level of strategy and the language of artistic reflection and practice. The discovery and consideration of the Situationist layer in the novel “62” allows us to include it in the studies of the political history of the XX century, as well as in urban studies and the city-oriented artistic practices.

The paper examines several diffuse phenomena in poetic meter, including heterometric verse, heteromorphic verse, metrical ambiguity, and blurred boundaries between systems of versification. Although these issues have attracted scholarly attention, most previous research has focused on literary texts. This study presents several examples of such “borderline” phenomena identified in folklore verse, or in verse closely related to folklore. The object of study is late spiritual verse in the form of a trochaic trimeter. The array of texts is presented in two main varieties: 1) poems with feminine clausulae and weakened pair rhyme and 2) poems with cross-weakened rhyme (feminine — masculine — feminine — masculine). I suggest that verses of the first type date back to the syllabic versification of the 17th—18th centuries. They were widely circulated among Old Believers, but over time these verses began to be perceived as syllabic-accentual ones. In the 20th century they were published primarily in the form of texts composed in trochaic trimeter. Poems of the second type are associated with the later literary tradition of syllabic-accentual verse, they are to a lesser extent assimilated into folk culture. I identified metrical types that can have several interpretations, and therefore I propose the term “metrical uncertainty” rather than “metrical ambiguity”: it covers the entire potential set of interpretations of metrics.

The autofictionality of the latest Russian-language literary texts encompasses various ways of creating autobiographical identity. The term ‘automediality’ was proposed by Christian Moser and implies an interdisciplinary approach to writing narratives based on biographical material: authors working on creating an autofictional image of themselves in the text use a variety of means of technological media for self-representation. This article examines two strategies of automedia within autofictional works: the use of video and photographic descriptions in Oksana Vasyakina's poetic statement “Kazan Text” (2024) and the diary form with the incrustation of a photograph of the cinematic heroine Laura Palmer in Natalya Meshchaninova's story “Literary Exhibitionism” (2023). Both texts feature the onomastic and subjective identity of the author-hero-narrator, characteristic of autofiction as a mode of writing, while the identities of the heroines are constructed in relation to significant others. The aim of this study is to examine in detail the techniques of automediality functioning in contemporary Russian-language texts with hybrid genre specificity, as well as to reveal the metaphorical similarity of autofiction to the gesture of taking a selfie, which simultaneously demonstrates the image of the subject, its objectivity, and the instrument used. The methodological basis of this article can be considered the psychoanalytic works of Lacan, Uslaner, as well as research in the field of autofiction and autotheory by Muravyova, Wagner-Egelhaaf, and Fournier. In autofictional texts with automediality, the subjectivity of authors and characters is constructed in relation to the Other. This figure can be quite concrete (close ‘others’) or abstract (the Other), representing a certain discursive power that controls the subject. In addition to automediality, the authors of the texts use various metadiscursive practices of self-exposure to create a setting for the referentiality and documentary nature of the autonarrative.