This article considers the radical changes in the functioning of literary lexis in the Russian language of the early 21st century, namely the causes and consequences of the semantic devaluation of the noun пафос and its syntactic derivate, the adjective пафосный, whose semantic transformation is explained by the speech expansion of glamorous lifestyle as an aggressive subculture.
This article presents a gender portrait of a man as seen in modern “male” Russian chanson. Two types of such portrait are identified: the lyrical one that is reconstructed on the basis of the songwriter’s self-expression and the objective one that develops when the songwriter looks at a man as another. In these circumstances, a man appears as a philosopher striving to comprehend life and his place in it.
This article analyses the problem of understanding the deeds of a holy fool in Russian Orthodox culture. Through considering the images of two “classical” saints – Simeon the Holy Fool ad Andrew the Holy Fool, the author emphasises the idea of humility as the dominant type of behaviour and the main personal characteristic thus objecting to S.A.Ivanov’s concept of aggression as the key typological feature of holy fools. The article also analyses images of saint in the anthropological and axiological aspects, which makes it possible to explain the motivation of the “paradoxical” behaviour of holy fools and prove that the corresponding type of holiness relates to the ideas of boldness and humility as the ultimate form of self-denial.
Based on the work of a famous 19th century Russian author, this article focuses on the development of the theme of robbers’ life, which was introduced by Pushkin and became central to Russian Romanticism. An analysis of the poem in the axiological aspect shows that A. Veltman – as well as other Russian poets – is interested in the moral and psychological reasons behind this phenomenon rather than social ones. The plot structure and the author’s position suggest that robbery is depicted in the poem as a cardinal sin that cannot be justified; it forces a person to abandon the moral law and leads to spiritual death.
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.
This article develops the concept of historical process being determnined by cultural phenomena. The cultural aspect examined by the author is religious beliefs. It is shown that Prussia constituted a region of intersection between ancient Prussian paganism rooted in the proto-Indo-European era and Roman Catholic Church and Orthodoxy. The interaction of these forms of ideology is used to explain the history of Prussia.
This article analyses the condition of settlements, manors (Landschlösser), castles, churches of East Prussia on the territory of today’s Kaliningrad region. It is shown that almost all historical sites of this type are either ruined or close to this condition. The author stresses the need to take urgent measures to preserves such sites or organise professional reconstruction.
This article presents the author’s philosophical and sociological ideas about the condition of modern society, its problems, and origins. The author stresses that the modern European civilisation is coming to a “dead end” and considers a human being as an object of manipulation. The subject of these manipulations is the bureaucratic system, whose interests lie in its own well-being.