Ideas and Ideals

The work of Alan Garner (b. 1934), one of the most significant contemporary English writers, consistently ranks the local myth of the writer's birthplace, Alderley Edge in Cheshire East. The evolution of the plot development can be seen well in the trilogy that began in 1960 (translated into Russian novel "The Magic Stone Brezingamena" and "Moon on the eve Gomrata") and completed in 2012 (untranslated novel «Boneland»). The story follows the adventures of a brother and sister who settled on a farm Alderley Edge. At an early stage story is built like a fairy tale, with contrasting humanized space truss wild woods and the hollow hill. Borrowing characters, motifs and themes of the epic tales leads to fragmentation and imposition of functions of heroes guarding different places. Chief among them, the magician fron the traditional fairy tale, Cadellin works within the boundaries of the Arthurian myth, protecting the cave with a sleeping king, the role of guardians of other places assigned to other heroes. In searching for the future integrity the author refuses to use ready-made fairy tale and epic models. In the final part of the trilogy keeper of the place becomes an "ancestral character" whose existence lasts until there is a race. The leading method of constructing the plot becomes a parallelism of events that occur with the personifications of the ancestral hero. Writer refuses to opposite locales (humanized and wild, positive and negative, and so on) and eras (ancient and modern, old and new magic, etc.), fusing them together and saying peculiar to primeval consciousness syncretism of perception, the only correct view of the world. Ancestral hero, shaman, guardian and creator of the myth controls all habitats, making all living space cultured at its mythological development. Bearing structures of the local myth becomes a kind of continuity, mastering the same place over successive eras.

The author considers spatial forms of everyday culture of Siberian merchants. The aim of the article is to show the possibility of applying research tools of environmental approach in cultural studies. The article is based on the materials of investigations of the Russian urbanists, historians of architecture and design, art and cultural studies, as well as photographs, which preserved the image of Siberian trade arcades. The author analyzes the shopping passages in Siberia from the point of view of urban interior categories. Passages vertically stood out from the surrounding buildings of commercial organizations. They dominated other buildings in size and architectural design. The formation of the visual image of the passage as a special space contributed to the architecture of the building, and the angular accents of the main entrance, and substantive design of urban parterre. The interior method was used to create the atmosphere of homelike place. The size of the windows corresponded to the size of the flight of the building, that created the image of arcades. Different signs in the form of labels, names and emblems of small shops shaped the perception of a definite business establishment in its integrity. Thus, shopping arcades of Siberian merchants in the context of cultural studies are treated not just as a professional space, but also as an open space for buyers, their everyday interactions in the structure of everyday routine of the Siberian merchants, where there was space for a merchant city, merchant's house etc.

The article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon "aestheticization of politics". The authors present political aesthetics within the boundaries of "symbolic politics" concept. "Symbolic politics", as a special kind of political communication, fits into the modern context of political life "virtualisation". The aesthetic mode of politics perception is viewed by the authors as socio-cognitive practices that are relevant to modern standards and principles of rationality. The paper studies the discourse of an "information war" in the context of correlative coherence of aesthetic and pragmatic elements of symbolic politics.

The article focuses on research of the language of architectural forms. The author considers the language of architecture as the artificial language living under the same laws of syntax and semantics as a natural language. The researcher’s attention is paid to simultaneity of the language of architecture perception as its characteristic feature, in contrast to linearity of natural language, which is perceived sequentially. The author considers the interdependency of the language dynamics of architectural forms and the historical period of their existence as well as social and political structure of the society. It is highlighted, that the language of architecture serves as a tool of a person’s orientation in space and as one of the forms of practical activities organization. Architecture is the art which combines not only decorative and esthetic functions, but primarily the pragmatic one.

The article offers the interdisciplinary culturological and art-critical approach allowing to reveal a number of the important semantic points in interpretation of a picture of the Altai artist A. Gnilitsky "Encounter". The painting became widely known due to its participation at exhibitions in Altai and Siberian exhibition in Omsk in 2013. Here the artist continues the tradition of Russian realistic portrait, and his manner of painting is close to the Russian Impressionism, going back to L. Turzhansky. The method applied here shows its prospects in the analysis of the works of contemporary artists, the painting reveals the figurative and psychological aspects of thematic portrait, makes it possible to describe and identify the specific features of the artistic manner of A. Gnilitsky.