Ideas and Ideals

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of art is understood not as a representation or a product of artistic will, but as an autonomous object possessing a “withdrawn reality.”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.

The Sakha (Yakuts) are the northernmost Turkic people. Like many peoples they preserved folklore art in a living existence. Part of it consists of myths, including cosmogonic ones, which are found primarily in the heroic epic of Olonkho, religious beliefs and in the form of separate mythological narratives. In this work the main attention is paid to the cosmogonic and related myths of the Yakuts, searching for parallels to them mainly from the mythology of the ancient Indo-Iranians. These searches are motivated by ancient ethnogenetic ties. The main source for the preparation of the work was materials from Olonkho. In the religious beliefs of the Yakuts, the cult of the bright god Yuryung Ar Aiyy Tangara occupies a central place, with which the kumysny ysyakh is associated. It is associated with the early nomadic Indo-Iranian mythological view, which was based on the cult of the bright deity Ahura Mazda.

Using comparative, geographical, etymological and genetic methods as well as the author’s fi eld materials the evidence of the Yakut epic Olonkho ‘about the valley-mother of Kyaladyky in the Middle World, where sacred white cranes winter – sterkhes (Siberian Cranes)’ is confi rmed. The sterches who spent their summers in Western Siberia wintered in northern Afghanistan, Pakistan and India before their complete extermination. The conclusions of the works of geneticists on the Aryan and Turkic ancestry of the Sakha (Yakuts) are presented, which also confi rm the evidence of the Yakut Olonkho. The materials obtained as a result of the study lead to parallels between the myths of the ancient IndoIranians and the Sakha (Yakuts), which indicates the origin of Yakut tengrism – the belief in the Ar Aiyy Tangara, in the same region.

As a result, a conclusion is drawn about the ancient cultural and ethnogenetic contacts of the proto–ancestors of the Indo–Iranians and the Uranhai Sakha, which took place in the area of the junction of the highest mountains of Asia: Karakorum – Hindu Kush – Himalayas.

This article develops an analytical model for studying the phenomenon of the Siberian supertext through a cultural studies lens, conceptualizing it as a cultural hyperpalimpsest. The research is motivated by a methodological defi cit in the study of complex regional cultural texts, which require comprehensive tools to account for their multi-dimensionality, depth, and inherent conflict. The methodological framework synthesizes N.E. Mednis’s concept of the supertext [10], V.N. Toporov’s semiotics of local texts [14], and the theory of the cultural hyperpalimpsest, adapted from the works of A.A. Zaliznyak [4] and A. Huyssen [21]. The core of the study involves examining the urban subtext as a multi-layered semiotic formation within the three-component fi eld structure of the Siberia concept: the historical-eventual, cultural-geographical, and fi gurative-metaphorical components (the latter falls outside the scope of this article). Each of these components undergoes a dual-aspect analysis – synchronic and diachronic – to reveal both current semiotic interactions and the historical stratifi cation of meanings. The totality of such urban subtexts, united by the overarching Siberia concept, forms the Siberian supertextin its hyper-palimpsestic multi-dimensionality. The practical application of the model is demonstrated through a case study of Kemerovo, which represents a type of industrial center with high semiotic tension. The analysis reveals the conflictual interaction of its historical layers (agrarian, resource-extractive, industrial), structured around binary oppositions such as center – periphery and victim – hero. The study confirms the model’s heuristic potential in identifying dense semantic stratifi cations, significant regional lacunae, and the multi-channel, non-linear dynamics of regional identity formation.

Ordering the world of things and phenomena is one of the tasks of symbolic activity as an important anthropological characteristic of man. An individual builds and uses a system of reference points in the socio-cultural space of traditional and modernist societies with the help of objectifi cation and de-objectifi cation of symbols. A monument as one of the forms of symbolic culture historically plays the role of such a reference point: it perpetuates generally signifi cant meanings that have the highest value, provides an axiological connection between generations, sets existential coordinates on the path of life. However, at the modern (post-historical) stage, traditional and modernist meanings and values  are losing their signifi cance as universal pointers. Nevertheless, the need for orientation not only does not disappear, but turns out to be extremely relevant in the conditions of uncertainty of a complex world. Today, a number of artists create their works in new territories of a complex world, inhabited through art. The author examines this trend using examples from works by Anish Kapoor (ArcelorMittal Orbit, Cloud Gate and the sculpture at 56 Leonard Street in New York City) and Antony Gormley’s project (One & Other). These artistic experiments offer an unconventional experience for the viewer, revealing the possibility of harnessing the creative potential of uncertainty. The works discussed in the article act as accumulators of ambiguity. Installed in public spaces, they not only accumulate uncertainty but also transmit it back into the human world, repeatedly concentrated through artistic means. The author demonstrates that among the goals of contemporary monumental art, one of the main objectives is reconciling people with an unstable reality through pre-adaptation. In modern psychology, pre-adaptation is viewed as a preventative measure that allows people to adjust to constant, unpredictable change. Pre-adaptation, carried out with the help of monumental art, is based on the principles of developing a creative attitude to the world.

The novel “The General and His Family” develops and summarizes the style of Timur Kibirov. It actively uses the quotation technique, so that the text gravitates toward centonicity. The genre subtitle “historical novel” emphasizes the traditionalist component of the writer’s artistic thinking. The breadth of coverage of Soviet reality prompts us to see in Kibirov’s novel a continuation of Pushkin’s text – “an encyclopedia of Russian life” at the Soviet stage. The author not only accuses, but also loves this past, which is an essential feature of the so-called artistic method of “critical sentimentalism” by Sergei Gandlevsky, implemented by
Kibirov following the members of the “Moscow Time” group. The image of the narrator in the novel is largely autobiographical, and at the same time he is the
bearer of the generalized voice and point of view of the post-Soviet intellectual with its characteristic socio-cultural features. The most important character in the novel is General Vasily Ivanovich Bochazhok. In it, the writer deconstructed the Soviet and especially post-Soviet stereotype of an offi cer as a narrow-minded soldier. General Kibirov is a knight without fear or reproach, devoted to his
military duty and his family. He does not swear, does not drink, does not cheat on his wife. In addition, he deeply and almost professionally loves classical music. In the character of General Bochazhok, Kibirov, by his own admission, tried
to continue Dostoevsky’s project in the novel “The Idiot”: to depict a positively wonderful person. General Bochazhok dreamed of a feat all his life and fi nally accomplished it: this is a completely Christian feat of love for his daughter, when
her father let her emigrate, thereby putting an end to his own military career. In his novel, Kibirov solves a diffi cult question: can there be an atheistic righteous man in an atheistic era? Having created the image of General Bochazhok, the writer answered this question in the affirmative. The novel “The General and His Family” was staged the following year after its publication at the Novosibirsk Academic Youth Theater “Globus.” Director Alexey Kriklivy paid close attention to the source material, creating an authentic production that faithfully embodies
the essence of the author’s idea by stage means. The performance is noteworthy in itself as an artistic event with deeply thought-out staging moves and talented acting by actors from the Novosibirsk. 

The aim of this study is to analyze the socially conditioned concept of ‘maiden beauty’, quality of all unmarried maidens in Russian folk tradition. The analysis of beauty is supplemented by consideration of such categories of folk culture as: fate, will, freedom, playing an important role in refl ection within maiden and wedding folklore. These categories of worldview have retained their archaic connotations, characteristic of the Indo-European and East Slavic archaic worldview in general, and at the same time are key to describing youth as a social group within the Russian agricultural community. Considering the general confusion of
terms, their layering on each other within folklore, in this article an additional category of ‘force’ was introduced. ‘Force’ is also a part of the language of folk culture
as a synonym for vital forces: age, skillfulness, glory, fate, holiness, both for a person and for the mythopoetic ‘forces’: spirits-masters of the land, folklore characters and folk Orthodoxy. But devoid of mythopoetic connotation, ‘force’
acts as ‘that which allows the possible to become real’. In its most general form, ‘force’ is inherent in everyone, not only people, but also events, deities, spirits, the dead, things, due to the anthropologization of the world around us within
the framework of the folklore picture of the world. Revealing the Slavic idea of ‘vampirism’ as a variation of the archaic concept of ‘closed space’ in which all who are endowed with ‘force’ act, a value confl ict is shown: the danger of acquiring
power for an individual, and those who are allowed to do so: monks, elders. Maiden beauty becomes a form of power, a conscious act of invading oneself as the Other, into the perception of the people around, but also as a purely maiden
ability, it is also a manifestation of one of the forms of feminine essence, which must be realized in the short time frame of youth and a form of acquiring this force permitted within the framework of Russian folk culture.

The article presents a critical analysis of the logical and pragmatic foundations of the “science of memory” as an independent subject area of socio-humanitarian
research. Articulation of the mechanisms and ways of functioning of group (collective) memory helps the authors to reveal the consistent logic of the formation and development of the memoriological paradigm. The methodological
principles and tools used in the work are designed to smooth out the contradictions of internalist and externalist strategies of scientifi c analysis, demonstrating the complementarity of internal and external factors in the genesis of memoriological
knowledge. At the formative stage, social memoriology developed in a specifi c polemic with historiology in terms of challenging the exclusivity of historiographical
methods and techniques for studying the past. The modern stage of the relationship between offi cial historiography and memoriology is characterized by the smoothing out of differences in understanding the nature and essence
of historiographical activity, and the convergence of their methodological principles and rules. In the pursuit of increasing inclusivity and plurality in the representation of the past, there is a noticeable local tendency towards the resacralization, remythologization and partially profanization of historical experience. The article attempts to problematize the epistemological status of modern memorial research in the logic of the Nietzschean strategy of ‘forgetting’ as an
opportunity and ability of society to balance and poise group ‘mnemonic experience’ and the experience of organized collective amnesia. The recognition of the redundancy and toxicity of a part of historical experience, the social provocativeness of certain fragments of world and national
history gives grounds to assert that oblivion can prevail over memories at a time when ‘memory events’ are explicitly or implicitly capable of deepening existing forms of intolerance and xenophobia, as well as becoming a dangerous manipulation tool on the part of the main benefi ciaries of confl ict and destructiveness in society. In the current mental context, according to the authors, it is not the
maxim of the existence and functioning of group (collective) forms of memory that is being problematized, but their modern institutionalized and codifi ed explications
and embodiments in mnemonic practices of subjects of media police and media culture.

The idea that there is a special aspect of cognition existing in art practices was introduced in antiquity. Nevertheless, the terminological form of ‘artistic cognition’ is found only in the Russian philosophical tradition. At the same time there is no clear historical and philosophical comprehension of the specifi city of this concept and the reasons why it turns out to be relevant precisely as compared with scientifi c knowledge. The author of the article believes that the concept of artistic cognition was born and developed in the fi rst years of
Soviet power against the background of the convergence of art and science, especially in the context of futurism and socialist realism. This term can be traced to the work of the ‘cardinal’ of the Russian avant-garde N.N. Punin named “Art and the Proletariat”. It has two epistemological aspects. On the one hand, the new concept satisfi ed the existing ideas about the ‘objective reality’ as concrete for art cognition. On the other hand, largely due to the use of literary examples in the works of K. Marx, F. Engels and V. Lenin, artistic cognition was considered as a way of analyzing the historical and sociological aspects of the class struggle which is comparable to the scientifi c one. Although N.N. Punin’s work caused a resonance in the periodicals of the fi rst decade of
Soviet power, it was forgotten later on. A few decades later it was rediscovered in a purely philosophical environment in the critical representation of P.V. Kopnin, who proposed an epistemological version of the connectivity between
scientifi c and artistic cognition. The philosopher believed that scientifi c and artistic cognition are in fact just two sides of a united cognitive process. At the same time, he denied the signifi cance of the image in artistic cognition
which distinguishes his position from both subsequent and modern philosophizing on the topic. In the consideration of P.V. Kopnin, the specifics of artistic cognition turned out to be insuffi ciently defi ned and became the subject of research of the subsequent tradition.