Soboleva larisa - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Soboleva larisa
THE LINGUISTIC EXPLANATION OF THE CONCEPT OF SHAPE OF SURFACE This article deals with the reconst... more THE LINGUISTIC EXPLANATION OF THE CONCEPT OF SHAPE OF SURFACE This article deals with the reconstruction of the linguistic picture of the world. The analysis concerns one of the forms of explanation of the concept of "shape of surface"-i.e., lexemes verbalizing this concept. The richness of linguistic resources which verbalize the concept of "shape of surface" testifies to its importance to Russian mentality. Characteristics of the shape of surface, documented by linguistic data, are: "place," "shape," "size," "way of formation," "presence of vegetation," "kind of mineral of the hill," "existence of water in recess," "existence of the crater," "ranges." Nazwy terenowe powiatu sokólskiego z sufiksem-icha 15 UWM Olsztyn Acta Neophilologica, XVI (2), 2014
Quaestio Rossica, Apr 3, 2023
Slavonic and East European Review
Quaestio Rossica, 2021
The dichotomy of yielding or resisting to changing circumstances and conditions, adaptability, an... more The dichotomy of yielding or resisting to changing circumstances and conditions, adaptability, and the potential to "humanize" the environment are becoming increasingly relevant among the many world problems that humanity is facing. The limits of our adaptivity and the human possibilities of preserving "selfhood, " interpreted through an appeal to the "bifurcation points" in history and culture, are the focus of Quaestio Rossica Nr. 4/2021. The previous issue raised the question of the integration and assimilation of Germans in Russia and their adaptation to their historical homeland in present-day conditions [Keller, Redin]. In this issue, the Problema voluminis section presents materials on the Jewish population of the ex-USSR in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The authors of these articles turn to conflict situations in which state policy and the majority of the population, as well, seemingly, as the logic of life itself, demanded acceptance of a new identity, dictated by the interests of the state and assumed out of a sense of self-preservation. All studies are based on extensive population surveys. Elena Glavatskaya and Elizaveta Zabolotnykh (Yekaterinburg, Russia) examine the role of religion in maintaining Jewish identity through the lens of the Sverdlovsk Jewish community, the largest and most active in the Urals. Using the reports of the commissioner for religious affairs and field research materials, the authors reconstruct the metamorphosis of Jewish festive rituals in Sverdlovsk in the 1940s and 1950s. The vitality of these rituals, which underwent significant simplification under persecution, sustained the identity of those Jews who migrated to Israel and continued to celebrate the same Jewish holidays as during their Soviet childhood. Vera Kliueva (Tyumen, Russia) explores the two main ways Jewish ethnic identity co-existed with Soviet identity in the Soviet Union. The first was formed as a response to aggressive everyday and state-incited anti-Semitism; the means of resistance, however, was chosen individually. The second was constructed along family traditions existing throughout the Soviet period * L. S. Soboleva's work was financially supported by RSF Project No. 19-18-00186 "'Culture of the Spirit' vs 'Culture of the Mind': Intellectuals and Power in Britain and Russia in the Era of Change (17 th-18 th Centuries)". Работа Л. С. Соболевой осуществлялась при финансовой поддержке гранта РНФ, проект № 19-18-00186 «"Культура духа" vs "Культура разума": интеллектуалы и власть в Британии и России в эпоху перемен (XVII-XVIII вв.)».
Quaestio Rossica, 2020
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. André Gide A... more Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. André Gide An era of change. These words are the salvation and curse of human existence. The restlessness of human nature is reflected in the neverending search for something new, encountering hope for the best, the desire for peace and stability, fatigue from the chase, disappointment, and bitterness. If one tries to look at history from a bird's-eye view, one might notice how little there is in it that can be safely called periods of stability. As soon as the fabric of historical time has taken a recognizable shape, its threads begin to tear, its patterns dissolve, and a seemingly reliable "yesterday" turns into a shaky "today" and an unknown "tomorrow", terrifying the timid ("Be patient, everything will soon return back to square one") and encouraging the bold ("We are building a new, unknown and brave new world!"). There are no clear borderlines between epochs of stability. Change may enter our lives quietly and imperceptibly, or loudly, accompanied by the roar of orchestras and ringing declarations. But the old does not give up easily: it fights, mimics, adapts, and softens the radicalism of change. And so we talk about the "Long Middle Ages", about the "long" seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, using the concept of "transitional era". Paradoxically, the duration of such transition periods is often as long as that of "stable periods". Therefore, transition eras tend to develop their own periodization. The multi-layered nature of the historical process complicates our understanding of the boundaries of transition. The study of "transitivity" in history seems limitless in terms of problematics. The ability to reflect on this sharpens the sense of change; social elites become more responsive to innovations; political processes become more dynamic; wars redraw borders and impose a new reality faster than people can keep up * L. S. Soboleva's work was financially supported by RSF Project No. 19-18-00186 "Culture of the Spirit" vs "Culture of the Mind": Intellectuals and Power in Britain and Russia in the Era of Change (17 th-18 th Centuries)". Работа Л. С. Соболевой осуществлялась при финансовой поддержке гранта РНФ, проект № 19-18-00186 «"Культура Духа" vs "Культура Разума": интеллектуалы и власть в Британии и России в эпоху перемен (XVII-XVIII вв.)».
Quaestio Rossica, 2021
is publishing the second part of Volume 9 during challenging times, when everyone has been forced... more is publishing the second part of Volume 9 during challenging times, when everyone has been forced to create new forms of communication, to rethink work, and to come up with a new understanding of our cardinal dependence on the ability to overcome social and personal pessimism. Thus, the central theme of this issue came naturally; it looks at the protest nature of contemporary art as an indicator of mental vitality. The second, equally important theme of the issue explores the sensation of the magic of life, the only facet of life that may still have a future when all the other usual attributes of being are exhausted. Normally inaccessible to logical interpretation, this can often be grasped by the artist's consciousness. Thus, the journal's central section, Problema voluminis, is entitled "Contemporary Art as the Consciousness and Language of Culture". It combines the observations and ideas of art researchers from Yekaterinburg, Serbia, and Montenegro, showing the uniqueness of artistic consciousness and creativity in our era as an expression of the "general state of the world", in Hegel's words. Today, art is where various aspects of culture meet and interact; it is a place of significant spiritual, psychological, and sociopractical tension, as well as many a creative effort to explore the world. In contemporary art, along with art's traditional interest in life, the problems of existence, and in the inner world of people, one can increasingly feel a manifest desire to understand the reality and role of culture, the specifics of its world, and the ways in which it influences society and the individual. Lev Zaks (Yekaterinburg, Russia) offers an explanation of the radical novelty of modern art from the standpoint of aesthetics in culture studies. The author shows the attention paid by contemporary artistic consciousness to the reality of culture. This universal feature (or paradigm) of contemporary art, known as culturocentrism, significantly distinguishes it from more traditional art of the past and present, which is more natureor life-centred. Looking at art pieces from various genres, the author demonstrates the representation of the most important components of culture in such culturocentric art. One characteristic trend of contemporary art, including Russian art, is conceptualism, the subject of an article by Jelena Kusovac (Belgrade, Serbia). A historical and personalistic approach to this leading, internationally recognised trend of contemporary Russian art is combined with the desire to typologise and generalise. The author reconstructs the logic, content, language, and evolution of Moscow conceptualism
Quaestio Rossica
This article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the cognitive-rhetorical strategies of promi... more This article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the cognitive-rhetorical strategies of prominent British and Russian intellectuals in the context of the systemic crisis of the “era of transition” and in the process of the formation of cultural/imperial/national identities in Britain and Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The authors focus on identifying a semantic shift in the cultural code of the emerging British and Russian identities based on the material of polemical works, sermons, and travelogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The authors employ the historical-comparative approach. It helps reveal the “golden ratio” of the cultural code, i. e. a value scale that undergoes cardinal changes in a tense intellectual discourse in a situation of the collapse of the universal picture of the world and the formation of new ideas about man, society, and the state. The study demonstrates an affinity between the logic of change and the dramatic collisio...
Quaestio Rossica
This conversation with Vitaly Volovich (3 August 1928 – 20 August 2018), a famous Ural artist, to... more This conversation with Vitaly Volovich (3 August 1928 – 20 August 2018), a famous Ural artist, took place on 18 May 2018, and turned out to be the last extended interview given by the artist. The interview was aimed at discussing the newly published Women and Monsters album of Volovich’s works, as the editorial board of Quaestio Rossica was planning to collect and publish more materials on this topic in Russian culture (Quaestio Rossica, Vol. 7, 2019, Issue 2). The interview, however, became much more expansive and interesting as Vitaly Volovich, with his phenomenal memory and unprecedented skill as a narrator, recalled many pages of his difficult life navigating Soviet bureaucratic censorship, which was only braved by those who truly understood and loved art. An epic picture of the dramatic ups and downs in the artist’s life unfolds in this interview; the reader finds the artist’s personal search for meaning and his opinions on art, the freedom of creativity, life in Sverdlovsk, hi...
Sibirskiy filologicheskiy zhurnal
Studia Slavica et Balcanica Petropolitana
Quaestio Rossica
The agenda of moral crime and punishment, of death and eternal life, entered Christianity-centred... more The agenda of moral crime and punishment, of death and eternal life, entered Christianity-centred Russian literature through Holy Scripture. Since early Rus, Russian literature has not merely touched upon these concepts; they became key themes centred on the salvation of the soul (Problema voluminis section). An attitude towards death as a new birth into the life eternal is symbolic for Russian Orthodox believers. Elena Konyavskaya (Institute of Russian History of the RAS, Moscow) explores the perception of the transition to another world in the vitae of Feodosii Pecherskii and Avramii Smolenskii in comparison with those of Greek saints. She shows that reflections on the end of earthly life and the posthumous destiny of the soul are inherent only in the Russian text of St Nestor, despite its narrative similarity with a number of Byzantine vitae. The researcher concludes that medieval Russian hagiographers reflected the mysticism of their era, along with the understanding of the human soul's mysterious transition from earthly life to another world and the expectation of the Second Coming by educated people of the times. Aleksander Uzhankov (Moscow State Institute of Culture; D. S. Likhachev Russian Scientific Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, Moscow) considers the moral aspect of crime and punishment in three works about Prince Igor Svyatoslavich's campaign against the Polovtsians in 1185. The campaign of Prince Igor, caused by pride and a desire for glory, ends with humiliating captivity. Medieval Russian writers interpreted this campaign and its result in different ways. In the Laurentian Chronicle, the blame for the subsequent devastation of the Russian land by the Polovtsians is laid on Prince Igor, who undertook a campaign of conquest and was defeated. The Kiev Chronicle, on the contrary, defends Igor Svyatoslavich, shows his courage, and tries to reveal God's Providence in him. Igor, having suffered defeat, conceptualizes his fate as an Orthodox prince ought, understanding it as a punishment for former sins. The prince repents and undergoes a spiritual transformation: the Lord saves him from captivity. The Tale of Igor's Campaign, which is close to the Kiev Chronicle, poetically describes the campaign and shows Igor's spiritual path; he passes from light into darkness and then returns through the prayers of his wife Yaroslavna. The following two articles look at the role of women in the history of the 18 th-century Russian Empire. Empress Elizabeth was the first ruler in Europe to introduce a moratorium on death penalty, which had an impact not only on life in the empire, but also on the formation of a wider European attitude towards the death penalty and its abolition in Italy in 1786 by Duke Leopold I
Quaestio Rossica
Nо 2, 2019) has a distinctive focus on the history of culture and art. This manifests the desire ... more Nо 2, 2019) has a distinctive focus on the history of culture and art. This manifests the desire of participating researchers and the editorial board to hear the echoes of history-the sound of the 'division bell' and the disturbing melodies of modernity, transformed by the creative consciousness into material monuments and emotional experiences. This issue unites two opposing poles of sociocultural space. The theme of monstrosity embodies either the anticipation or the disintegration of harmonious Divine Creation. One of the statements of Igor Smirnov, a prominent theoretician of history, might serve as a heraldic motto for this theme: "Art is fearless in the face of degeneration, depriving it of supreme power, making it manageable, and putting it under control" [Смирнов, с. 11]. Thus, this issue of QR presents examples of "curbing" the advance of chaos through aestheticising monstrosity or demonism and overcoming the fear of entropy. The opposite pole in this confrontation is the phenomenon of sociocultural communication, reconciling people both in their successes and in their misfortunes. The ineradicable desire to rejoice, to enrich one's own emotional and conceptual reality through the artifacts and institutions of other cultures is what incites the development of civilization. This theme has been repeatedly raised in the pages of QR in various ways: biographical [Zhuk; Христофоров], historical and scientific [Kуденис], sociocultural [Binney; Приказчикова; Вачева], and the history of everyday life [Кароли]. An article about Johannes Baar, a prominent German professor of philology, looks at the unique ability of human beings to reconsider their and others' experiences, to learn life lessons, and to organise their earthly existence in accordance with an acquired system of values. The Second World War was Professor Baar's true university. The courage of this academic researcher consisted not only in the fact that he retained his ability to empathize and open his heart to pain amidst a military catastrophe, as his wartime letters show; he also had the inner strength to move from instigated hatred to recognition of the cultural perfection of the Russian language and literature and to devote his further life to studying them. The materials on Professor Baar's academic life, especially his wartime letters, are published in the Scientia et vitae section by professors Boris Kovalenko, Valery Mokiyenko (St. Petersburg State University), and Christine Mielsсh (Hamburg Association of Teachers of Russian Language and Literature), a German specialist in Russian studies.
THE LINGUISTIC EXPLANATION OF THE CONCEPT OF SHAPE OF SURFACE This article deals with the reconst... more THE LINGUISTIC EXPLANATION OF THE CONCEPT OF SHAPE OF SURFACE This article deals with the reconstruction of the linguistic picture of the world. The analysis concerns one of the forms of explanation of the concept of "shape of surface"-i.e., lexemes verbalizing this concept. The richness of linguistic resources which verbalize the concept of "shape of surface" testifies to its importance to Russian mentality. Characteristics of the shape of surface, documented by linguistic data, are: "place," "shape," "size," "way of formation," "presence of vegetation," "kind of mineral of the hill," "existence of water in recess," "existence of the crater," "ranges." Nazwy terenowe powiatu sokólskiego z sufiksem-icha 15 UWM Olsztyn Acta Neophilologica, XVI (2), 2014
Quaestio Rossica, Apr 3, 2023
Slavonic and East European Review
Quaestio Rossica, 2021
The dichotomy of yielding or resisting to changing circumstances and conditions, adaptability, an... more The dichotomy of yielding or resisting to changing circumstances and conditions, adaptability, and the potential to "humanize" the environment are becoming increasingly relevant among the many world problems that humanity is facing. The limits of our adaptivity and the human possibilities of preserving "selfhood, " interpreted through an appeal to the "bifurcation points" in history and culture, are the focus of Quaestio Rossica Nr. 4/2021. The previous issue raised the question of the integration and assimilation of Germans in Russia and their adaptation to their historical homeland in present-day conditions [Keller, Redin]. In this issue, the Problema voluminis section presents materials on the Jewish population of the ex-USSR in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The authors of these articles turn to conflict situations in which state policy and the majority of the population, as well, seemingly, as the logic of life itself, demanded acceptance of a new identity, dictated by the interests of the state and assumed out of a sense of self-preservation. All studies are based on extensive population surveys. Elena Glavatskaya and Elizaveta Zabolotnykh (Yekaterinburg, Russia) examine the role of religion in maintaining Jewish identity through the lens of the Sverdlovsk Jewish community, the largest and most active in the Urals. Using the reports of the commissioner for religious affairs and field research materials, the authors reconstruct the metamorphosis of Jewish festive rituals in Sverdlovsk in the 1940s and 1950s. The vitality of these rituals, which underwent significant simplification under persecution, sustained the identity of those Jews who migrated to Israel and continued to celebrate the same Jewish holidays as during their Soviet childhood. Vera Kliueva (Tyumen, Russia) explores the two main ways Jewish ethnic identity co-existed with Soviet identity in the Soviet Union. The first was formed as a response to aggressive everyday and state-incited anti-Semitism; the means of resistance, however, was chosen individually. The second was constructed along family traditions existing throughout the Soviet period * L. S. Soboleva's work was financially supported by RSF Project No. 19-18-00186 "'Culture of the Spirit' vs 'Culture of the Mind': Intellectuals and Power in Britain and Russia in the Era of Change (17 th-18 th Centuries)". Работа Л. С. Соболевой осуществлялась при финансовой поддержке гранта РНФ, проект № 19-18-00186 «"Культура духа" vs "Культура разума": интеллектуалы и власть в Британии и России в эпоху перемен (XVII-XVIII вв.)».
Quaestio Rossica, 2020
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. André Gide A... more Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. André Gide An era of change. These words are the salvation and curse of human existence. The restlessness of human nature is reflected in the neverending search for something new, encountering hope for the best, the desire for peace and stability, fatigue from the chase, disappointment, and bitterness. If one tries to look at history from a bird's-eye view, one might notice how little there is in it that can be safely called periods of stability. As soon as the fabric of historical time has taken a recognizable shape, its threads begin to tear, its patterns dissolve, and a seemingly reliable "yesterday" turns into a shaky "today" and an unknown "tomorrow", terrifying the timid ("Be patient, everything will soon return back to square one") and encouraging the bold ("We are building a new, unknown and brave new world!"). There are no clear borderlines between epochs of stability. Change may enter our lives quietly and imperceptibly, or loudly, accompanied by the roar of orchestras and ringing declarations. But the old does not give up easily: it fights, mimics, adapts, and softens the radicalism of change. And so we talk about the "Long Middle Ages", about the "long" seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, using the concept of "transitional era". Paradoxically, the duration of such transition periods is often as long as that of "stable periods". Therefore, transition eras tend to develop their own periodization. The multi-layered nature of the historical process complicates our understanding of the boundaries of transition. The study of "transitivity" in history seems limitless in terms of problematics. The ability to reflect on this sharpens the sense of change; social elites become more responsive to innovations; political processes become more dynamic; wars redraw borders and impose a new reality faster than people can keep up * L. S. Soboleva's work was financially supported by RSF Project No. 19-18-00186 "Culture of the Spirit" vs "Culture of the Mind": Intellectuals and Power in Britain and Russia in the Era of Change (17 th-18 th Centuries)". Работа Л. С. Соболевой осуществлялась при финансовой поддержке гранта РНФ, проект № 19-18-00186 «"Культура Духа" vs "Культура Разума": интеллектуалы и власть в Британии и России в эпоху перемен (XVII-XVIII вв.)».
Quaestio Rossica, 2021
is publishing the second part of Volume 9 during challenging times, when everyone has been forced... more is publishing the second part of Volume 9 during challenging times, when everyone has been forced to create new forms of communication, to rethink work, and to come up with a new understanding of our cardinal dependence on the ability to overcome social and personal pessimism. Thus, the central theme of this issue came naturally; it looks at the protest nature of contemporary art as an indicator of mental vitality. The second, equally important theme of the issue explores the sensation of the magic of life, the only facet of life that may still have a future when all the other usual attributes of being are exhausted. Normally inaccessible to logical interpretation, this can often be grasped by the artist's consciousness. Thus, the journal's central section, Problema voluminis, is entitled "Contemporary Art as the Consciousness and Language of Culture". It combines the observations and ideas of art researchers from Yekaterinburg, Serbia, and Montenegro, showing the uniqueness of artistic consciousness and creativity in our era as an expression of the "general state of the world", in Hegel's words. Today, art is where various aspects of culture meet and interact; it is a place of significant spiritual, psychological, and sociopractical tension, as well as many a creative effort to explore the world. In contemporary art, along with art's traditional interest in life, the problems of existence, and in the inner world of people, one can increasingly feel a manifest desire to understand the reality and role of culture, the specifics of its world, and the ways in which it influences society and the individual. Lev Zaks (Yekaterinburg, Russia) offers an explanation of the radical novelty of modern art from the standpoint of aesthetics in culture studies. The author shows the attention paid by contemporary artistic consciousness to the reality of culture. This universal feature (or paradigm) of contemporary art, known as culturocentrism, significantly distinguishes it from more traditional art of the past and present, which is more natureor life-centred. Looking at art pieces from various genres, the author demonstrates the representation of the most important components of culture in such culturocentric art. One characteristic trend of contemporary art, including Russian art, is conceptualism, the subject of an article by Jelena Kusovac (Belgrade, Serbia). A historical and personalistic approach to this leading, internationally recognised trend of contemporary Russian art is combined with the desire to typologise and generalise. The author reconstructs the logic, content, language, and evolution of Moscow conceptualism
Quaestio Rossica
This article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the cognitive-rhetorical strategies of promi... more This article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the cognitive-rhetorical strategies of prominent British and Russian intellectuals in the context of the systemic crisis of the “era of transition” and in the process of the formation of cultural/imperial/national identities in Britain and Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The authors focus on identifying a semantic shift in the cultural code of the emerging British and Russian identities based on the material of polemical works, sermons, and travelogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The authors employ the historical-comparative approach. It helps reveal the “golden ratio” of the cultural code, i. e. a value scale that undergoes cardinal changes in a tense intellectual discourse in a situation of the collapse of the universal picture of the world and the formation of new ideas about man, society, and the state. The study demonstrates an affinity between the logic of change and the dramatic collisio...
Quaestio Rossica
This conversation with Vitaly Volovich (3 August 1928 – 20 August 2018), a famous Ural artist, to... more This conversation with Vitaly Volovich (3 August 1928 – 20 August 2018), a famous Ural artist, took place on 18 May 2018, and turned out to be the last extended interview given by the artist. The interview was aimed at discussing the newly published Women and Monsters album of Volovich’s works, as the editorial board of Quaestio Rossica was planning to collect and publish more materials on this topic in Russian culture (Quaestio Rossica, Vol. 7, 2019, Issue 2). The interview, however, became much more expansive and interesting as Vitaly Volovich, with his phenomenal memory and unprecedented skill as a narrator, recalled many pages of his difficult life navigating Soviet bureaucratic censorship, which was only braved by those who truly understood and loved art. An epic picture of the dramatic ups and downs in the artist’s life unfolds in this interview; the reader finds the artist’s personal search for meaning and his opinions on art, the freedom of creativity, life in Sverdlovsk, hi...
Sibirskiy filologicheskiy zhurnal
Studia Slavica et Balcanica Petropolitana
Quaestio Rossica
The agenda of moral crime and punishment, of death and eternal life, entered Christianity-centred... more The agenda of moral crime and punishment, of death and eternal life, entered Christianity-centred Russian literature through Holy Scripture. Since early Rus, Russian literature has not merely touched upon these concepts; they became key themes centred on the salvation of the soul (Problema voluminis section). An attitude towards death as a new birth into the life eternal is symbolic for Russian Orthodox believers. Elena Konyavskaya (Institute of Russian History of the RAS, Moscow) explores the perception of the transition to another world in the vitae of Feodosii Pecherskii and Avramii Smolenskii in comparison with those of Greek saints. She shows that reflections on the end of earthly life and the posthumous destiny of the soul are inherent only in the Russian text of St Nestor, despite its narrative similarity with a number of Byzantine vitae. The researcher concludes that medieval Russian hagiographers reflected the mysticism of their era, along with the understanding of the human soul's mysterious transition from earthly life to another world and the expectation of the Second Coming by educated people of the times. Aleksander Uzhankov (Moscow State Institute of Culture; D. S. Likhachev Russian Scientific Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, Moscow) considers the moral aspect of crime and punishment in three works about Prince Igor Svyatoslavich's campaign against the Polovtsians in 1185. The campaign of Prince Igor, caused by pride and a desire for glory, ends with humiliating captivity. Medieval Russian writers interpreted this campaign and its result in different ways. In the Laurentian Chronicle, the blame for the subsequent devastation of the Russian land by the Polovtsians is laid on Prince Igor, who undertook a campaign of conquest and was defeated. The Kiev Chronicle, on the contrary, defends Igor Svyatoslavich, shows his courage, and tries to reveal God's Providence in him. Igor, having suffered defeat, conceptualizes his fate as an Orthodox prince ought, understanding it as a punishment for former sins. The prince repents and undergoes a spiritual transformation: the Lord saves him from captivity. The Tale of Igor's Campaign, which is close to the Kiev Chronicle, poetically describes the campaign and shows Igor's spiritual path; he passes from light into darkness and then returns through the prayers of his wife Yaroslavna. The following two articles look at the role of women in the history of the 18 th-century Russian Empire. Empress Elizabeth was the first ruler in Europe to introduce a moratorium on death penalty, which had an impact not only on life in the empire, but also on the formation of a wider European attitude towards the death penalty and its abolition in Italy in 1786 by Duke Leopold I
Quaestio Rossica
Nо 2, 2019) has a distinctive focus on the history of culture and art. This manifests the desire ... more Nо 2, 2019) has a distinctive focus on the history of culture and art. This manifests the desire of participating researchers and the editorial board to hear the echoes of history-the sound of the 'division bell' and the disturbing melodies of modernity, transformed by the creative consciousness into material monuments and emotional experiences. This issue unites two opposing poles of sociocultural space. The theme of monstrosity embodies either the anticipation or the disintegration of harmonious Divine Creation. One of the statements of Igor Smirnov, a prominent theoretician of history, might serve as a heraldic motto for this theme: "Art is fearless in the face of degeneration, depriving it of supreme power, making it manageable, and putting it under control" [Смирнов, с. 11]. Thus, this issue of QR presents examples of "curbing" the advance of chaos through aestheticising monstrosity or demonism and overcoming the fear of entropy. The opposite pole in this confrontation is the phenomenon of sociocultural communication, reconciling people both in their successes and in their misfortunes. The ineradicable desire to rejoice, to enrich one's own emotional and conceptual reality through the artifacts and institutions of other cultures is what incites the development of civilization. This theme has been repeatedly raised in the pages of QR in various ways: biographical [Zhuk; Христофоров], historical and scientific [Kуденис], sociocultural [Binney; Приказчикова; Вачева], and the history of everyday life [Кароли]. An article about Johannes Baar, a prominent German professor of philology, looks at the unique ability of human beings to reconsider their and others' experiences, to learn life lessons, and to organise their earthly existence in accordance with an acquired system of values. The Second World War was Professor Baar's true university. The courage of this academic researcher consisted not only in the fact that he retained his ability to empathize and open his heart to pain amidst a military catastrophe, as his wartime letters show; he also had the inner strength to move from instigated hatred to recognition of the cultural perfection of the Russian language and literature and to devote his further life to studying them. The materials on Professor Baar's academic life, especially his wartime letters, are published in the Scientia et vitae section by professors Boris Kovalenko, Valery Mokiyenko (St. Petersburg State University), and Christine Mielsсh (Hamburg Association of Teachers of Russian Language and Literature), a German specialist in Russian studies.