Ideas and Ideals

How to express inexpressibly complicated things in a simple way? In order to find the answer to this question, Art always comes up with the only solution, which means modifying its own expressional vocabulary, to alter and renew the language. As a rule, the reaction of the perceptive audience, rigidly philistine in the most cases, was stigma of the new art principles, its apologists and creators. In the 19th century, there was an opposing reciprocal reaction on the part of the artists, which manifested in the image of the unappreciated genius and his proclamation of the Art of future whereas sublimation of the genius phenomenon transformed from the concrete personality into abstract principles. They are often expressed in the characters’ names, and even through the names of mythological Gods which seemed to be so symbolic and collective that the process of their complete transformation is hidden behind each of them. This process has already become common practice in art, for instance, as it was in Franz Liszt’s demonic imagery.

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of the so-called "people of culture" in two areas of Eurasia - Europe and East Asia. They appear as a product of cultural exchange between the "South" (the Mediterranean, China proper) and the "North", inhabited by people of a different mentality and economy. We are talking about a different perception of the so-called ancient culture, that is, the configuration of culture that developed in antiquity and became paradigmatic for the whole metaregion ("Christian World", East Asian Civilization Zone). As examples of such people are taken the largest figures of medieval culture I. S. Eriugena, who left a deep trace in scholasticism, and a member of the imperial clan Yēlǜ in the nomadic Chitan Empire Liao (907-1125) Tuǜ. People with unconventional looks on culture and complex destiny, they demonstrated a peculiar attitude to southern culture not as a form and means of education, but as a complex of ideas and recipes for building a new political and cultural reality.

The philosophy of N. Berdyaev is a restless movement of thought in the space with three conceptual coordinates. The person, creativity, freedom in their unity constitute the universe of Spirit, define the dynamics, the existential orientation of genuine philosophical thinking. The philosophical thought creatively confirms the being of a free person by means of the ideal man’s image formation: the ideal man is opposed to the evil kingdom of necessity, oversteps the limits and overcomes the empirical world. According to Berdyaev, the ethical quintessence of the European culture is three images of the ideal man – the sage, the saint and the knight. This article traces the sources of the knight ideal’s interpretation in the texts of the Russian thinker. The romantic idea of knighthood as “an eternal task of human spirit” demanded overcoming of early Slavophiles’ conceptualizations of knighthood, but Berdyaev valued these authors very highly for their aspiration to holistic understanding of Spirit’s life, to the harmony between the internal and the external. In his publications of 1904-1907 N. Berdyaev outlines two lines of knighthood’s idealization as an embodiment of medieval mystical Christianity’s depth and the noble human type. The first line is connected with the discussion about “new religious consciousness”, D.S. Merezhkovsky's idea about metaphysical primordiality and a religious equivalence of "spirit" and "flesh". The second line is determined by Berdyaev’s treatment of K.N. Leontyev's heritage where the historical knighthood represents itself as an alternative of the bourgeois commonness and mediocrity, vulgarity and philistinism.

The current article says that transference and entrenchment of information in the space and time is possible due to the appearance of a written language. A text is characterized by the function of memory, because it is not only a generator of new meanings, but it is also a guide of cultural memory. A written language can store and accumulate reminiscences about preceding contexts. Speaking about reminiscences of a text we should note that a text becomes meaningful. Such meaningful text enters into relations with cultural tradition (or cultural remembrance), which is born in mind of addressees. Texts which store cultural activity include the ability to condense the information, formulated differently; the ability of storing historical and cultural remembrances appear in such texts. Hence texts, which are transferred from one generation to another through centuries, don’t lose the information.  This paper is devoted to the principles of replication of cultural information. In culture this task is performed by units of cultural information – memes. Mutations of memes are presented as transformation formulae. The current article deals with aspects of preserving non-genetic data. The subject of analysis is formulae and clichés of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Bible. The development of linguistic formulae is under scrutiny. The main types of transformation of formulae and clichés are defined. Different variants of formulae are given; they are registered on the basis of the Bible. The author describes four main types of transformations of formulae phrases, which demonstrate development of relations in the culture. These four main types are: type “A” which is reframing of conventional formulae; type “Б” which is lexical substitution of a key-term; type “B” which is production of new combinations and forms with new semantic structure, type “Г” is a description with substitution of a lexeme in the context of a formula, which denotes different events. The author demonstrates that formulae deal with innovative descriptions which are characterized with more detalization. Consequently, growth of information is described.

Taxonomy of the world traced back to classic commentator’s tradition of Porphyry. The works by Porphyry gives us foundation to judge the tempo of development of semiotics and philosophy of the name. Compiling the taxonomy of the natural world Porphyry drew subtle definition of objective and nonobjective substances in the live languages by means of their formal exposure. The characteristics of individual exposure of the world coincides with the consequence of layers in the map of the world since ancient periods until nowadays. Thus the sequence of floral, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic codes in interpretation of the world coincides with the natural taxonomy of the tree by Porphyry. The presentation of individual meanings is connected with the transition from poor sections of the taxonomy to the developed ones. So the individual properties of space are at maximum low, and many spatial substances acquire metaphorical meaning in floral, zoomoorphic and anthropomorphic codes. The degree of individual properties is increasing due to their denoting by proper names, which transfer the higher degree of discretion. The individual properties present themselves a sort of fossils, within which we detect the change of the mapping of the world. Therefore the most ancient Indo-European mapping of the world is connected with the concept of the world tree. So the researcher gets a possibility to register such fossils in the form of the individual texts which depict the image of the space in the evolutionary program of space. As a substitution of floral code zoomorphic code comes, when individual properties of space are described on the basis of the form of the animal. The body of the animal in individual properties is richer than the plant. Then the anthropomorphic code comes. The mapping of the world is a very important task in metaphors microcosm- and macrocosm. The metaphors lexically are independent from each other, which gives the evidence of low plausibility of mixture in the order of space. The deeper we penetrate into the ancient layers of language, the more specialized meanings we discover.

This is the first attempt ever made when the author investigates the culture of bell-ringing in orthodox Greece. The purpose of the work is to define the features of this tradition. The article considers the following issues: the types of the Greek bell architectural constructions, their bell arsenal, national specifics of bell-ringing, and the characteristics of the orthodox bell ringing. The Greek tradition was developing under the strong influence of the Byzantine empire with its periods of blossom and decline and then Greece was invaded by crusaders (and later by the Turks) and those invasions resulted in the great influence of the Catholic church. These events defined its national peculiarity. Turning to the post-Byzantine region broadens the geography of research to the new to the Russian campanology direction. The facts which had been earlier unknown were collected by the author of the article in his expeditions to Greece. The publication of these facts is a contribution into the research database. In the long run it will help to trace the signs of influence of the Byzantium culture on the art of the Russian bell-ringing.