The purpose of this study is to identify the characteristics and patterns of development of Soviet private collecting. The article describes the sociocultural mechanisms of the historical dynamics of domestic private collecting within the context of the political, social, and economic processes of Soviet society and state policy. The phenomenon of Soviet private collecting is examined both in its holistic, institutional characteristics and in its individual manifestations. The following periods of Soviet history are analyzed: the early years of Soviet power, the NEP period, the Stalin period, the Thaw, and Gorbachev’s perestroika. The analysis included: a study of government documents, an analysis of the activities of state and public organizations charged with working in the fi eld of private collecting, a description of the activities of domestic private collectors, and the fate of their collections.

The methodology is based on a micro historical method, which allows us to highlight the role of individuals in history through the analysis of personal documents. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the use of the pendulum metaphor. As a result, it was established that the history of Soviet private collecting follows a pendulum-like pattern: increased state surveillance of citizens’ lives, making legal collecting impossible, was followed by a period of relaxed private initiatives in this area, and then a reversal. This shift in the country’s political course led to the active movement of cultural treasures, the emergence of new ways to locate collectibles, the formation of new types of collectors, and forms of communication between private collectors and with state institutions.

As a result of the study, the author concludes that private collecting not only reflects the logic of the country’s historical and cultural processes but also has its own developmental logic.

Studying collecting practices, the forms and methods of assembling collections, and the nature of the relationships between the state, state museums, and private collectors can be useful not only for understanding the historical process but also for understanding the ways in which national identity is formed and maintained and cultural heritage is preserved.

This article continues the testing of the analytical model of the Siberian super text as a cultural hyper palimpsest [17], applying it to Novosibirsk. While Kemerovo exemplifies an industrial center with the semiotics of “victim” and “resource,” Novosibirsk reveals itself as a different model – a deliberately designed administrative and scientific metropolis, a “capital” project in the Siberian context. The aim is to demonstrate the universality of the cultural hyper palimpsest model, capable of describing a fundamentally different type of Siberian city, and to identify the specific mechanisms of meaning-making in its subtext. Using Novosibirsk as a case study, the article examines the key characteristics of the hyper palimpsest: high density and conflict of overlays (transport, administrative, constructivist, industrial, and scientific strata); the presence of significant lacunae (prehistory, constructivist utopia, traumatic memory of repression); nonlinearity and the “overseeing” of hidden layers (for example, the tragic conditions of gaining capital status within the logic of subsequent growth); and multichannel narratives (architecture, toponymy). The city exists in a constant opposition. On the one hand, the official success story: a favorable transport hub, the establishment of a science city, and so on. But on the other hand, a different reality lies hidden beneath this: a forcibly imposed capital status, shaped amidst famine and a typhus epidemic; traces of “distribution zones” being erased under elite housing; utopian projects that remained only on paper. The article proves the heuristic power of the cultural hyper palimpsest model for the comparative analysis of diverse urban subtexts within the unified Siberian super text.

The article examines the changing role of the author-narrator as a defining feature of contemporary collective artistic practices and as a form of subjective narrative rupture. In this article, the term “narrative” refers to an artistic utterance organised through the sequential disclosure of meaning and presupposing an agency that holds this sequence together. The article argues that for understanding contemporary forms of distributed authorship, the relevant genealogical reference is not modernism in general but the specific institutional model of the Bauhaus: the workshop as a form of joint design production in which the artwork ceases to be an exclusively individual utterance. It traces a structural connection between this model and the curatorial concept of Documenta fifteen, where for the fi rst time a non-Western collective, RUANGRUPA, acted as artistic directors. It shows that the Indonesian idea of lumbung – a collective resource barn – does not bring about the destruction of narrative, but rather offers a different model of artistic coherence based on the distribution of authorship, resources, and responsibility. The methodological framework consists of structural analysis of narrative conventions, comparative art studies, and historical reconstruction.

N.A. Berdyaev develops and elaborates the principles for comprehending the national idea, previously formulated by V.S. Solovyov. The founder of the philosophy of All-Unity linked the meaning of a nation’s existence with the destiny of the Christian world, the Universal Church. According to Solovyov, the national idea has universal character, it consists in what God thinks of the nation in eternity.  In his works Berdyaev examines the Russian idea in the context of the establishment of God-manhood formation, emphasizes the priority of a universal, objective Divine will, calls for the renewal of Christianity and all aspects of social life. The personalist philosopher connects the impending religious revival with the development of the personal principle. He perceives Christianity as a revelation about the person, and the Western European idea of knighthood as the threshold of Christian anthropology. The most important component of the realization of the Russian people-nation is the knightly ideal – the basis for forming a new religious consciousness, an alternative to ‘worldly philistinism’ and total self-sufficing statehood.

Initially, Berdyaev’s attention to the “Russian Idea” was connected with his reflections on the causes and consequences of the First Russian revolution of 1905-1907. He came to the conclusion that Russia was destined for a great mission – to become a bridge between the Christian East and West, to unite humanity in its progressive historical improvement. To fulfill this mission, the Russian people must overcome their inherent shortcomings and create favorable conditions for perfecting the personal principle within its bounds. In the Russian person, who has absorbed knightly virtues, Berdyaev believes, the individualism of the West is superseded, and a synthesis of the two vectors of historical development, East and West, is realized.

The theme of Russia’s world-historic world mission becomes urgent in Berdyaev’s work in connection with the country’s entry into the First World War, and especially after the overthrow of the autocracy in February 1917. He views the victory of democracy in Russia as an external condition for the emergence of spiritual knighthood, whose thoughts are directed beyond the empirical world. The Russian philosopher hopes that the revolution will liberate spiritual forces of the people and will be accompanied by the formation of national aristocracy of the spirit. But in the summer of July 1917, Berdyaev observes that Russia is being sacrificed to the revolutionary element. He considers the Russian person’s inclination towards social utopias a consequence of centuries of slave-like existence of the people, the absence in the Russian national character of a sense of duty and responsibility. The Bolsheviks’ victory in the struggle for power in the autumn of 1917 confirmed Berdyaev’s worst fears. He states that in Russia, the forces of negation and degeneration, the force of chaos and disintegration have prevailed. There is no genuine revolutionary movement, no creative development. Class consciousness destroys respect for the human person. The triumph in Russia of the bourgeois ideal of prosperous existence in the material world, of equality and justice, over the hierarchical principle of the universe’s order, was symptom of the degradation of the Russian people and meant the collapse of N.A. Berdyaev’s “Russian Idea”.

The issue of continuity and creative development has arisen repeatedly throughout the more than fi ve-thousand-year history of Chinese culture. Today, amid accelerating modernization and the homogenizing influence of globalization, China’s distinctive and profound culture is entering into active cross-cultural dialogue. In this process, foreign architects interpret and adapt the principles of Chinese vernacular architecture, while Chinese masters, in turn, reinterpret borrowed forms.

The aim of this article is to identify and analyze the specific mechanisms and strategies of contemporary inheritance practices through which traditional architectural elements are integrated with modern creative concepts, including an analysis of examples of cross-cultural communication. The object of the study is iconic architectural works in China created during the modern period of the 20th and 21st centuries. The research methodology is based on a comprehensive approach, including historical-genetic analysis, formal-stylistic analysis, and a comparative study of examples of the interaction between tradition and innovation.

The scientific novelty of the work lies in systematizing inheritance strategies, identifying patterns in the incorporation of sacred meanings and structural elements of traditional architecture into the current language of modern formbuilding, as well as in analyzing the bidirectional nature of cultural exchange. The study demonstrates that true continuity in architecture is achieved not through stylization or museum-like preservation, but through a deep reinterpretation of structural principles, spatial archetypes, and cultural symbolism – allowing tradition to gain new life in a global context without losing its unique identity.

The issue of continuity and creative development has arisen repeatedly throughout the more than fi ve-thousand-year history of Chinese culture. Today, amid accelerating modernization and the homogenizing influence of globalization, China’s distinctive and profound culture is entering into active cross-cultural dialogue. In this process, foreign architects interpret and adapt the principles of Chinese vernacular architecture, while Chinese masters, in turn, reinterpret borrowed forms.

The aim of this article is to identify and analyze the specific mechanisms and strategies of contemporary inheritance practices through which traditional architectural elements are integrated with modern creative concepts, including an analysis of examples of cross-cultural communication. The object of the study is iconic architectural works in China created during the modern period of the 20th and 21st centuries. The research methodology is based on a comprehensive approach, including historical-genetic analysis, formal-stylistic analysis, and a comparative study of examples of the interaction between tradition and innovation.

The scientific novelty of the work lies in systematizing inheritance strategies, identifying patterns in the incorporation of sacred meanings and structural elements of traditional architecture into the current language of modern formbuilding, as well as in analyzing the bidirectional nature of cultural exchange. The study demonstrates that true continuity in architecture is achieved not through stylization or museum-like preservation, but through a deep reinterpretation of structural principles, spatial archetypes, and cultural symbolism – allowing tradition to gain new life in a global context without losing its unique identity.

This article focuses on some challenges and nuances of translating two early texts by the Italian thinker Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) into Russian: the article Of a European Literature (1829) and open anonymous letter to King Charles Albert of Sardinia (1831). The author analyzes different translations for the existing ambiguous units and also presents possible interpretations of these works on philosophy of history, justifying each translation decision. The paper’s first part explores the meaning of the word “una” in the title of the article Of a European Literature (D’una Letteratura Europea). Tracing the history of the “Goethean” epigraph to this Mazzini’s writing and examining its content, the author comes to the following conclusion. In this case, “una” can be perceived as either a numeral meaning “united” (in a moral sense) or an indefinite article, which indicates the unspecified and hypothetical nature of the concept of European literature. The article’s second part covers interpretations of the characteristic “Un Italiano” found at the beginning of the letter to Charles Albert. As the author shows, it can be applicable both to the Sardinian monarch, who is called to head a “united, free, and independent” Italian nation, and to Mazzini himself, who had already used the signature “An Italian” in several of his previous works. Furthermore, this part discusses the practical goals Mazzini may have had when distributing this letter among Italians in the summer of 1831. In the author’s opinion, following P. Ricœur, such parallelism of different but equally relevant interpretations should be viewed as “not a drawback or vice, but a virtue of understanding, which forms the essence of interpretation.

The research of Veliky Novgorod cultural landscape in the context of urban representation in digital media reveals how the interaction between cultural and natural elements of the urban environment infl uences the urban image formation. The cultural landscape includes not only material, but also natural components, whose combination is a complex unity that is accessible to human perception. Each person creates his own cultural landscape image, but due to media representation or coverage of phenomena, reality events, created by media resources (photography), and broadcasted through digital media (the Internet), numerous created individual images are integrated into collective representation. During this process, a single person is both an observer who perceives the cultural landscape, and an active participant in its representations modeling. The main method of the study is visual data content analysis, which allows identifying the key components of the cultural landscape based on photographs that capture it. Photographic materials are classified according to representations types and forms developed by V. N. Kalutskov, taking into account additional factors introduced by the researcher, including seasons, time of day, and natural phenomena which allow revealing the key components of the cultural landscape. The author selected Veliky Novgorod as empirical material for the analysis, enabling the mechanisms demonstration for the urban representation formation through the visual aspect of its perception. The study’s findingsconfirm the hypothesis that Veliky Novgorod’s perception is based on its cultural landscape representation formed from visual components such as the city’s planning system, geographic location, natural features, architectural monuments, and buildings (churches, temples, and cathedrals). These composite elements of the cultural landscape form the basis for Veliky Novgorod’s cohesive and recognizable image, which is broadcast and perceived in the digital media sphere. Thus, the study demonstrates the importance of the cultural landscape’s visual components in urban image formation. The article contributes to the mechanisms study for representing the cultural landscape and emphasizes the role of visual means in this process.

This article proposes an ontological revision of the foundations of art historical analysis, which has traditionally relied on the hermeneutics of style expressed through a system of binary oppositions (from Wölffl in to Baxandall). In contrast to this relational model, which defi nes an artistic phenomenon through its difference from another style, the theory of apophatic stylistics is put forward. Borrowing its fundamental gesture from negative theology, the theory postulates that an artistic principle or pattern asserts itself not dialectically, but through a radical negation of all that it is not–of the entire mute materiality of the world of “things themselves.” The article provides numerous examples from various arts, from classical to the most recent, substantiating the necessity of apophatic stylistics as a sub-discipline of art history and, simultaneously, an essential practical component of the philosophy of art, crucial for the accuracy of intermedial generalizations.

The article argues that this approach has direct ontological implications, resonating with Graham Harman’s project of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). Within OOO, a work of art is understood not as a representation or a product of artistic will, but as an autonomous object possessing a “withdrawn reality.” The task of the artist, therefore, shifts from mimesis to the act of revealing this objecthood, which transforms the formula summarizing the spirit of Duchamp’s enterprise: “the whole world readymades itself.” Through a reinterpretation of Rosalind Krauss’s concept of the index and the category of “zadannost” (“givenness,” in the Neo-Kantian and Bakhtinian tradition), the article demonstrates how apophatic stylistics shifts the focus from anthropocentric categories of intention and cultural context (“point of assemblage”) to an encounter with the otherness of the artistic object itself in its self-suffi cient being (“point of vivifi cation”).

The article substantiates the apparatus of apophatic stylistics, provides a detailed innovative terminology for this discipline, and justifi es its analytical procedures. This enhances the practical signifi cance of the article, making it not only a contribution to the philosophy of art but also an instructive foundation for analyzing any work of art using the author’s proposed method.

This article is a critical attempt to understand the phenomenon of Derzhavin’s infl uence   on the ideologies of the median culture in Russia. The research methodology is based on the concept of A.S. Ahiezer. He proposed a “mediational methodology for the socio–cultural analysis of Russian society”, in which there are categorial concepts: ‘inversion’, ‘mediation’, ‘median culture’, ‘inversion trap’, etc.  The main issue for Derzhavin was the question of self–determination of the individual in the context of serving the state system. In these conditions, individuals will have to leave the fi eld of ‘inversion’ traditional thinking through ‘mediation’, the search for mediation. Derzhavin, engaged in serving the autocratic state, sought to avoid the extremes of the binary approach.

 The author tried to analyze the phenomenon of Derzhavin’s poetic and prose vocabulary in order to discover elements of the median culture in the writer’s texts. It is important for the author to show Derzhavin’s poetic space fi lled with binary oppositions that are intricately related to each other.  This space, in turn, is connected to the socio–cultural space of Russian Classicism in general. The author presents his methodology for studying the Russian Enlightenment of the XVIII^th century.

Derzhavin’s work is presented as a focus on developing a new type of relationship with the government. The poetic discourse is a response to a system of historical challenges, the main one being the challenge of binary consciousness. The deployment of mediation practices in some cases determines the specifi c structure of his literary work. The author shows how all of this relates to the poetics of Russian classicism and the state ideology of autocracy. The new forms of social organization in the 18^th century involved the struggle for personal liberation including from state violence. Speaking about the relationship between the individual and the state, Derzhavin enters into internal polemic with the revolutionaries on the one hand and the court conformists on the other.  

This article examines the formation and transformation of English aesthetic thought within the framework of the British philosophical tradition. The study focuses on the development of key aesthetic concepts such as taste, imagination, the sublime, and beauty from eighteenth-century empiricism to analytic aesthetics and contemporary interdisciplinary approaches. The research employs a historical-philosophical method combined with conceptual analysis of major aesthetic theories articulated by British philosophers and theorists of art. The article demonstrates that English aesthetics did not emerge as an abstract speculative system but developed as a reflection on perceptual experience, moral sentiment, and cultural practices, closely connected with moral philosophy, literary criticism, and philosophy of language. The analysis reveals a consistent internal logic in the evolution of British aesthetics, moving from the problem of taste and sensibility toward the examination of artistic practices, institutional forms of art, and the linguistic conditions of aesthetic judgment. The article argues that the specificity of the British aesthetic tradition lies in its empirical orientation, emphasis on individual experience, and openness to interdisciplinary dialogue, which ensures its continued relevance for contemporary philosophy of culture and theory of art.