Ideas and Ideals

Investments are the resource which is necessary for economic development on the micro-, meso- and macro-levels. The investment attractiveness of the region is of special importance now when the Russian Federation entities are implementing important programs of social and economic development. Enhancing investment attractiveness and the intensification of investment activity in the region are indispensable prerequisites for increasing its competitiveness. Economists from various schools have repeatedly been studying this problem.

Theoretical and practical aspects of forming and analyzing the investment attractiveness of the Russian Federation entities are successively considered in the paper. The focus is made on the Siberian Federal District and the Novosibirsk Region. The time period of the analysis is 2006–2017. Official information of the Federal State Statistics Service is used.

The authors summarize the most significant characteristics of the region investment attractiveness and show the relation of this notion with such categories as an investment potential and risk as well as investment climate.

They identify the main applied methods of assessing the investment attractiveness of the region, which are based on both functional and organizational groups.

The authors modified the approach evaluating the investment attractiveness of the Siberian Federal District regions. This approach includes the calculation of annual and average rates of risk-free returns on fixed capital investments for the period under review. Special attention was given to the District industrial regions.

The Novosibirsk Region as an administrative center of the Siberian Federal District attracts particular attention. Therefore the authors studied the investment attractiveness of this region and factors influencing it, basing on the correlation-regression analysis. As a result the most significant factors which prevent enhancing the investment attractiveness of the region are identified.

The paper considers the peculiarities of government regulation of investment attractiveness on the regional level. The authors describe the measures to raise it specified in the District program documents. Basing on the calculations made and documents analyzed, the authors formulate additional measures to promote the investment attractiveness of the Novosibirsk Region and thus to increase its competitive advantage in the long run.

The article provides an overview of current works on the nature of money in the modern world; considers the problems of the essence of money and their functions on the example of the main topics of the books by F. Martin “Money: The Unauthorized Biography” and K. Rogoff's “The Curse of Cash”. The author formulates the key contradictions of the “money” category based on the argument that money is a social agreement or a solid amount of the precious metal discussed in the book by F. Martin. In particular, the money of “primitive peoples” can be highly abstract and inconvenient for accumulation - fiduciary money, stimulating trust. This thesis is illustrated by the monetary system of the Yap Islands in the Pacific Ocean. William Laundhes, the secretary of the English treasury at the end of the 17th century, believed that Money is a system of credit accounts and debt repayment, in which cash plays the role of a vivid illustration of the state of an individual account of a member of society. O. Spengler wrote that money is a function, a force, which value lies in its action, not mere presence. The article considers local monetary systems, money with a demurrage, negative interest rates, and a possible waiver of cash circulation. The experience of the so-called “monetary partisans” - local payment systems that operate in parallel with the official monetary circulation is rather interesting. There are possible explanations for the abandonment of paper money in favor of metal in medieval China. The practice of Khubilai’s financiers, perhaps, was one of the factors in the fall of the Yuan dynasty. The double currency circulation was probably used for the first time in history as a repressive economic mechanism on such a large scale. The introduction of significant negative interest rates can stimulate a variety of social practices that can be described as “corruption”. It is concluded that there is a categorical dichotomy in the structure of the concept “money” - money as a commodity and as a tool for the transit of debts. The author supposes that technologically advanced forms of money can perform a repressive function. The author believes that we can talk about a kind of monetary cyberpunk, by analogy with cyberpunk - the science fiction genre, describing the decline of human culture against the background of technological progress in the computer age. The repressive function of money in many cases is latent for monetary circulation as a social institution.

In the process of financial management, there regularly appear tasks of making decisions about the importance of a particular value in the conditions of uncertainty. For such decisions, statistical methods are actively used, but in many cases the initial information is insufficient and / or subjective.

The article considers the problem of assessing financial values in the conditions of absence, insufficiency or inapplicability of statistical data. The authors describe an approach to a priori estimation, based on the formation of an undistorted assessment basis with the inclusion of the maximum number of acceptable alternatives and the application of a statistical-game approach to estimation. The assessment obtained using the proposed approach is stable and reproducible and it minimizes the expected absolute estimation error. The proposed approach shifts the emphasis in the work of specialists from the actual performance of the calculations to the search and analysis of the feasibility of alternatives, i.e. on the formation of a complete, comprehensive and reasonable basis for the assessment. Also, the authors discuss the possibility of applying this approach to the organization of financial management accounting at the university.

The article considers the tasks of the system of financial management accounting at the university, determines the financial values used in management accounting, for the assessment of which the a priori approach can be applied with the greatest efficiency.

The author studies the visual symbolism that was used by the German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) in his operas Parsifal, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser and Tristan and Isolde, as well as musical peculiarities of these operas, features of libretti and the composer’s remarks to ballet, connected with the visual symbols. The paper shows that Wagner’s visual symbolism in the works considered is Christian in its essence. It either refers to the visual symbols of the Old and New Testaments, or represents a version of the composer’s re-interpreting antique and ancient Eastern symbols in a Christian context. The author finds out that Wagner forms Christian homiletics (the art of religious preaching) on linguistic (libretto) and metalinguistic (music, dance, scenography, author’s and director’s remarks in the score) levels in the four operas concerned as part of his Gesamtkunstwerk methodology. Visual symbolism is used by the composer to build a holistic Christian preaching narrative within his operas. Despite the fact that Wagner was not a church-going Christian and did not join any Christian denomination, in his operas he appears a Christian religious preacher. His sermon is non-canonical from the point of view of traditional theology, but it helped many people close to the German artistic circles in the 19th century to come to the adoption of Christianity, i.e. there is historical evidence that Wagner’s non-canonical sermon was quite a successful homiletic methodology. Based on the analysis of Wagner’s operatic visual semiotics, the author of the article concludes that visual symbolism woven into the Gesamtkunstwerk methodology is one of the main components of Wagner’s religious homiletic program.

The article presents an overview of the desktop film genre and attempts to find its philosophical foundations in the concept of posthumanism. Desktop film is seen as a reflection of posthuman ideas. Specifically, it discusses the new corporeality of the posthuman person. The theoretical ideas of the new corporeality are supported by the analysis of its examples taken from the movie “Anon” by Andrew Niccol (2018). In this film, two types of the new posthuman corporeality are shown. The first is that of a cyborg and implies a human body equipped with technological enhancements and extensions. The second is the symbolic digital body made of data and stored in virtual databases – this digital body becomes a person’s “digital double”. In desktop films, these types of new posthuman corporeality intersect on the screen. Desktop films are the type of movies where the action takes place primarily on computer or mobile phone screens. Characters of desktop films tend to merge with their screens, both literally and metaphorically. The characters’ physical human bodies gradually form tight bonds with the screens. At the same time, screen devices help to create, display and contain the digital data body of the characters. Thus, the desktop film genre could potentially be regarded as contemporary culture’s response to the changing relationship between people and technology in the modern world. In particular, this genre demonstrates a tendency towards more symbiotic connections and relations between people and their screen devices. The analysis of the film, produced in the “posthuman panic cinema” manner, reveals the perspectives of this symbiosis and its often-problematic consequences, the major of which is the fragmentation of personality.

The article analyzes the image of European and American women, reflected in the posters and fashion of wartime. The two world wars of the twentieth century had a great influence on many spheres of life of people in the Western world, including the position and image of a woman. Due to this influence, during the period of the two world wars, the ideas of feminism and gender democratization of society, which originated at the end of the XVIII-th century and grew up towards the end of the XIX-th century, finally got stronger. In many ways these ideas were implemented through the active participation of women at work in the rear, where they replaced men who left for war, and also partly on the battlefields, where women served as nurses, cooks, secretaries, intelligence officers and signalers. The implementation of these ideas contributed to changing the role of women in society, and along with their appearance. All these changes are reflected in the posters and fashion of wartime. The wartime posters that used women's images formed (along with the traditional image of a woman in need of protection and patronage from men) also the image of a female assistant and comrade, ready to do male work in the rear and, partly, in the field. Changes in the appearance of women, reflected in the fashion of this time, indicate a significant emancipation of women. The woman changed her complicated and impractical suit and shoes with clothes that could be quickly dressed, were suitable for movement and work. The new image of a woman began to correspond to her new social status, expansion of her area of activity.

The article focuses on the plot story of the characters in the Gogol’s short story “The Carriage” in the context of the author's post-romantic literary reflection. In this regard, the rhetorical device such as giving the horse character a female name refers to romantic female images and allows considering the plot story of the character as a history of the character dissimilation in the style of romantic irony.

This way of applying a rhetorical device reflects different elements: folklore, sentimental-romantic, naturalistic, which is due to the change of literary paradigms in the first half of the XIX century – the time of aesthetic emergence of Natural School and Russian Realism. It is assumed that this was manifested in Gogol's way of depicting a thing when the image of the carriage is comprehended as the objective embodiment of the image of the hero. At the same time, the carriage, and the mount are interpreted in the plot space of the story “Carriage” as elements of everyday culture, and as elements of aesthetic reality. The way they are portrayed reflects the archaic nature, referring to the folklore of the peoples of the Caucasus; stylistic tendencies of the parodic “journey of imagination”, referring to the imaginary travels of a trickster; romantic tendencies of anthropomorphism of an animal, referring to the Byronic type of “Southern Beauty”. These stylistic trends are reflected not only in the artistic world of Gogol, but also in the works of A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, P. Vyazemsky, A. Pushkin, and M. Lermontov. Taking this into account, we can conclude that Gogol, unlike his predecessors and contemporaries, sought to post-romantic “everydayness” of the character's image not only through fiction-based detailing, but also through idiomatic rhetorical techniques.

The article raises the question of a disciplinary survey of fashion studies. The description of the specifics of the disciplinary status of fashion studies contributes to the design of this regional analytics as a full-fledged theoretical discourse. It allows you to more accurately determine fashion studies, which appears at the intersection of the positivistic and, later, non-positivistic presentation logic. It acts as an analytical conquest of cultural studies, various “philosophies of the subject” and a social theory of the newest type that have become isolated in separate fields of discourse. The author names the reasons for the appeal of humanitarian cognition to fashion as an expressive pattern of modern sociality. The article analyzes in detail the sociocultural basis of interest in fashion studies under the actual cultural-philosophical aspects. This circumstance is extremely important because the sociocultural dimension is naturally built into the horizon of research interest. It forms the tendencies of the cognitive subject, shaping the epistemological prejudice and pre-understanding from the horizon of actual life-world attitudes. The questions of the redefinition and restructuring of philosophical knowledge are discussed separately. Philosophical knowledge is interested in projects that are directly related to everyday life as the accumulation of human practice. This is practically a vital relation to oneself and to the world. We see this in terms of fashion as an important form of praxis. It is shown that there is a clear tendency to shift from the usual positivistic - sociological in its basis - the study of fashion as a social institution to its phenomenological and philosophical - anthropological presentation of it. It is relevant to the general philosophical formulation of the question of the subject and the ways of its constitution. This is a turnaround of opportunities that has been provided by the modern view of fashion on the new methodological trend. In modern philosophy, it is categorically designed as the performatization of social and historical epistemology. The logic of this view is rooted in the philosophy of the language. At the same time, a significant place in connection with fashion studies is given to the historical context proper. It is shown that fashion in the format of a plastically represented praxis indicates a change in the prevailing paradigms that give an idea of the way the subject is constituted. Dynamics of fashion indicates the direction of development and articulates any progress in the forms of organization of subjective experience. The article discusses the prospects for the further entry of fashion in the subject area of modern socio-humanitarian knowledge, oriented, mainly, in a philosophical way.

The author considers the use of computer technologies in modern art museums. The article also analyzes the problem of creating a modern digital infrastructure of art museums, which should ideally provide not only the performance of routine functions, such as stocktaking of the objects of the collection, admission of visitors and guarding the museum, but also information, cultural and leisure functions to solve problems of communication interaction between visitors and museums. When implementing each of the directions, its own methods are used. These methods take into account that we live in the information era, the era of computers, the conceptual idea of which is that the modern period is characterized by wide possibilities of using new computer technologies in order to increase the human ability to receive information and absorb it. The author discusses the problem of perception of cultural heritage preserved “through the centuries” by modern audience. The author defi nes the global goal of the museum’s digitalization – maintaining an artistic and compositional dialogue in the triad “creator – object of art - viewer” “through the a centuries” at the level that was originally
laid down by the author of the cultural heritage object without taking into account the temporary deformation of society and an individual (viewer).
The author suggests a classifi cation of digital technologies, which consists of two groups: passive technologies, performing routine functions in the museum, and active, providing a visitor with the main ideas of the authorscreators embedded in the objects of cultural heritage. The paper considers the projects and programs created in the world cultural community that use cognitive computer systems and artifi cial intelligence systems and ensure the development of cultural heritage through socio-personal interactions. These projects are based on the “profi ling” of visitors, their typology, developed as a typical description of various people, comprising the base of visitors to this museum. The author formulates the Hub concept of digitalization of the art museum, based on the division of the computer software used in the museum into several clusters according to the corresponding sections of the museum collection and united into a joint computer network with a common center that ensures the communicative function of the museum and overcomes cognitive dissonance because of the differences in perception, language and historical distances which surround the displayed objects. The hub concept of digitalization of the art museum takes into account the preparedness of modern audience and allows counting on the restoration of an artistic and compositional dialogue. 

The authors introduce new materials about the biography of V.V. Mayakovsky and his immediate environment: the memoirs of the prominent Chekist M.P. Schreider and the 1938 document of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR, devoted largely to Lilya Brik. The documents are able to expand our knowledge of the poet and his environment, which would be right to call the literary-Chekist. State
security actively worked among the creative intelligentsia, supporting the loyal part and accumulating incriminating materials against opponents of the regime. The secret agents of the OGPU Osip and Lilya Briks were assigned to keep an eye on Mayakovsky and other writers. Creative groups of a modernist style were characterized by the entry into the system of Bolshevik patron-client relations.
Art avant-garde artists considered themselves a part of the revolution, and therefore did not disdain the security structures of the new government. The Chekist and writer O.M. Brik offi cially completed his work at the beginning of 1924; however, he retained wide acquaintance with the Chekists, keeping a literary salon popular in Moscow. Of course, the Chekists visited (organized) other salons, but they went to Mayakovsky and Brik as to their own, presenting the symbiosis of power and literature on the basis of life building coming from symbolism: Brik and Mayakovsky wrote about the Chekists,
including real hymns in honor of the “Dzerzhinsky’s Soldiers” and secret police offi cers sent Lily Yuryevna abroad with their instructions.
Mayakovsky liked playing a role not only in the literary process; he showed interest in the Soviet secret police both as an artist and as a dependent on its benefi ts. But when the state, fi ghting the opposition, began to arrest and shoot the Chekists and writers, the poet was deeply disappointed with his former ideals, which infl uenced his decision to commit suicide. 

The concept of “self-identification” in Japanese society is subjected to philosophical consideration, the categorical underdetermination of which rises significant difficulties in operating this concept.

This study focuses on and analyzes issues related to the influence of Zen Buddhism philosophy on the methods, ways and characteristics of the Japanese identity process. Rituals from ancient times and supported by modern Japanese tradition; high degree of reflection; the practice of meditation as one of the main features of Zen Buddhist culture; understanding of the principle of “emptiness”, Japanese community organization — these are the characteristics that stand out as a key, and are explored in the article as the basic foundation for constructing an identity. This work focuses on the fact that it is Zen-Buddhist philosophical attitudes that are defined as means to solve the negativity problem of the prescribed identity in a clearly hierarchized class society in Japan, because through the concept of “emptiness” the Japanese form the idea of a humble acceptance of their status parameters in their everyday life. Comparing oneself to others is the main factor considered in the formation of any kind of identity, the analysis of which also reveals the influence of Buddhist philosophy and defines the basic aspect of self-identification as being included in the “friend-or-foe” pattern since the idea of one's reference group as “significant ones” expressed in the Buddhist term “the world of existence” (Skt. dharma-dhatu). When revealing the highly developed Japanese ability to borrow and adapt as a way of interacting with another, the indicated adaptation clearly manifests itself precisely in the process of borrowing Buddhism. The aspiration to harmonize the inner world through the practice of peaceful contemplation (Skt. Dhyani) as the highest achievement and the basic principle of Zen Buddhism, is defined as an important factor that determines the norms of behavior in Japanese society. Based on the concept of contemplation, the study touches upon another important element of Japanese Zen culture such as hieroglyphic writing. The significational, connotational and denotational saturation of writing in Japan augmented by ethical content has a huge impact on the process of a personal self-identification through non-locality mechanisms, initiating one or the other cultural phase in the development of society.

The article describes the experience of the crisis period in Azerbaijan at the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century.We can say that this topic is relevant for all post-Soviet countries, which gained independence in the new era. Self-determination of people, their connection to certain values give them a clear idea of the world, just as it was in the Soviet era, the connection to the model of the “Soviet man” created this idea. The crisis of identity is a process that occurs when common norms and values are broken. Further the author considers the impact of social diffculties on moral values experienced by people of Azerbaijan during the transition period. Many people try to use easier and shorter ways to meet their material needs, and they often choose
illegal ways. Moral values are weakening and gradually they begin to consider it as the norm.The author also points out that a society that has been accustomed to socialism for many years cannot adapt to the rules of capitalism that are alien to it. The author describes this process with E. Durkheim’s term “anomie”. It was considered that in the early 20th century, the process of forming a unifi ed national identity in Azerbaijan was over, however, the processes observed at the end of the twentieth century showed that this idea was wrong. The elements that formed our national identity at that time – Turkism, Islamism and so on – began pressingly to appear. There was a need for a model that unites people both in the identity and the spiritual realms. The author analyzes the
experience of European countries on their way to national state building. Since the characteristics of our times are different from previous periods, it is noted that the formation of national identity in new national states like Azerbaijan is a relatively diffi cult process.
The author highlights the idea, that the moral values in Azerbaijan have not been stabilized yet and no model has been formulated to be applied as an example. Today Azerbaijan is a place where national culture, Soviet past and market economy are combined. During the research, phenomenological and interactionist approaches helped to understand human and community relationships. Historical-comparative method was used to study historical foundations of identifi cation models. The research was based on historical and
objective principles.