Vol. 55 (2026) Current Issue

Published July 6, 2026

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Linguistics

  • Cognitive Models of the Concept of “Normality”
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    This study examines the concept of “normality” in contemporary Russian public discourse of recent decades in the context of uncertainty in normative frameworks. In contrast to the previously analysed construction “new normality,” which exhibits a marked and metalinguistic function, “normality” functions primarily as a background cognitive-discursive category, serving as a tool for evaluation and categorization. The data for the study is drawn from the RuTenTen corpus. The methodological framework is based on cognitive-discursive analysis aimed at identifying typical patterns of usage and reconstructing the conceptual structure. The analysis reveals the main cognitive models of the concept of “normality,” including spatial, scalar, processual, and institutional metaphors, as well as models of masking, simulation, and axiological inversion.

  • Linguistic Analysis of the Development of the Term “Greenwashing” Through the Prism of Variology
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    This article examines the variability of the ecological neologism “greenwashing.” Based on an analysis of the media context and various corpus platforms, the main types of variability (graphic, morphological, and syntactic) are revealed. Semantic variability is also presented depending on the context. Particular attention is paid to the process of determinologization in the context of the mediatization of scientific knowledge.

Literary Studies

  • The Image of Europe in Nikolay Karamzin’s “Letters of a Russian Traveller”
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    “Russia or Europe?” Nikolay Mikhailovich Karamzin undertook a journey to Western Europe and, whilst travelling, wrote travel letters describing his impressions. In Russian literature, even before Karamzin, there were works of travel literature written for the purposes of pilgrimage or trade, but in the 18th century the emphasis shifted to enlightenment and to the description of the national characters of the peoples of Western Europe. How does the Russian traveller perceive Western Europeans, how does he describe representatives of Western nations, and what does he pay attention to upon arriving in a foreign city? This article seeks to answer these questions.

  • On the Functions of the Figure of Narrative Metalepsis in the Narratives of “Old Writing”
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    This article, based on the works of Russian writers of the “old school,” analyses the functions of the narrative figure of metalepsis. The article points out the differences between the types of metalepsis: rhetorical and ontological. It then provides an overview of the typology of metalepsis functions, which are divided into diegetic and exegetical. The former includes the functions of introducing the figure of analepsis and the figure of prolepsis into the narrative, as well as the function of transitioning from one diegetic line to another. A separate function of metalepsis is the exegetical function, which is common to both types of metalepsis.

  • Leonid Andreyev’s Panpsychic Drama “Requiem”
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    This article examines the role of Leonid Andreyev’s work in the emergence of the New Drama in Russia and, through an analysis of the play Requiem, highlights the genre-specific and formal characteristics of panpsychic dramas. The author emphasises that Andreyev’s panpsychic drama is a groundbreaking experiment that demonstrates just how far the concept of the dramatic genre can be expanded. The text of the panpsychic drama shows that eventfulness, previously considered one of the main criteria of drama, is by no means fundamental in the New Drama. In this way, the frequency of external events decreases, while the significance of internal events increases, and the role of mental and psychological events becomes increasingly important. On the other hand, Andreyev’s dramatic text already contains within itself an impoverishment of the referential function of artistic language, and the pursuit of the autonomy of tropes becomes the organizing principle of the drama’s structure. These phenomena give Andreyev's drama panpsyche special significance on the way to the contemporary understanding of the New Drama.

     

     

  • Litvins as a Medieval Baltic-Slavic Ethnic Group in Kastuś Tarasaŭ's Novel “The Pursuit of Grunwald”
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    Ethnically colored characters based on stereotypical representations of different peoples occupy an important place in the fiction of any nation. At the same time, works of art may depict not only representatives of modern nations, but also those of ethnic groups that have now disappeared, and sometimes even those that never existed at all. A special literary discipline, imagology, is concerned with the study of this issue. In contemporary Belarusian literature, the Litvin ethnotype occupies an important place, as it is a relevant component of certain types of modern Belarusian identity. Its presence is particularly noticeable in works on historical themes. One such text, significant for the national literary tradition, is Kastuś Tarasaŭ's novel The Pursuit of Grunwald (1986), thematically devoted to the Battle of Grunwald in 1410 between the combined forces of Poland and Lithuania and the knights of the Teutonic Order. In this work, the imago of the Litvin occupies a fairly clearly defined position as the self-image, serving to describe his own people and his homeland in the past, in relation to which characters of all other nationalities are positioned as hetero-images. In Kastuś Tarasaŭ's work,  Lithuanians are a Slavic-speaking ethnic group of mixed Baltic-Krivich origin, diversified in terms of religion (Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and pagans), whose representatives make up the military and political elite of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The author attributes the following characteristics to them: brave, harsh, cruel, stubborn, persistent, fierce, reckless, short-sighted, and unreasonable. These traits do not fully correlate with the current stereotypical perceptions of modern Belarusians about themselves, which had developed by the end of the 20th century.

Cultural Studies

  • The Linguistic Organization of the Visual Text in V. Kamensky’s “Concrete Poems”: An Intermedial Analysis of the Poem The Palace of S.I. Shchukin
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    The article is devoted to the analysis of the visual-poetic structure of Vasily Kamensky’s “concrete Poems,” based on the poem The palace of S.I. Shchukin. The study focuses on compositional principles, lexical-grammatical organization, and typographic features of the text within the aesthetic framework of Russian Cubo-Futurism. The application of an intermedial approach makes it possible to identify connections between poetic elements and works of painting from the collection of S.I. Shchukin. The poem is interpreted as a model of museum space, in which the text functions as a system of exhibition zones. The study reveals the dominance of the nominative principle, the reduction of verbal forms, and the synesthetic nature of imagery. It is demonstrated that typography performs a meaning-generating function, shaping the visual-spatial organization of the text.

  • Silence as Structural Presence: A Theoretical Exploration of Ivan Ikićʹs Film “Oaza” [Oasis] within a Cinematic Framing of Noam Chomsky’s Minimalist Program
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    This study proposes a formal-analytical reading of Ivan Ikić’s Oaza [Oasis] (2020) within an interdisciplinary framework combining film theory and Noam Chomsky’s Minimalist Program. Drawing on core Minimalist concepts – such as the distinction between Phonological Form (PF) and Logical Form (LF), economy of derivation, and the copy theory of movement – the article argues that cinematic silence in Oaza is not absence, but a structurally licensed form of non-externalization. In this sense, silence functions analogously to syntactic traces: elements that lack phonological realization yet remain interpretively active. Focusing on the interrogation scene and the final sequence of the film, the analysis demonstrates how the suspension of speech and the restriction of expressive means shift interpretive responsibility onto the viewer. Meaning emerges not through explicit articulation, but through structured absence and constrained access. The film thus operates as a derivational system in which omission is not a deficit but a condition of interpretation, governed by principles of economy and interface interaction.

  • The Surgeon and Surgery in the Cinematic Poetics of the Thaw
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    The figure of the doctor occupies a distinctive place in Thaw cinema. This type of character embodies the moral maximalism of the Shestidesyatniki (the Sixties generation) and their new attitude toward health and the human body but also assumes the features of one of the era’s most pivotal heroes. The doctor is depicted as a laconic and decisive representative of the intelligentsia who opposes “the most harmful social elements” – bureaucrats and philistines. The hero also retains a certain degree of social isolation (an unstable personal life, reservedness, abruptness, and intransigence). Among all medical specialties, prominence on the screen is accorded to surgery, and the performance of complex operations frequently serves as the climax in many Thaw-era films. The paper examines the artistic projections of this particular medical sphere through the analysis of the films Heart beats Again (1956, dir. A. Room), My dear man (1958, dir. I. Kheifits), Colleagues (1962, dir. A. Sakharov), and Degree of risk (1968, dir. I. Averbakh). It accounts for the semantic and visual variations of the theme in war films of the period, as well as the specific representation of the surgeon in the cinema of the Union republics of the USSR (the Baltics and Central Asia). The text also makes an attempt to trace the main periods in the Thaw ideology – from films centered on re-education and “finding the right path,” through the pathos of “Rousseauian realism,” to the “Hamlet-type” surgeons in the cinema of the late 1960s.

  • Moscow Everyday Life in Soviet Film Comedies of the 1960s–1980s
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    The paper addresses the representation of everyday life in Soviet film comedies of the 1960s–1980s. The object of analysis is a corpus of nine films: Vzroslye deti [Adult children] (1961),  Legkaya zhizn [Easy life] (1964), Daite zhalobnuyu knigu [Give me a book for complaints] (1965), Uroki literatury [Literature lessons] (1968), Ironiya sudby, ili S legkim parom! [The irony of fate, or Enjoy your bath!] (1975), Mimino (1977), Po semeynym obstoyatelstvam [Due to family circumstances] (1977), Sluzhebny roman [Office romance] (1977), and Samaya obayatelnaya i privlekatelnaya [The most charming and attractive] (1985). The research methodology combines two complementary approaches: Michel de Certeau’s sociology of everyday life and Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological poetics of space. De Certeau’s concept of tactics and strategies helps describe the mechanisms by which the Soviet urban citizen adapted themselves to systemic structures, while Bachelard’s ideas on poetics enable the reading of interiors, material objects, and living spaces as symbolic images rooted in memory and imagination. The article demonstrates that the Soviet film comedy of this period was not a degraded genre but a distinct aesthetic form linked to Italian Neorealism that developed its own language for representing the everyday. In the analyzed films, Moscow appears not as a neutral topographical backdrop but as a meaning-making space that captures the profound transformations of late Soviet society: the conflict of generations, the crisis of public and private spheres, and the paradoxes of urban space unification. Film comedy is treated both as an archive of social tactics and as a text-space where the social and the symbolic are inseparably intertwined.

  • A Demographic Portrait of Migrants From the Soviet and Post-Soviet Space in Eastern Hungary: A Preliminary Analysis of Questionnaire Data
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    Migration has accompanied humanity throughout its entire history, shaping cultures, economies, and social structures across regions. This study examines the demographic profile of migrants from Soviet and post‑Soviet states residing in Eastern Hungary, highlighting gender, age, timing of migration, and geographic origins. These characteristics illuminate the mechanisms of adaptation and the intergenerational transmission of cultural practices within local diasporic communities. Methodologically, the demographic portrait provides a foundation for future sampling strategies and mixed‑method research. Practically, it informs local images by identifying the types of social and linguistic support most relevant to this population. The results are preliminary but offer valuable insights for understanding regional migration dynamics and planning further large‑scale studies.

     

Scholarly Criticism