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• The abnormal “new normal”: The concept of the “new normal” as a framing structure in social media discourse: A cognitive-discursive analysis

  Nava Vanda Sahverdova

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  414

  This study is devoted to the analysis of the concept of the "new normal" and the description of its frame structure in everyday usage within social media discourse. Based on a cognitive-discursive approach, the study examines the transformation of the meaning of the expression "the new normal" from its original economic-political term into a polysemous linguistic tool for expressing evaluation, anxiety, and rejection. Using comments from social media platforms (such as Facebook, Telegram, and LiveJournal), the study identifies frames and thematic groups in which this concept is actualized: the moral and value devaluation, the cultural-civilizational crisis, ideological pressure, the normalization of violence, the mediatization of tragedies, and the social adaptation to post-COVID realities. The analysis shows that the "new normal" functions in media discourse as a marker of normative transformation and a cognitive representation of crisis phenomena. The concept serves as an ironic label, a means of stigmatization, emotional evaluation, and as a tool for expressing identity and describing the "other" amid global and local changes.

• Moscow Everyday Life in Soviet Film Comedies of the 1960s–1980s

  Anel Kozhabergenova

  Views:

  70

  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.

• Bugs, Burrow, Inquisitor: Dostoevskian Intertexts in Eyeless in Gaza

  Angelika Reichmann

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  323

  The present article is devoted to the discussion of intertextual connections between Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza (1936) and three works by Dostoevsky: Notes from the Underground(1864), Crime and Punishment (1869) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880, Grand Inquisitor scene). As is well-known, the Dostoevskian novel of ideas was a major inspiring force for Aldous Huxley’s art: Huxley’s rewriting of the Grand Inquisitor episode in Brave New World (1932) is probably the best-known case in point. Nonetheless, insufficient critical attention has been devoted to the actual intertextual connections between the two novelists’ output. As I have demonstrated earlier, on closer inspectionPoint Counter Point (1928) turns out to be a rewriting of Devils (1872), which, however, alsoproves to be a low point in Huxley’s assessment of Dostoevsky – a companion piece to his incidental vicious critique included in his 1929 essay on Baudelaire, in which Huxley also targets spiritual quest. Let me argue that Eyeless in Gaza can be read as a sequel to that polemic, in which a change of Huxley’s attitude to Dostoevsky is clearly notable: the novel provides a much more subtle and even respectful critique of Dostoevsky by implying the universal relevance of the Dostoevskian underground to the understanding of the modern human condition and by re-embracing spiritual quest.