Ideas and Ideals

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 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 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.

Dystopia, which is one of the popular genres of modern culture, has found new opportunities in the cinema for its development. Many researchers are studying the cinematography dystopias, but dystopia as a genre of animation is practically unexplored. The purpose of this article is to examine the emergence and development of the genre of animation dystopia. The author suggests the periodization of the history of animation dystopias: from the first experiments of animators through the active mastering of the dystopia genre by animation – to the rise of the popularity of animation dystopias. The author connects the development of dystopias in animated films with world events and the development of computer and animation technologies, the advent of high-speed Internet. The paper systematizes the basic animation principles and imaginative means of animation, on the basis of which the author analyzes the first animation dystopias of the 1940s and 1960s: “Mr. Walk”, “Animal Farm”, “Cybernetic Grandma”, “Shareholders” and “Mermaid”. The article draws attention to the fact that the analyzed animation films combine several types of dystopias at once (socio-political, social-science-fiction and sociocultural) and reflect the corresponding dystopian features. Among the animation dystopias of the 1940s and 1960s, the author identifies hand-drawn animated films and puppet animation using the animation creation technique. The author believes that animation films producers were able to create lifelike characters, which are revealed under the influence of dystopian circumstances. Animation imaginative means, according to the author, made it possible to convey complex inner state and characters of persons of animation dystopias and features of the dystopian works. The author concludes that the application of the basic principles of animation, animation imaginative means and the principles of complexity and uncertainty promote an increase in interest both to the events occurring in the analyzed animation dystopias and to the genre of animation dystopia in general.

The article examines the issue of obtaining information about contemporary art by representatives of Soviet youth who later became active participants in the West Siberian counterculture of the 1980s and 1990s. The author sets a task to trace the genesis of radical ideas for the reorganization of society, examines in detail such aspects of the topic as sources of information on the counterculture, including foreign and domestic media, popular science publications, rumors and conjectures. In the course of the study, the author conducted surveys and interviews of the direct participants of the Siberian punk movement and also used the expert assessments. The author puts forward the hypothesis that the presence of information on the counterculture in the Soviet press shows a sympathetic attitude towards it in general. Growing immediacy of information in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to the enthusiasts among journalists and scientists, allowed young people in the USSR to monitor what was happening in the countercultural environment in the West. One of the main conclusions of the study is that, replicating fashionable stereotypes, young people in the Soviet Union felt themselves as a part of the actual artistic processes. Despite unoriginal nature of the national counterculture samples, it was an avant-garde phenomenon for our country.

The article is devoted to the research of designers professional culture in Russia. Focused interviews with Perm designers of different types of design serve as a source of research. The author identifies and examine the specifics of the functioning of the professional community of Russian designers that based on the empirical data analysis. The research showed that the organization of the design community occurs around some nucleus of a new institutional system or institution in the making. The dominance of the individual, that is the authoritative representative of the profession, is inherent in such institutions. This individual is a high-level specialist who is able to influence the overall process of design development. One of the tendencies of the community organization around certain professional landmarks is their existence in a special mythological time, which allows us to identify the significance of the figures of different historical periods within the framework of a single cultural chronotope. This feature of mythmaking is an indicator of the existence of professional mythology along with a specific "pantheon of the Titans". In addition, the research found that the perceptions existing in the Russian design community, form a certain single ideal type. This construction is a sociocultural portrait of a Russian designer that, on the one hand, has the features of a mythological titan, and, on the other hand, the archetype of a trickster. Depending on the prevailing characteristics, this ideal type has two modifications - the designer as the organizing center and the designer as the ordinary member of the profession - which allows using these constructions as tools for further research of the community.