2026 Vol. 17 №1

The article undertakes a motif-based analysis of the semantic connections between “The Ladder” by St. John Climacus (St. John of Sinai) and the spiritual letters addressed to the lai­ty by St. Ambrose of Optina. St. Ambrose took part in the preparation for the publication of the translation of “The Ladder” into Russian and Church Slavonic, carried out at Optina Pustyn in 1862. Quotations from “The Ladder”, as well as references to the name of St. John Climacus, occur in twenty letters from the corpus of St. Ambrose’s correspondence with the laity. The genre dominant of these letters is determined by the nature of the spiritual problems they address. As one of the principal forms of spiritual guidance offered by the elder to his followers, the letters reflect the ascetic experience of the Holy Fathers, which in turn shapes the motif structure of St. Ambrose’s messages to individual recipients. Central to this guid­ance is the principle of gradualness — “the ladder” principle — which finds direct expression in the thematic organisation of the letters. The semantic field of the correspondence is ground­ed in the idea of spiritual struggle with the passions on the path toward the acquisition of virtues. Quotations from “The Ladder” cited in the letters consistently correspond to the el­der’s pastoral task: to identify a specific passion afflicting the addressee and to indicate the path toward liberation from it. The key motif is the struggle with pride, which, according to both St. Ambrose and St. John Climacus, can be overcome only through meekness. The con­stellation of motifs also corresponds to traditional hagiographic topoi of monastic life — temp­tation, self-will, struggle with demons — as well as to core virtues such as remembrance of death, prudence, wisdom, obedience, and repentance. Among these, meekness occupies a cen­tral position both in the spiritual letters of the elder and in “The Ladder”, while love stands as the highest of all virtues. St. Ambrose does not merely illustrate his thoughts with direct quo­tations from “The Ladder”; rather, he frequently interprets and develops them, integrating their meanings into the broader context of the patristic tradition, to which the spiritual letters of the Optina elders themselves belong.

The article examines the antinomic nature of the existence of fear in Anton Chekhov’s works, with particular attention to the short story “Fear”. The methodological framework combines the principles of New Criticism — treating the literary text as a self-sufficient struc­ture featuring an unreliable narrator — with approaches drawn from cognitive ontolo­gy. In addition, the analysis engages philosophical conceptions of fear developed by S?ren Kier­kegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the Christian understanding of fear articulated in the Patristic tradition. Applying a cognitive approach to existential fear in Chekhov’s narrative raises the problem of the destruction of the ontological foundations underlying the characters’ traditional cognitive architecture. The article argues that this de­struction does not result in mere negation but rather in a transformation into a new existen­tial quality. In particular, the collapse of the cognitively maximal concept of marriage is in­terpreted as a key symptom of ontological disorder: it leads, on the one hand, to an intensifica­tion of existential fear in the protagonist, and, on the other, to a growth of entropic indiffer­ence in the existence of the other characters. Special emphasis is placed on the antinomies em­bodied in the character of Gavryusha, nicknamed the Forty Martyrs, who emerges as a crucial entropic factor in the story, counteracting the total immersion of existence in horror. Finally, the article raises the question of how religious and non-religious agents influence the process­es of encoding, decoding, and recoding a person’s cognitive structure.

The article examines Osip Mandelstam’s last poem, recorded from the poet’s voice in a transit camp. Two main tasks are pursued: the verification of authorship and the reconst­ruc­tion of the original text. The poem is analysed against the background of the Russian poetic tra­dition and within the context of Mandelstam’s late work. It is argued that the extant re­cord is not a fragment of a lost text, but a complete poem—a one-line epigram. Rhythmic and phonetic analysis brings this poem close to the experiments in ancient versification found in “Stone”. The collision of stressed syllables places these verses beyond the limits of dol’nik and taktovik. Since the number of syllables is equal in each line, it is suggested to use the term syl­la­bometric, employed by Mikhail L. Gasparov to designate the earliest stage of ancient Greek versification. For Mandelstam, ancient metrics serves as an instrument for the con­servation of time; and since time itself is conceived as a prison, the camp epigram overcomes time by enclosing it within the frame of verse. The prison motif appears in his poetry before it becomes a biographical reality. The epigram continues the poetics of the Voronezh period and thus brings evidence for its authenticity. It is not neces­sa­ry for the camp poem to be composed in the camp: orality is inscribed in the text itself. Con­sidered within its full context, Man­del­stam’s last poem allows us to relate his poetics to the modernist project of synchro­nisation of history.

The aim of the study was to identify the semantic features of the representation of the category of security in the French text of Jules Verne’s novel “Les Enfants du capitaine Grant” (“The Children of Captain Grant”). The results show that in Verne’s novel the category of security is verbalized by a set of lexical units, including adresse, apaisement, asile, assurance, calme, confiance, garantie, talisman, tranquillit?, paix, pr?cision, pro­tec­tion, justesse, fid?lit?, franchise, s?ret?, s?curit?, and solidit?. Lexical units expressing the category of security occur unevenly throughout the text. The core of the semantic field is for­med by the lexical units confiance and calme. The near periphery includes s?ret?, adresse, pr?cision, protection, tranquillit?, s?curit?, paix, garantie, and asile; the far periphery comprises assurance, fid?lit?, justesse, solidit?, and franchise; and the extreme periphery is represented by apaisement and talisman. The use of lexical units denoting security in the novel is accompanied by a specific set of modifiers and verbs. The verbs display greater variability than the adjectives associated with these lexical units. Most frequently, the author combines security-related lexemes with the adjectives absolue, par­fai­te, telle, digne, toute, compl?te, and grande, as well as with the verbs avoir, parler, fai­re, respirer, d?pendre, ?tre, chercher, and trouver. Identifying the lexical features through which the category of security is expressed in “The Children of Captain Grant” makes it possible to gain a deeper understanding of the conventions governing its representation in works belonging to the adventure genre.

The aim of the article is to identify the representative possibilities of the Gothic text using the example of Wilkie Collinsʼs story “The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice” (1878). The authors rely on hermeneutic methodology, directing their attention to the historical subtext of the story, expressed in its figurative structure, as well as in the many allusions and reminiscences contained in it, which have a clearly expressed historical content. The need for such a methodology is dictated by the main objective of the study: to demonstrate the possibility of interpreting Collinsʼs story as a specific historical representation. As a result of the analysis, the veiled historical content of the story was explicated, thanks to which it can be considered as a specific representation of historical reality, close to oneiric representation: historical characters and events in it undergo a process of symbolization reminiscent of dream work, according to Freud, and the historical itself is reduced to the “family”. Although such a reduction excludes history as such, it provides great opportunities for representing the meaning of historical events through the depiction of a certain historical experience. It is precisely this historical experience (Franklin R. Ankersmitʼs term), along with the frag­men­tary Gothic narrative of Countess Narona, present in the story like a “dream within a dream”, that reveals the truth of this work with its puzzling ending. The story’s ending, which explicitly declares the impossibility of uncovering the “secret of the hotel,” functions as a trigger for the allegorical interpretation developed in this article.

This paper delineates the field of realistic discourse and its internal diversity. It develops a conceptual matrix of epic realism and explicates its key features: the individualisation of collective experience; the transposition of the monumentality of the past into the present and the future; and the transformation of monumentality that results in a problematization of the presumed final impeccability of the author and, ultimately, of the hero. The study examines Ernst J?nger’s intellectual novel “Eumeswil” through the lens of epic realism in its individualistic variant. It conceptualises the worldview and mode of action of the protagonist, the Anarch, portraying him as a right-flank soldier of freedom on the parade ground of post-history, as well as a rearguard incarnation of the author’s “other self”. The figure of the Anarch is shown in relation to his ideological companions and adversaries, most notably the anarchist and the partisan. J?nger’s text is ultimately interpreted as a rigorously articulated conceptualisation of the post-historical condition of humankind.

This article investigates the phenomenon of cancel culture as a contemporary manifesta­tion of social ostracism and a mechanism of discursive manipulation within English-language media discourse. Particular emphasis is placed on its interrelation with wokeism, which oper­ates as an ideological and axiological framework shaping a system of values centred on equali­ty, inclusivity, and social justice. Cancel culture, in this context, functions as a pragmatic instrument of value enforcement, realised through public condemnation, boycotts, stigmatisa­tion, and symbolic exclusion. Both phenomena are conceptualised as interdependent compo­nents of a unified conceptual-cognitive mechanism facilitating the transmission, consolida­tion, and normalisation of axiological meanings in the media sphere. Drawing on contempo­rary English-language media discourse, the study identifies and analyses several cognitive mechanisms underlying the construction, interpretation, and stabilisation of meaning within cancel culture narratives. These include conceptual framing, which structures discourse through binary oppositions and evaluative schemata; scripts, representing the recurrent event “violation — exposure — punishment”; emotional construal, in which affective responses such as anger, indignation, solidarity, and moral satisfaction act as cognitive catalysts en­hancing entrenchment; and multimodal integration, which combines verbal, visual, and digi­tal semiotic resources to increase salience, emotional resonance, and persuasive force. The interaction of these mechanisms gives rise to a stable CANCEL frame, instantiated in a proto­typical cognitive scenario: norm violation → public exposure → accusation → media amplifi­cation → audience mobilisation → sanction → outcome fixation. The dynamic interplay be­tween the affirmative strategies of wokeism (foregrounding justice, equality, and inclusivity) and the sanctioning strategies of cancel culture (boycott, exclusion, ostracism) constitutes a bidirectional cognitive process. On the one hand, it ensures the reproducibility and legitimisa­tion of emergent moral norms; on the other, it contributes to the entrenchment of collective cognitive patterns that delineate new boundaries of social identity, moral evaluation, and ideological differentiation within the digital public sphere. The findings contribute to a broad­er understanding of how multimodal media discourse functions as a site of axiological fram­ing, collective conceptual alignment, and cognitive regulation of social values, offering ana­lytical perspectives relevant to the study of digital communication, manipulative discourse strategies, and critical media literacy.

In modern Finnic onomastics, the study of the pathways and mechanisms through which foreign borrowings are adapted in closely related languages has gained particular signifi­cance. Drawing on material from the Votic and Ingrian anthroponymic systems, this article examines the phonetic and morphological transformation of personal names of Christian origin. The study aims to identify the typological features of adaptation mechanisms and to distinguish between universal and language-specific characteristics in the two languages. An integrated methodological framework is employed, combining comparative-historical analysis, typological methods, and systematic reconstruction. The empirical basis of the research com­prises data from fieldwork, archival sources, and lexicographic materials dating from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The analysis identifies the principal strategies of phono­logical and morphological adaptation of borrowings and determines the dominant models underlying anthroponymic transformation. The findings demonstrate that a substantial pro­portion of Votic and Ingrian personal name forms derive not from canonical Christian names, but from their Russian dialectal variants, highlighting the complex nature of interlingual contact. Differences in the operation of adaptation mechanisms between Votic and Ingrian are shown to stem from the specific phonological and morphological structures of each language. Particular attention is devoted to processes of vocalic and consonantal adaptation, including consonant gemination, palatalization, and epenthesis. Morphological aspects of adaptation are also described, notably the use of the ancient Finnic suffix *-oi and its variants. The results contribute to a deeper understanding of language contact phenomena and may inform efforts aimed at preserving the linguistic heritage of the smaller Finnic peoples.

This article examines linguocultural and linguistic research on the Kashubian substra­tum, drawing on materials collected by Russian scholars, primarily those affiliated with Saint Pe­tersburg academic institutions, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. These materials, derived from recordings of native speakers’ oral speech as well as from written, lexicographic, and ethnographic sources, constitute an invaluable empirical foundation for the study of Kashubian. The article offers an extensive review of the history of Kashubian studies within Slavic scholarship, situating this tradition within the broader development of Sla­vistics. In addition to linguistic data, the paper addresses cultural and extralinguistic issues related to contemporary Kashubia as a northern Polish (Baltic) Slavic periphery. Based on the authors’ own fieldwork in the Kashubian region and a critical analysis of the contributions of Russian linguists, the study seeks to re-evaluate and update key issues concerning Kashubian as a Slavic microlanguage and the Kashubians as a microethnos. Particular attention is paid to the current state of Kashubian studies and to the present ethnolinguistic situation of the re­gion. The findings presented in the article contribute to a more nuanced understanding of Ka­shubian linguistic and cultural dynamics and are intended as a substantive addition to Sla­vic studies in the twenty-first century.

The article examines binomial stable syntactic constructions (BSSCs) as a distinct class of phraseologized expressions in Russian. The analysis focuses on the interaction between two key parameters of their semantic organisation: linearity and compositionality. Linearity is understood not merely as a formal property of syntactic word order, but also as a cognitive mechanism that shapes the perception and interpretation of meaning. Compositionality is defined as the extent to which the overall meaning of a construction can be predicted from the meanings of its constituent elements. The study demonstrates that BSSCs form a continuum ranging from fully compositional constructions, whose meanings are readily inferable from their components, to idiomatic units, in which the connection between the components and the global meaning is weak or entirely opaque. At the same time, even as compositionality dec­reases, a fixed linear order is often preserved. This stability of linear structure functions as a salient marker of idiomaticity and constructional fixity. In cases where phraseologization leads to a disruption of compositionality, the linear form remains invariant, thereby becoming a key cue for idiomatic recognition. A regular correlation is identified: the lower the degree of compositionality, the higher the degree of linear stability. This pattern is supported by both cog­nitive and pragmatic observations. On this basis, the article proposes a typology of bi­no­mial stable syntactic constructions according to their degree of compositionality and the role of linearity in their cognitive and semantic organisation. The study outlines prospects for fu­rther research into the pragmatic, cognitive, and typological properties of these construc­tions, as well as their place within the system of the Russian language.

The paper examines the concept of translation strategy and aims to develop a typology of its possible forms from the perspective of a needs-tailored approach to translation. It begins with a brief review of positions on translation strategy articulated by Russian and inter­na­tio­nal translation scholars, demonstrating the lack of consensus in the field. The study then subjects the theory of translation strategies developed within the communicative-functional app­roach, conceptually close to the needs-oriented framework, to critical analysis. A key short­coming identified is the weak correlation between the theoretical, practical, and didactic di­mensions of the so-called strategy of tertiary translation. To address this limitation, the paper proposes a definition of translation strategy grounded in the needs-oriented theory of translation. Treating translation as a service and conceptualising it as a tool, this definition ref­lects the realities of professional translation practice. Depending on the translation brief, determined by the nature of the need and the task to be by the initiator and/or end user, the translator is expected to produce a target text with a linguistic composition appropriate to the intended purpose. Since a given communicative situation may require the creation of a target-language text whose textual characteristics differ from those of the source text, the paper distinguishes between two categories of translation: conventional and peculiar. Conventional translation corresponds to translation proper, understood as a complete functional equivalent of the source text. Peculiar translation, by contrast, encompasses various translation variants that cannot be regarded as full functional analogues and therefore diverge from the source text in their formal-structural and/or contextual-conceptual characteristics. On this basis, the pa­per proposes a typology consisting of two translation strategies bearing the same de­sig­nation and corresponding to the two categories of translation identified. At the same time, drawing on specific examples from translation practice, the study demonstrates that the strategy of con­ventional translation may also be applied within peculiar translation, depending on whe­ther and to what extent the actions and operations performed by the translator are hete­ro­geneous.