2025 Vol. 16 №4

The article presents the results of a study on the cultural code of the city, using Saint Petersburg as a case study. The author conceptualizes the city as a symbolic space saturated with meanings that can be encoded and decoded. Accordingly, the study employs the category of the ‘cultural code’ as a relatively stable system for organizing cultural meanings mentally rooted in the collective representations of the city and determining how the city is perceived by its residents. The cultural code reflects the city’s uniqueness and its distinction from other urban environments; it is interpreted through images transmitted from one generation to the next and preserved in the city’s cultural memory. However, studies that examine the city’s cultural code through the analysis of residents’ perceptions—those who serve as its carriers and transmitters—and that address their mental attitudes and subjective modes of imagining the city remain relatively scarce. This article, therefore, presents the results of an empirical study of the cultural code of Saint Petersburg. The research was conducted through structured interviews with residents of Saint Petersburg and was based on Lynch’s mental mapping methodology. This method was adapted to use verbal data collection techniques, with an emphasis on identifying the value foundations underlying citizens’ perceptions of the city across the following thematic blocks: a) natural and climatic characteristics; b) memorable historical events and places of memory; c) spatial characteristics; d) prominent figures; e) dominant images and symbols of the city. The sample consisted of 50 respondents selected according to age, gender, occupation, length of residence, and district of residence. The empirical cross-section of residents’ opinions was obtained through qualitative research methods, which made it possible to reveal their deep-seated mental attitudes and identify the most significant elements of the city’s cultural code. The findings have practical relevance, as the knowledge gained can serve as a valuable resource for the city’s development, both in shaping its external image and in informing cultural policy and urban planning.

This paper attempts to conceptualize the city as both text and context—an interpretive construct jointly produced by the urban environment and its inhabitants in their search for self-understanding within a specific place and time. Using the example of the phenomenon of  the ‘Petersburg text’ and the emerging ‘Königsberg-Kaliningrad text’, it is shown that these texts play the role of a reflexive form-mirror in culture, helping the city comprehend itself. Using the example of Brodsky’s poetics, the author shows how the Königsberg context clearly shi­nes through the Kaliningrad text, without which the modern city is neither visible nor felt. At the same time, the author reveals that the usual means of understanding and compre­hen­ding the city and oneself in the city are not enough. New metaphors and tools are needed to help us understand the city. Among them are porosity, rhythm, and imprints. The article int­ro­duces the basic metaphor of the city as a porous sponge. It also presents the phenomenon of the flaneur as a special figure uniquely suited for phenomenological immersion in urban eve­ryday life. Using the example of contemporary Kaliningrad, the article illustrates episodes from the city’s everyday life and argues for the need to re-humanize the urban space, restoring a sense of proportion between the city and its inhabitants.

The article analyzes the social factors that influence the content of tour narratives. Based on interviews with tour guides from Kaliningrad, the study identifies the main social requirements of guiding practice and the corresponding constraints these impose on narration. Among the key social regulators of tour narratives, the article highlights the process of socialization, the social context of the excursion itself, where group dynamics come into play, as well as institutional control. The study demonstrates that the guide is a bearer of symbolic power, manifested in the ability to ascribe meaning to objects and events, and, thereby, shape public opinion. In this sense, the guide moves beyond the role of a mere narrator, assuming the function of a creator of meanings. Guided tours perform an important social function, fostering a positive image of the territory, its history, and culture for visitors. In this regard, particular attention is paid to the political regulation of the goals and content of excursions. The study concludes that strict administrative control over tour narratives proves ineffective. The structure and content of excursions are primarily shaped by the presence of a well-developed professional habitus among guides—one that includes an awareness of the social significance of their work, a sense of social responsibility, strong communication skills, and a genuine love and respect for the region, its history, and its inhabitants.

The article is devoted to the study of the pragmatic aspects of visual communication in the modern urban environment. The physical objects of the city are interpreted as a text aimed at transmitting specific information to its residents. The research focuses both on the processes of meaning-making—based on the interaction of various semiotic resources such as co­lour, imagery, graphic design, texture, and verbal signs—and on the reception and deco­ding of this mosaic of visually perceived signs by the audience. The visual landscape of the city is saturated with images and symbols that carry particular cultural and value-laden meanings for its inhabitants. Examining the temporal dimension of objects of material culture makes it possible to trace the connection between the past and the present and to highlight elements of a society’s historical memory.

The study centres on the visual characteristics of third places, which constitute impor­tant components of urban space. The material for analysis includes commercial recreational venues in Nizhny Novgorod — specifically cafés, coffee shops, restaurants, and pizzerias. Dra­wing on the principles of social semiotics, the research provides a detailed examination of two case studies: the exterior design of the restaurant ‘Gus v yablokakh’ and ‘Clara Zetkin’, an Asian cuisine café. The purpose of the study is to explore how the visual design of urban spaces communicates messages to city dwellers and to analyze how the cultural meanings embedded in semiotically complex texts are interpreted by their recipients. The study adopts an interdisciplinary approach situated at the intersection of visual communication, media urbanistics, and social semiotics. The key research methods include critical discourse analysis, visual observation, and surveying. Their combined application made it possible to describe the external design of third places as a combination of verbal and nonverbal signs that construct the local identity of the space and to reveal how this visually transmitted information is perceived by audiences. The study identified the influence of both the contemporary urban context and the historical background on the visual perception of third places and specified the factors that make recreational venues noticeable and appealing. The proposed conceptual framework may serve as a basis for a broader analysis of visual communication within the urban context.

The article presents the results of a study of the semiotic potential of urban sculptures as carriers of the city’s cultural code. It also offers an analysis of specific segments of this cultural code that have become integral to it as a result of conceptual transformation viewed through a semiotic lens. The relevance of the research stems from the growing attention to the role of visual culture in shaping the identity of contemporary urban residents, as well as from the need to develop analytical tools for interpreting such complex semiotic systems as urban sculpture. The study aims to identify the mechanisms of encoding and cognitive re-decoding of cultural and historical information within sculptural works, and to determine the role of these objects in enriching the city’s cultural code and in shaping a unique sociocultural context for its inhabitants. The objects of analysis are physical art installations, carriers of deep symbolic meaning within the cultural and semiotic field of urban space and represented in the visual cluster of the city’s cultural code. These sculptures were created based on or inspired by literary texts. Using examples of narrative sculptural compositions in Krasnodar (Monument to Catherine II, The Doggie Capital, The Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan, among others) and in Gelendzhik (The White Bride), the study analyzes the liminal mechanism through which a verbal text, in the process of materialization, acquires semiotic complexity and transforms into an iconic, static, spatial semiotic narrative that subsequently becomes a precedent phenomenon. The research culminates in the construc­tion of a model describing the process by which not only secondary signification occurs but also new, contextually relevant shades of meaning are generated within the core of the cultu­ral code. This contributes to understanding the mechanisms behind the creation of complex, mul­ti­layered, multimodal art objects that exert a significant influence on the social and cultural identity of urban inhabitants.

The paper examines the representation of Ekaterinoslav’s urban space based on twenty-two Russian travelogues of the late 18^th—19^th centuries (texts by Ivan Ya. Akinfiev, Alexander S. Afanasyev, Pavel A. Bibikov, Ivan F. Vernet, Fyodor F. Vigel, Alexander F. Voeikov, Nikolai S. Vsevolozhsky, Karl I. Hablitz, Ivan M. Dolgoruky, Mikhail P. Zhdanov, Konstantin P. Zhukov, Vasily A. Zhukovsky, Iakov I. Vecherkov, Lev Z. Kuntsevich, Nikolai M. Longinov, Alexei N. Molchanov, Dmitry M. Perevoshchikov, Vasily M. Sidorov, Pavel I. Sumarokov, Gerasim T. Khokhlov, Alexander V. Khrapovitsky, and Pavel I. Shalikov). The study aims to provide an analytical description of the main spatial characteristics shaping the city’s image within a semiotic—imagological framework. The representation of Ekaterinoslav is shown to be constructed primarily through the opposition between ‘the space of a glorious past’ and ‘the space of an inglorious present’. Correspondingly, the motif of unrealized potential is a defining feature of the city’s image. The moment of the city’s foundation — its space of historical memory — is associated with motifs of grandeur, scale, and ambition, and linked to figures of the imperial personosphere, including Empress Catherine II, her favourite Grigory Potemkin, and Emperor Joseph II of Austria. By contrast, representations of con­tem­porary Ekaterinoslav by 19^th-century authors are predominantly negative, marked by motifs of smallness, unattractiveness, provinciality, decay, monotony, heat, and mud.

Any city holds hidden meanings associated with its history, intentional or unintentional plans of builders, representations of power and practices of residents, revealing archaic or pseudo-archaic elements in the city structure. The article focuses on Yerevan as a space of multiple symbolic layers, conflicts and re-significations. The authors trace how in the Armenian capital throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries there was a deliberate displacement of some signs by others — from the demolition of religious and Soviet architectural objects to toponymic transformations. Analyzing examples of street renaming, the authors reveal how ideological strategies are manifested both in state initiatives and in local commercial names. Particular attention is paid to protest movements (from 1988 to 2022), in which the street acts as a space for the articulation of collective subjectivity. Methodologically, the work draws on the semiotics of space, the anthropology of the city and the theory of representation (including Lefebvre), examining how material and symbolic practices conflict, coexist and shape ‘place’ in the anthropological sense. The article offers an interpretation of Yerevan as a living urban text, where each renaming and protest action is a struggle for the right to meaning.

The article provides a comparative description of different types of metaphors based on an analysis of the prose of Hrant Matevosyan (1935—2002), a classic of Armenian literature. To analyze the specific type of societal relations reproduced by Matevosyan in his Tsmakut Cycle, the article uses the model of ‘mix of mores (Sittlichkeit), which refers to the spontaneous movement of morals considered from an ontological point of view. In the hopeless struggle to preserve this syncretic environment of morals, subjected to the destructive attack of mobi­liza­tion, Matevosyan-the-person suffered defeat as a traditionalist. But Matevosyan-the-writer, who developed non-traditional writing methods to describe the metamorphoses of the collap­sing ‘mix of mores’, achieved victory as a modernist.

Matevosyan's creative toolkit includes various types of metaphors. The comparative ana­lysis made it possible to identify them in the broad space between epiphany and enowning. From the general idea of epiphany, the study moves on to lyrical metaphor, and from it to existential or phenomenological metaphor, and then to epistemological metaphor. The analysis concludes with a shift toward ontological enowning, engaging the writer within the realm of metaphor.

The article presents a comprehensive study of urban untranslatables — unique cultural prac­tices, terms, and semiotic codes deeply rooted in specific historical and social contexts. Fo­cu­sing on phenomena such as Russian ‘ЖКХ-арт’ (municipal utility art), French ‘flânerie’, Indian ‘jugaad’, Spanish ‘tertúlia’, and Argentine ‘merendero’, the authors de­mons­trate that these concepts resist translation due to their embeddedness in local collective memory and eve­ry­day practices. The central thesis is that urban texts are fundamentally ‘untranslatable’ be­cause of their multimodal nature (combining verbal, visual, and spatial elements), dyna­mism (constant real-time transformation), and contextual depth (ties to historical and social fra­meworks). The methodology employed is based on an interdisciplinary approach: her­me­neutic analysis of urban texts, decoding hidden cultural and historical layers; comparative analysis of urban practices across cultures (e. g., Russian ‘porch gatherings’ versus Spanish ‘tertúlia’ or Indian ‘jugaad), revealing gaps in the perception of seemingly similar phenome­na; visual anthropology; linguistic analysis of key terms, tracing their etymology, semantics, and usage in oral/written speech (e. g., in blogs and social media). A proprietary classification mat­rix has been developed to evaluate urban phenomena according to four parameters: for­ma­lization (F), temporal dynamics (T), social involvement (I), and material-symbolic compo­nents (M). This matrix systematizes diverse cases and highlights cultural specificity. The conc­lusion proposes a "Dictionary of Urban Untranslatables" (inspired by Barbara Cassin’s project), advocating for multimedia documentation (visual, auditory, tactile) alongside tex­tual descriptions. Special attention is paid to cryptographic urban codes — spontaneous graf­fiti, inscriptions, and spatial modifications that are legible only to locals.

The article deals with occasional derivatives ‘moskvanutyj’ and ‘piternutyj’, ‘peterburg­nu­tyj’ formed according to the model of past passive participles with resultative meaning. The aim of the analysis is to identify the stereotypes reflected in the lexical meanings of the neo­lo­gisms associated with toponyms — Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The study is based on the data of the natural corpora of the Internet, such as Yandex and Google, and the results of a sur­vey. To obtain more objective data, the respondents were divided into three groups ac­cording to their place of residence — Moscow, Saint Petersburg and other regions. The majo­rity of respondents believe that the word ‘moskvanutyj’ is more often used in a negative sense, whe­reas the words ‘peterburgnutyj’ and ‘piternutyj’ have both negative and positive mea­nings. The analysis of examples of the words ‘moskvanutyj’, ‘piternutyj, and ‘peterburgnutyj’ allo­wed for the identification of the meanings based on the stereotypes associated with life in the capitals. The study reveals that the word ‘moskvanutyj’ expresses the meanings associated with a negative assessment of Moscow residents, rejection of their pace of life, values, as­pi­rations for success, and condemnation of those who seek to move to Moscow and do not app­re­ciate their ‘small homeland’. On the contrary, the words ‘peterburgnutyj’ and ‘piternutyj’ emp­hasize love for the city, contrasting its culture and art with Moscow values. The pecu­lia­rity of the formation of these words built according to the model of the past passive participle adds the element of ‘inadequacy’ and ‘craziness’ to the meanings of both words. While in the word ‘moskvanutyj’ this connotation is connected with condemnation, even with profanity, the words ‘peterburgnutyj’ and ‘piternutyj’ are more often used to express admiration.