Ideas and Ideals

The article discusses the features of intercultural communication process from the aspect of globalization of the modern society. Globalization creates special conditions for the interaction of different cultures. The authors highlight the idea that cultural foundations of the globalizing socie-ties are being transformed and it can even lead to certain changes in the state of mental structures of people. According to their opinion, multiple simulacra (illusory images that replace the reality and substitute traditional values) have a significant impact on the spiritual transformation of mental structures in the globalized society. In these circumstances, the global community faces the task of finding new forms of intercultural communication. The authors emphasize the fact that the most important foundation of intercultural communication is mentality (a special way of thinking and emotional reactions, allowing a person to form a complete image of the world). Then, the article analyzes two forms of intercultural communication – a monologue and a dialogue. It is noted that a monologue is based on the dominance of one of the communicating parties and leads to its cultural domination, which has a negative impact on the second participant of interaction. The most effec-tive form for the establishing cross-cultural understanding is an intercultural dialogue, which will enable the participants to maintain their mental specificities and adequately understand the partner.

The article reviews the specifics of modern business communication on the basis of English words and expressions conceptualized around the notion of business and recorded in Word Spy online dictionary of neologisms within the last three decades. The newly coined words are analyzed through extra- and intralinguistic motivators of their emergence in the language inventory, the formal and semantic composition, pragmatic properties actualized in English business discourse. As the majority of neologisms possess the metaphorical potential, their intensive use in modern business communication tends to create the uncertainty effect and through it enhance the ideological impact on the audience. Thus, with the traditional norms of business communication being violated, English professional discourse recently experiences the loss of its conventionality in favour of increased efficiency of every single communicative act.

The article continues the earlier begun research in “Ideas and Ideals” (№-s 19, 21, 23). Now we examine the ethical aspect of the music function. ‘Music contributes to the moral perfection of people’- this well-known statement we meet in a great number of scientific and literary sources from Ancient Greece (music ethos, the “kalokagathia” doctrine – unity of Beauty and Kindness) till our days. The article's task is to argue our hypothesis about the moral aspect of music, describing the mechanisms of this impact. The main idea of the hypothesis is that it is the professionalism of a composer (as a talented person) that creates moral perfection of people and personal moral values of the composer have nothing to do with this process. The masterly organized music form triggers the mechanism of moral perfection. Just “well-made” music (not any accidental sounds' connection) evokes positive emotions, which have wholesome influence on listener's moral. The beauty of music forms has influence on auditorium; music harmony (in narrow and wide senses) contributes to the development of a harmonic person. The article contains some literary examples with the author’s music analysis, which prove the hypothesis (“Mozart and Salieri”, “War and Peace”). The highest form of this music transforming function is moral purgation (catharsis) as a result of emotional “explosion” during music listening. Music catharsis confirms “The Moral Law Within Me” (Kant).

From the first days of the war there appeared a large number of cartoons mocking the German army and the German people in the French press and on postcards. These cartoons - often woefully primitive and vulgar- allow to understand the reasons which forced the French to fight against the Germans, they show how the French perceived the war, especially in the beginning of the conflict, when the cartoons appeared in large numbers, and when they expressed the most cruel motives. Firstly, caricatures ridiculed the Germans. Secondly, they emphasized the danger caused by their invasion, accompanied by atrocities. Thirdly, the cartoons depicted the abomination, and the inhumanity of the enemy, both these qualities made the Germans an intermediary between a man and a pig. Caricature is, certainly, a popular aspect of propaganda, which turned out to be quite consistent with people’s preferences. This kind of genre is not only the evidence of the atrocities of the war, but also reveals the cruelty of creative thinking and is a constituent part of that total war.

The author analyzes how Socialist-Revolutionaries estimated the character of the Bolshevik regime. He considers this in the context of the opposition between Socialist-Revolutionaries (PSR) and Bolsheviks as representatives of two branches of the Russian socialism – Narodnichestvo and Marxism. This opposition had a long history and roots. It must be taken into account that their doctrines had different nature and were derived from different concepts. At the same time it is a fundamental issue that Bolsheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries argued in the frames of one socialist paradigm, but PSR offered another model of socialist society and other ways and means of its construction and they estimated the Bolshevik regime from this point of view. The evaluations of the Bolshevik regime differed among the PSR members according to the group attachment of this or that PSR member. Centrists and Left-Centrists argued that adventurous and ill-considered actions of Bolsheviks pursuing among others selfish interests would lead to the discredit of the conception of socialism in the eyes of the masses and impede the movement to it in future. “The Right-Wing PSR members” including the group of Avksent’ev and Fondaminsky saw the near future of Russia in recovery of destroyed economy mainly on the capitalist basis and by “the formation of a healthy productive bourgeoisie” but necessarily with simultaneous development of democracy, self-government, cooperation, trade-unions and with PSR cooperation with other democratic parties for common or coordinated actions. V.M. Chernov characterized the Soviet regime as a form of state capitalism. All those Socialist-Revolutionaries stated from the very beginning: the impossibility of building socialism in the country with unready economic, social, cultural and psychological prerequisites; the regime relies not on the mass initiative but on the coercion and intimidation; the development of state terror to enormous quantitative and qualitative degrees which had no analogues in the previous history and destroyed the society structure; the degeneration of the Bolshevik party itself (E.M. Ratner pointed out this fact, which happened in 1922, at the PSR Trial, speaking about moral experimentation of Bolsheviks) – all this was confirmed during the next decades

The article is devoted to Eurasian civilizational identity of Russia and Mongolia and to the problem of civilizational identity of Russian and Mongolian youth. The processes of globalization and modernization affect the value orientations of young people. The break of traditions and continuity of generations due to global and local socio-cultural processes is the main cause of the disintegration trends of Russian and Mongolian society. The authors make a conclusion that the formation of the Eurasian civilizational identity of Russian and Mongolian youth will promote continuity between generations and create favorable conditions for the development of cooperation between Russia and Mongolia.

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.