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In the Hallways of the Tauride Palace during the February Days of 1917: Memoirs of a Veteran Staffer of the Duma Chancellery А. А. Kondrat’ev
Get PDFThis publication presents an autobiographical account of the February Days in Petrograd by a
long-standing mid-level staffer of the Duma Chancellery, Aleksandr Alekseevich Kondrat’ev
(1876–1967). The author spent the first days of the February Revolution inside the Tauride
Palace and diligently recorded his impressions, some of which he also shared in letters to his
contemporaries. Later, he systematized what he had remembered and turned it into a cohesive
narrative published below. His reflections on the revolution’s key moments offer a unique perspective
of a well-informed insider who at the same time remains detached from party politics
and allegiances. It is from inside the Tauride Palace, from its offices and hallways that the
author witnessed the meteoric rise (and soon, the precipitous downfall) of the propertied but
nevertheless revolutionary Fourth Duma, as well as the breakdown of the old political and social
order. His testimony augments some of the established views on the attitudes and behavior
of contemporaries caught up in the revolutionary whirlwind. Of special interest is the author’s
testimony about his fellow Duma Chancellery staffers who — unlike insurgents and Duma
politicians who flocked into the revolutionary headquarters in the wake of the unprecedented
popular uprising that engulfed the capital city — came to the Tauride Palace on 27 February
to fulfill their bureaucratic duty, that is to ensure orderly functioning of the Duma apparatus.
The text below is supplemented by textual and contextual annotations incorporating the most
up-to-date scholarship.Research and writing of this publication was generously supported by Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute
for Advanced Study), Delmenhorst, Lower Saxony
Multimodality, hybridization, carnivalization in text organization and compression of the information flow
Get PDFThis article analyzes manifestations of the most relevant trends in the organization
of text structure. Special attention is paid to creolization as the tendency in the organization
of the text, as it provides the producer of the text with varying ways of compression
of information flow. The functional potential of individual textual mechanisms of
verbalization of heterogeneous information about the world is described by looking at
some examples of methods of semantic, formal and functional organization of the text
generated by means of different cultural codes. The influence of heterogeneous factors,
external and internal to the generated text, on the organization of the text is analyzed.
The paper offers an interpretation of the reasons leading to a consistent increase in
the degree of multimodality of texts of various types, which is noted by researchers in
relation to different communicative environments and different communication formats.
The author also describes individual techniques of textual organization which
are intensively used by native speakers of the language and members of a culture when
generating texts of different types. Such clearly manifested trends in the organization
of texts of various types as multimodality (or creolization), hybridization, carnivalization,
etc., are analyzed as complementary, as accounting for and supporting each
other, as well as contributing to the consolidation and structuring of the information
flow not only in specific interaction between communicants, but also in the implementation
of political, media and public agenda both in a shared cultural space and
in different cultural spaces. An explanation of the paradox expressed in the desire to
optimize the communicative process as much as possible due to intensive use of secondary
nominative means is proposed. This paradox is facilitated by minimizing the
communicative and cognitive efforts of communicants who more or less consciously
choose certain means of implementing a particular discursive strategy in interaction.
In existing formats of communication, text producers prefer to select secondary nominative
means from numerous and diverse isofunctional means when solving various nominative tasks, not without reason assuming a greater degree of effectiveness of the
impact on the recipient of secondary nominative means due to their expressiveness,
emotivity and informational density. Compression and structuring of the information
flow, i. e., rapid, productive and effective comprehension of the information perceived
by the recipient is obviously stimulated by the coactivation of heterogeneous, heterosubstrate,
heterochronous information about the world expressed by secondary nominative
means
Typographical markers of emotionality used in expression of expert evaluation in German and Russian reviews in Linguistics
Get PDFThis article explores the involvement of typographical means in the construction
of evaluative meanings in expert scientific discourses. A qualitative context-semantic,
axiological, and grapholinguistic analysis was carried out on the basis of 50 German
and 50 Russian reviews in linguistics published in the period from 2016 to 2020 in
high-ranking academic journals: Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik, Zeitschrift
für Rezensionen, Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, Problems of Onomastics, Russian
Journal of Linguistics, and Topics in the study of language. During the course of the
study, typographical emotionality markers used by the authors of linguistic reviews
were identified and classified. Conclusions are drawn regarding the involvement of
the selected units in the typical evaluation strategies in linguistic reviews. Particular
attention is paid to cases of communicative-functional transposition of visual-graphic
emotionality markers. The prospects for future research include an investigation of a
wider number of reviews chosen for the corpus in order to collect statistical data for a
quantitative comparative analysis of typographically marked expert-evaluative statements.
The novelty of the study is in the discussion of typographical means relevant
for the texts that ensure effective professional communication in academia. The means
of this nature are still insufficiently covered in the publications of Russian researchers.
The results presented in this paper can contribute to the further study of the text types
of scientific discourse in an interlingual and intercultural perspective and particularly
to the study of the interaction of linguistic and typographical features used to construct
an author’s identity in context.The study was prepared with the support of the Russian Science Foundation
(project 22-28-01024 “Evaluation language in scholarly humanities practices and discourses
of Germany and Russia”) at the St Petersburg State University
Multimodal structure of an online lecture in German Studies
Get PDFThis article focuses on the multimodal structure of the online lecture in German
Studies. In a pandemic context, the field of teaching at German universities has responded
very quickly to the changes that have taken place in the way of communication.
Although the academic lecture is a largely established form of scholarly interaction
between professor and students, in distance learning it is being replaced
by the online lecture. The various communicative elements (text and images in the
presentation, as well as facial expressions and gestures accompanying the teacher’s
speech) combine with each other to create a complex and multidimensional form of
multimodality. The analysis in this article is based on the classification of online lectures
and the model of this multimodal text in scientific Internet communication. The
25 German-language online lectures in linguistics and literary studies posted between
2020 and 2022 on the YouTube platform as well as on the websites of five German
universities (e. g. lecture2go.uni-hamburg.de) were selected as research material. The
choice of these lectures was caused by their availability on the Internet and their general
topic (German Studies lectures). Discourse analysis as well as the method of systematization
and classification were used to study the empirical material. Based on
lecture transcripts, nonverbal characteristics and audiovisual components three main
types of online lectures were identified: two-modal lectures with a predominance of
audio and verbal communication channels, the most common three-modal online
lectures, in which three main modes of information transmission interact at once:
verbal, nonverbal and prosodic. The most complex combination of multimodal means
is reflected in the last group of crossmodal lectures, where the lecturer simultaneously
duplicates several communication channels in different ways to communicate more
effectively with the student audience. To sum up, the analysis allowed us to answer
the question, what is the peculiarity of multimodal structure in online lectures and
what discursive-communicative strategies are used by German-speaking lecturers for
constructing lecture discourse in the humanities field of study
Some Remarks about the Ceiling Painting of Bartolomeo Tarsia from the Dance Hall of the Great Peterhof Palace
No full textThis paper is dedicated to the painting ceiling created in the middle of the 18th century by the
Venetian artist Bartolomeo Tarsia for the Dance Hall of the Great Peterhof Palace. The plafond
was badly destroyed during the Second World War and was re-painted by Soviet artists
in the second half of the last century from preserved pre-war photographs and a preparatory
drawing. These documents formed the basis of our research. Starting from the 19th century,
the subject of the plafond is interpreted mainly as “Apollo and the Muses on mount Parnassus”.
An accurate examination and analysis of Tarsia’s preparatory drawing, along with an appeal to
well-known prototypes from Western European painting, made it possible to come to some
conclusions about the subject of the artwork, the nature of its iconography, and also to revise
the established interpretation. In particular, we considered the problem of the iconography of
Parnassus and Helikon, we also noted the co-presence on the ceiling of the figures of Minerva,
the Muses and Pegasus, referring to one specific episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; it was
also discovered that in the Tarsia’s native Republic of Venice — in Padua — there is a plafond
by Giuseppe Le Gru, known as the “Triumph of the Sciences”, correlated in time of creation
and content to Tarsia’s plafond. Like Parnassus, the subject with Minerva and/or Apollo and
the Muses on Mount Helicon has an allegorical meaning — the prosperity and glory of the
sciences and arts. The Peterhof plafond also has this allegorical character. The image of the
supreme goddess Juno crowning the composition serves as an additional confirmation of this,
and also allows us to attribute this ceiling to examples of the embodiment of female mythological
iconography, which generally corresponds to the logic of the decorative decoration of the
palace and corresponds to the spirit of the time. In addition, the possible parallels with other
works of the middle of the 18th century, with which the Peterhof plafond shows ideological
and compositional similarity, are proposed in the paper. Among such examples, there is one
of the illustrations by Giambattista Piazzetta for the grandiose Venetian edition of “La Gerusalemme
liberata (Jerusalem delivered)” by Torquato Tasso in 1745
Scientific collections of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg
Get PDFThe Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg
is one of the oldest biological research institutions in Russia, housing the largest
zoological collections in the country, both in terms of their size (number
of specimens) and global diversity. It is also one of the largest zoological depositories
in the world, with over 60 million specimens in its stores. In total, the
Zoological Institute holds about 260,000 animal species, about a quarter of the
world’s known diversity. The type collection includes several tens of hundreds
of primary types, which are very important as the essential foundation for zoological
nomenclature. The digitisation of scientific collections now plays an important
role in ensuring the standardised accumulation and use of various data
sets, as well as quick access to stored information. The digitised scientific collections
of the Zoological Institute are published online for the public access. To
date they have accumulated 146,695 taxa records and over 13,000 high quality
images of invertebrate and vertebrate specimens and their original data labels.
The Zoological Institute is not only a depository of animal specimens important
for biodiversity inventories and studies, but also a unique bank of genetic resources
of extant/extinct animals which can be studied using modern genetic
technologies.This study was supported by
Ministry of Science and Higher Education of
the Russian Federation (Grant No. 075-15-
2021-1069)
Jensens ekphrasis in “The King’s Fall” as “interference”
No full textThe article analyzes an example of ekphrasis from the novel “The King’s Fall”
(1901) by Danish Nobel prize-winner Johannes V. Jensen as a space of interaction between
visualization strategy and rhythmic organization of prose. The idea of “interference”
as a principle of mutual influence of waves in Physics is dear to the writer at this
early stage of his career and is present in the title of the poem in prose from 1901. His
turn-of-the-century poems and prose often combine high and low, emptiness and fullness,
and different kinds of media. As a historical novel describing the epoch of the 16th
century, “The King’s Fall” borrows the pictorial features and structural principles of
Baroque painting as well as the essential ideas of the epoch’s memento mori, reflected
in the paintings of H. Holbein, P. Bruegel the elder and still-lifes of Flemish and Dutch
masters from the Vanitas series. The ekphrasis under consideration is presented as a
piece of memory unfolding before the eyes of an observer, as a painting from the epoch
with its frame, light, perspective, horizon line, colours and viewer. Furthermore, thanks
to rhythmicity, repeated syntactic, lexical groups and alliteration, the focus shifts to the
creative act, betraying the presence of the creator and the narrator
Prince Eugene of Sweden. A painter’s brief biography
Get PDFThis article tells about the main stages of the biography of the famous Scandinavian
painter Prince Eugene, a representative of the Bernadotte dynasty, who left a noticeable
mark on the history of Swedish culture. Having no prospects of ever taking the royal
throne, Eugene, after receiving the traditional upbringing and education for the heir to
the throne, devoted himself to the study of painting. Having experienced the serious
influence of the French Impressionist masters of the last third of the 19th century during
his studies in Paris, he worked fruitfully in various genres for a long time, leaving an
extensive creative legacy: his brush owns not only numerous canvases presented both
in leading museums in Sweden and world-class collections (the British Museum, the
Metropolitan Museum), but also monuments of monumental painting — in particular,
frescoes in the Stockholm City Hall and the Royal Drama Theater. The activity of
Prince Eugene as a representative of the Swedish royal court during the period on the
eve of the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian union is a significant research interest.
Prince Eugene made certain efforts to preserve the unity of Sweden and Norway
by popularizing such ideas in the Norwegian creative environment, where he had wide
acquaintances and a certain popularity and was even proposed by such famous figures
of Norwegian culture as K. Hamsun and B. Bjornson as a possible candidate for the
role of king of Norway. The prince-artist is also noteworthy as a public figure who held
anti-Nazi positions during the period before and during World War II: he not only
condemned the policies of the Third Reich, but also criticized Swedish public figures
who expressed sympathy for the actions of the Nazi regime in Germany. Nowadays,
the extensive creative heritage of Prince Eugene is on display in the collection of the
art museum located in his estate Waldemarsudde in Stockholm, where he lived and
worked for most of his life and where he was buried after his death
Solonin on the socio-political philosophy of conservatism
No full textProfessor of the St Petersburg State University Yu. N. Solonin to the study of global and Russian
conservatism, analyzes his works on the problems of philosophy and axiology of politics
and political ideology. The author shows that political philosophy of Solonin was theoretically
grounded Center for comprehensive study of conservatism at the Philosophy Department of
the St Petersburg State University. It is pointed out that many well-known specialists from
St Petersburg and other regions of Russia took an active part in the work for the Study of
Conservatism Center. They investigated the substantial characteristics of conservatism as a
complex socio-cultural and intellectual phenomenon and the historical-philosophical preconditions
of conservatism. Solonin’s works creatively developed the concepts by Russian scholars
dealt with conservatism, and it helped to organize a research school of comprehensive study of
conservatism. The article offers an analysis of Solonin’s writings on conservatism while he was
leading the Study of Conservatism Center. The works by Solonin and other scholars revealed
the main features of conservatism’s philosophy, such as holism, organicism, traditionalism,
etatism, and irrationalism; they analyzed the historical, cultural, political-legal and socioeconomic
preconditions of the genesis of European and Russian conservatism. The article
argues that a special attention in Solonin’s theoretical heritage was paid to the analysis of the
problem of liberal-conservative synthesis. He specifically analyzed the potentialities of liberalconservative
synthesis and proved that various non-classical forms of political ideologies are
being formed in modern conditions. Solonin also noted the complex and diverse ideological
currents of conservatism in Russia, its being conditioned by the traditional way of Russian
society, the attitude of the people to the state.The article was prepared with the support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research grant no. 20-
011-00144 “Theoretical Heritage of Philosophy in Leningrad-Petersburg. Second half of the 20th century”
The decline of technogenic civilization: Sufficient development strategy
Get PDFThe first quarter of the 21st century was marked by global instability. Sharp climate changes,
biodiversity loss, exponential population growth, a lack of natural resources and living space,
environmental pollution form a complex of current global issues that pose a threat to the humanity’s
future. The article demonstrates the destructive nature of the established consumer
vector of development, which underlies the modern economic model, and also reveals the
negative aspects of scientific and technological progress that led to the global environmental
crisis. Overcoming these negative trends presupposes the choice of new strategies for socioeconomic
development, which are based on its alignment with the laws of evolution of the
biosphere. The achievement of a secure future implies the preservation of natural ecosystems
considering their ability to self-repair disturbed processes within the economic capacity of the
biosphere, since its excess leads to a violation of the biological cycle of energy and matter, and
to the ecological imbalance in the biosphere. Taking into account the patterns of conservation
of natural ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole, the authors propose the strategy of
sufficient development, and determine related implementation measures. They include development
of environmentally safe technologies and the approval of a new humanism as a
necessary condition for achieving a secure future. The authors argue there is a need in the
radical revision of value orientations in order to achieve a secure future. This revision presupposes
redirecting people from the anthropocentric orientation in relation to nature to the
bio-anthropocentric orientation, which takes into account the need to preserve nature and the
spiritual world, and preserves the moral foundations of the development of society