Ideas and Ideals

Pierre Loti was a novelist and a marine officer who visited lots of countries. He gained popularity writing about his travels and travel impressions. This article analyses his travel to Nagasaki back in 1885 where he lived for half a year and had a ‘temporary wife’. His novel written during that travel is called “Madame Chrysanthème”. It’s one of his most extravagant and interesting pieces which made the author world-famous. It reflected common interest in the oriental life typical for that time and it predetermined the image of Japan in the European consciousness of the second half of the 19th century. Pierre Loti wrote about his ambition to make the novel as impressionist as possible determining impressionism not as an intellectual but as a decorative phenomenon related mostly to arts and translation of sensory perception. His interpretation of impressionism was expressed in “Madame Chrysanthème”, which is an attempt to describe the world around us, represented not only by the material world but by the author’s sensory perceptions and feelings. To be exact, this is impressionism in fiction. The world is a product of our sensory experience, and the author’s goal is to fix this experience, which is the sum of his observation and impressions. Pierre Loti creates his work where color plays the main role together with sounds and words. They are a sum total of the elements determining the reality in equal amounts. Stylistically “Madame Chrysanthème” is created according to impressionist canons, with lots of epithets, comparisons, metaphors, the author’s neologisms. The novel is written as a diary where separate episodes in chapters are separated from one another by large white empty gaps. The article discusses similarity of impressionism and the Japanese culture. However, a closer look demonstrates considerable differences between the European and the Oriental minds.

The author considers the factors, which determine interest to the German language in different regions of the world. The object of research is the role of the German language in international sociocultural contacts and the humanitarian sphere development, in the world educational space formation. The subject matter is practical experience of mastering the German language, linguistic achievements and problems of specific nations in this area. The author   considers practical application of the German language in the language policy of several countries, studies intercultural interaction difficulties, analyses international research projects in ethno-social dynamics. The goal of the research determined the tasks: to present a socio-anthropological approach to the consideration of the language situation in the countries, to comment on the institutional aspects of the German language dissemination, to substantiate the multilingualism significance as a tool of intercultural education. The chronological framework of the study covers the first decades of the XXI century.  At the same time, if we consider the problem in a historical aspect, we will inevitably turn to the earlier periods.  A systematic approach allows us to establish a logical relationship and interdependence of these periods, traces changes in the status of the official language in Germany. This issue is not only linguistic, but also historical and cultural. The author analyzes the problems of the ethnolinguistic situation associated with the study of the German language in a number of countries: among them, the United Kingdom, in which other languages (but English) have a lesser degree of social prestige and are being squeezed out of the language space.  The French Republic, along with the Federal Republic of Germany, as the leader of Europe, has always been on the axis of European construction.  The country continues the policy of promoting internationalization of the French language.  At the same time, Francophonie is a movement for cultural diversity. The Kingdom of Belgium and the Swiss Confederation are related to Germany in institutional architecture. It is necessary to study the situation in these ethnically heterogeneous and multilingual federal states, where German is one of the official languages. The author appeals to the history of Spain and the Republic of Korea because the citizens of these countries participated in the reconstruction of Germany after the Second World War. Issues related to the individual linguistic rights implementation determine national and political processes, educational and cultural policies. Learning several languages forms the idea that a multilingual society is the standard model of communication.

Interpretation of cultural values and cultural heritage is one of the most common types of their development and creative understanding. However, the concept of ‘interpretation’ remains blurred among related processes, usually without getting much mention. In the field of cultural heritage preservation, interpretation is the main method of human development of cultural heritage objects. The process and results of interpretation, as shown by the long history of preservation of cultural heritage, also affect the preservation of cultural heritage. The proposed material is devoted to the consideration of a museum as an example of one of the most consistent built spaces and tools for the interpretation of cultural heritage.

The subject of the research is the methods of museum work considered in the context of mechanisms of interpretation of material cultural heritage. Museum as an instrument of interpretation has been known since ancient times. Human interest in ancient artifacts that act as visible symbols of historical and cultural memory of the past, eventually led to the development of collecting, and then, with the publication of collections, to the emergence of museums.

Museum and its activities occupy a special place in the methodology of interpretation. The museum space can set its own special rhythm of historical time and create conditions for comfortable perception of the presented artifacts. No other cultural institution has such a task, and if it is necessary to present an artifact, interested persons in one way or another turn to the method tested on museum sites.

As a result of the research, the author identified five stages of museum activities, which are generally typical for the mechanism of interpretation of cultural heritage. Therefore, the main goal of museum activities should be recognized as an interpretation of cultural heritage. In accordance with this goal, the museum's tasks are also implemented, including the preservation, publication and promotion of the collection's artifacts. Thus, the role and place of the museum as a specific space created for the purpose of interpreting cultural heritage is proved. These provisions allow us to look at the theory and practice of museum activities in a different way, in the context of interpreting cultural identity.

This article is about the rationality concept in the Ernst Cassirer philosophy of culture. The need for such understanding was made conditional for the philosopher upon the modern project (Enlightenment project). One of the key ideas around which the project was built is rationality. However, it is this concept that begins to be rethought and criticized at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries. Narrow sense of rationality raises the problem of substantiating humanitarian knowledge and embedding it in a scientific paradigm. A number of philosophers have attempted to resolve this issue. Two ways were outlined – a categorical break with the established tradition (for example, the intuitive approach) and work within the framework of the tradition (expanding the concept of rationality with the intention of including more cultural phenomena in it). The neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer belongs to the followers of the second approach.

The concept of symbolic form, that he developed, allows us to build a new plural idea of the rationality. In his opinion, each cultural phenomenon has its own rationality. This view of the problem makes it possible to talk about humanitarian knowledge as scientific, that is, fit into the framework set by the New Time. Cassirer did not develop a complete system, but outlined important guidelines for cultural research. In particular, he especially singled out two categories of the humanities, such as form and style. In addition to them

The article is devoted to the interrelation between the epoch and music creation, basing on the experience of the USSR and the Azerbaijan SSR during 20–30s of the XX century. These geographical and time frames give us significant material for studying the problem. The establishment of Soviet power determined colossal changes in life, including art and culture. The essence of new features is the method of socialist realism. Mass character and collectivism are the most important peculiarities of that time. It is a direct response to the new economic relations. The research of the phenomenon “we” begins in Azerbaijan music – especially in mass, popular songs. The accent in the opera genre is shifted to the concept of people’s victory. The main tendency in Azerbaijan art before 1920 was the humanity tendency, after 1920 the Communist party ideals. We must mark the birth of a new musical style in Azerbaijan as the main result of the development of composers’ music after 1920. The Azerbaijan music came out on the world stage at that time.  It became a heroic one, whereas before 1920 it had been lyrical. The heroic line is expressed mainly by march intonations. We must also notice the concrete historical line instead of legendary character of music before 1920. The chief heroes of Azerbaijan music theatre are Medjnun and Kerogly, the opposites: contemplation and action, unresistance and struggle, makam and ashug genres. But in spite of differences there is continuity between the first epoch and the second one in such genres as: Russian folk songs and Azerbaijan tunes.

Based on the analysis of the obituaries of the revolutionaries belonging to different political parties of the socialist camp, the article attempts to reconstruct the “ideal” of the revolutionary figure. The author proceeds from the fact that the analysis of the complex of obituaries of a certain social or public group allows to identify those values that are most important for a particular group at the given time, to carry out the reconstruction of its moral and ethical ideas, which are important system-forming factors of its subculture. According to the author of the article, the similarity of the revolutionary obituary to the lives of saints is lawful, firstly, by virtue of the identity of functions - the creation of an image of a “hero”, which  served as an example to follow and the formation of a “pantheon”; secondly, because although the revolutionaries were largely nonreligious people, the revolutionary conviction sometimes took a religious connotation, became a kind of confession of a new faith, in which their “saints” and “martyrs” appeared. The term “obituary” is understood quite broadly, and not only short notes about a person's death were analyzed, but also memoir materials, biographical essays, having a character of an obituary, which were published in sections such as “Memory of the Departed” and / or had other features peculiar to this genre. On the basis of the analysis of obituaries published in the illegal newspapers “Znamya Truda” and “Proletariy”, in the journal “Penal Servitude and Exile”, as well as in the emigrant press (“Socialist Vestnik” and “Noviy Zhurnal”), the author highlights a complex of traits of character and properties of the human personality, perceived as undoubtedly positive, as well as a complex of actions and behavioral patterns that are characteristic of a true revolutionary and are positioned as an example to follow. The author also comes to the conclusion that the hypothesis of similarity of hagiographic literature and obituaries originating from the revolutionary camp has proved to be true.

This article is devoted to some theoretical and methodological, as well as applied aspects of imagology, associated with the use of its conceptual and categorical tools to study the cinematographic “hyperreality”. The latter is considered as a source-reservoir of media imagams as leading constructs of the binary opposition of the type “own” / “alien” –  “us” / “them”, performing the function of continuous cognitive mobilization, leading to the creation of long-term, universal, supratextual allusions and therefore popular for the modern process of political stereotyping and the formation of identification codes.

The predominant type of research sources were film documents, films of English and American production of various genre affiliation. An attempt was made to evaluate the information potential of the imagosphere of the studied films on the quality of the representation of the specific humor of the “Cold War”, features of the means of artistic and visual expressiveness to reproduce the image of the other. The study concludes that there are differences in the morphology of the political-satirical imagosphere of English and American cinematography.

In conclusion, the author asserts the importance of Anglo-American cinematic humor and “laughter technologies”, portraying expressive immanent mobilization mechanisms that have turned into self-sufficient driving forces leading to the formation of “cold” political-ideological existentialism as a special type of thinking action.

The aim of the article is to reveal and reconstruct the hierarchy of values in rock-culture. The author’s hypothesis is that rock-culture is an important instrument of forming post-industrial axiology. This fact implies exaggerated manifestation of values. In the author’s opinion rock-culture is characterized by the system of relations, a set of values, norms, identities, practices, symbols that surround social context of rock-music. The methodology of the research is based on principles of structure and functional analysis. The main methods are: an included non-formalized narrative interview and included observation. The axiological model of rock-culture is formed around the value dichotomy: collectivity, unity – individualism, self expression. One of the variants of this dichotomy is a contradiction between family values, profession and non-limited self expression. Agents of rock-culture are influenced by this contradiction and they understand the need to change their axiological model. They are forced to adapt an alien lifestyle. It correlates with the values of activity and innovation. Another important for rock-culture value is that of a riot, confrontation. It is in dialectical interaction with the value of creativity. Creativity in rock-culture has a complex and multi-level structure that includes excess versatility and existential strive for the transformation of reality. These values comprise the main group of rock-culture values. Freedom is the leading value in the system. And at the same time it provokes the appearance of some secondary values. They are: laziness, excessive hedonism, household deviations (in the value aspect, not as practice). So the core of axiological rock-culture system includes the values that correlate with post-industrial culture. Laziness and hedonism have traditional connotation. Family and profession are connected with responsibility. This element of rock-axiology is a part of industrial culture. These values are on periphery of rock-culture. On the basis of the above it is possible to conclude the following. Axiology of rock-culture is subject to the transformations of its culture during post-industrial period. Sometimes it can be associated with strengtheting of certain value positions, with the acquisition of hypertrophied qualities.

The article deals with the problem of studying the cultural meanings of literary and painted landscape in postmodern discourse, which is relevant for modern cultural knowledge. It is noted that the polyphonic content characteristic of postmodernism, the “rhizomatic” structure of texts, their playful nature, intertextuality largely determine the fact that the boundaries of traditional types and genres of art become conditional, because the very concept of “boundaries” as a kind of “demarcation line” is replaced by the idea of relativity of intraspecific differences. In the “postmodern situation”, for which the paradigm is the installation on the “heteromorphism of language games”, dynamic stability, giving importance to pluralism, randomness, the assumption of different ways of development and its description, the landscape goes beyond the independent genre form, creating multicomponent intertext structures, organized on the principle of citation, collage, free construction of semantic relations. The tendency of leveling intraspecific boundaries in postmodern art leads to the transformation of the content core of the landscape in the direction of mechanical copying, deconstruction, ironic play on the “usual” norms of classical or, to a greater extent, modernist artistic strategies, which always performed a certain teleological function, that is, represented the articulated author's idea. Landscape (both literary and pictorial) in this context is an act of expression, communicative event, “consistency plan” (G. Deleuze), where polysemantic internal bonds leading to permanent indentation in the cultural layers of the text. On the basis of the analysis of the works of J. Fowles, M. Pavic, A. Kiefer it is concluded that in postmodernism, the traditional understanding of the landscape as a holistic artistic image of the natural world is replaced by its interpretation as a mosaic, multi-layered structure, parts of which are connected variatively, have polyassociative and polysemantic interpretations, since their semantic reading is not regulated by the author's intention, but is in dialogical interaction with the reader or viewer. The revealed tendencies of genre synesthesia in postmodern discourse fill the landscape with practically unlimited possibilities in the construction of a complex polysemantic structure, in which semantic levels are not hierarchically invariant, but are in dynamic interaction, forming places of “assemblies” and “distribution” of information in accordance with a certain cultural context.

The article analyzes the causes of the crisis of the modern history of Russian literature, the main reasons for which is the crisis of the Russian language in general and the crisis of the academic language in particular. The ideological pressure experienced by Soviet literary criticism as a science of the history of literature influenced not only topics and interpretations of the literary process, but also generated a specific language - a language “infected with Soviet meanings”. The analysis of the language of literary texts of the Brezhnev era of the 1960-1970s implies that the Soviet studies of the history of Russian literature were based on two concepts: “struggle” and “fallacy”. That allowed Soviet literary scholars to describe the literary process in the framework of Soviet ideology, when Soviet literary criticism considered the natural process of democratization of Russian literature in the 19th century as the main stream of revolutionary struggle. The proclamation of “struggle” and “fallacy” as the main engines for the development of literature led to extreme degree of pathos of Soviet literary criticism, which is especially noticeable in the example of studies of the work of 19^th-century satirists. A typical example is the Soviet literary scholars’ research on M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. On the one hand, the satiric pathos of his works helped Saltykov-Shchedrin to go through the ideological selection of Soviet official literary studies. At the same time, Soviet literary criticism passed by the main feature of Shchedrin's satire: clichés of the official language of any ideology gives many opportunities to play on changing the meaning of the official formula, which leads to its destruction from the inside. The limited set of research topics did not allow deviating from the “general line” of interpretation or broadening the range of problems, which predetermined the results of research in advance. As a result, Russian literary criticism inherited the language from the previous Soviet era, in which it still writes. Even out of external ideological pressure, the Soviet language continues to communicate acquired ideological meanings.