INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURAL RESEARCH

Tatiana ARTEMYEVA

Mikhail MIKESHIN

St. Petersburg, Russia
Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia
Department of Theory and History of Culture. Professor, Dr.

St. Petersburg, Russia
Gorny University.
Head of Philosophy Department.
Director of St. Petersburg Center for the History of Ideas. Prof. Dr.

Russian Intellectual Culture

The traditional interdisciplinary division of thought, which corresponds to university educational programs, has lost its heuristics. Thus, one needs new optics to see unexpected combinations of approaches and ideas. The lines between philosophy, literature, history, art, elegant polemics in noble salons, drunken confessions in a dirty pub, the revelations of a diary, and provoking posts on social networks are drawn artificially by researchers, but do not exist in real, creative activities. These lines make it more difficult to understand how ideas move within the sphere of political prohibitions, censorial restrictions, uncontrolled freedom, social challenges, and marginal gaps in the entangled structure of hierarchies. "Enlarging the format" presumably creates new readings and interdisciplinary combinations that, in turn, produce new understanding of cultural texts and free us from their standard, conventional interpretations. Every epoch has its own combination of ideas, forms of expression, means of conveyance, and assimilation. Materials come from both within the traditional disciplinary frames and from their possible correlations.

Key words: intellectual culture, Russia, elites, cinema, Enlightenment, philosophy.

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Marina SAVEL‘EVA

Ukraine, Kiev.
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Centre of Humanitarian Education.
Department of Philosophy of Sciences and Cultural Anthropology, Professor.

The Paradox of Encyclopaedic Thought as the Manifestation of Enlightment and Freedom of Cognition

1. The paradox of cognition is a situation that reflects the ambivalent behavior of contradiction. On the one hand, it does not exist as an internal, objective situation. On the other hand, it is present as an external, subjective and very pronounced situation. The reason for its manifestation is a spontaneous mutual substitution of semantic connections, while inner logic is generally preserved, i. e., the transition from a rational to a mythological relation to the object of cognition. The paradox appears when the content of thinking is expressed in a form that is made specific to the limit, and then raised to the level of an abstract individuality by the ability of judgment. That is a judgment that outwardly appears to be rational, transparent, complete and publicly accessible, but in reality it is a non-rational (as well as non-philosophical), mythological form of cognition.
2. The paradox is manifested in individual consciousness, when it disturbs a measure of individuality and breaks into universality trying, at the same time, to maintain a subjective nature. However, during the European Enlightenment period, the paradox of thinking became a phenomenon of mass consciousness, crowding out the philosophical aspect from the form of consciousness. At that time, the search for universal methods of scientific cognition and the creation of broad classifications of things led to the breach of an epistemological measure, reflected in the creation of the French Encyclopaedia or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts.
3. The paradox of encyclopaedic thinking became an enlightenment criterion of the freedom of thought and behaviour. For an enlightened man of the 18th century, freedom was the reality of individual autonomy of thought and behaviour outside of the absolute foundation. It was a bourgeois, rationalized view of freedom, which excluded irrational aspects (such as a stroke of luck). In the context of this general understanding, an encyclopaedism was a notion of the final embodiment of intellectual freedom, when universality was comprehended through empirical (mechanical) enumeration.

To maintain empirical individuality, a man who is denied hispersonal freedom, becomes satisfied with the infinite judgments about freedom or the freedom of judgment. Instead of considering freedom as the universality of thinking forms and the basis of any activity, he considers it as the content of individual thinking — as “the idea of freedom”. In fact, it was only a “possibility of freedom”, understood as itself and, at the same time, understood as an image of true freedom, i. e. as real freedom. Such freedom vanished with the disappearance of the ability of judgment and became a freedom comprised of the combination of good sense - not with reason, but only with the imagination. This was not a deep-semantic freedom, but only a spatial (meaningful, informative and outwardly demonstrative through erudition) freedom. It was a freedom, limited to a framework far from that of moral law, and directed to the immensity of the investigated problems. It was a “freedom of rapid response” to external “stimuli”. Thus, the “freedom of speech” of politics was a necessary substitute for genuine, absolute freedom, a way of periodically “letting off steam” in the face of permanent social contradictions and conflicts, a distraction from their true base. “Freedom of speech” in art served as a cover for true understanding of a master’s latent purposes.

Key words: paradox, contradiction, enlightenment, encyclopedic, freedom, Diderot, Kant.

References

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Grigorii TULCHINSKII

St. Petersburg, Russia.
National Research University High School Economics.
Professor Dept. Applied Political Theory, PhD, professor

Russian Philosophical Culture of the late 20th — early 21st Centuries

The paper considers the peculiarities of Russian philosophical culture of the late 20th — early 21st centuries: common themes and methods of philosophizing, the main direction of their evolution, and ways of organizing philosophical life.

Key words: culturology, neorationalism, philosophical culture, post-Marxism, Russia, semiology, ways of philosophizing.

References

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Ludmila KONEVA

Samara, Russia
PhD in Philosophy, Ass. Prof. retired.

Serguei Bulgakov: The Human Capability of Being

The article deals with the key problem of the philosophy of S. Bulgakov and that of the Russian tradition of religious philosophy, in general. This is the problem of the place of the human in the world, and its role in the destiny of being. Noting the singularity of Bulgakov's anthropology, the author focuses on the ability of being. In the article, the author distinguishes between the ability to be (human ontology) and the ability to be (human phenomenology). All these abilities are considered in the context of the understanding of Unity as a communication between God and the world, such as the unity that includes the dual nature of the divine and creaturely / yet corporeal Sophia. The meaning of these abilities is revealed in the question “could God exist without the world?”, and in the concepts of the predetermination of being, an image as an idea, and of a simulation as a reality, of creativity, of notions “Me”, “Name”, “Personality”, “Genius”, “Talent”, etc. This analysis serves to reveals human nature as an “ontological paradox”.

Key words: S. N. Bulgakov, philosophy of unity, anthropology, religious philosophy.

References

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Tatiana ARTEMYEVA

St. Petersburg, Russia.
Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia.
Department of Theory and History of Culture. Professor, Dr.

Andrei Bolotov on the Aims of Cognition

The contribution is a publication of the manuscript "On the Aims and Logic of Cognition" by Andrei Bolotov (1738-1833) from his volume "Amusements of a Country Gentleman", which resides in the Manuscript Department of the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. Bolotov’s paper is devoted to the epistemological theory he later developed in his philosophical books "Children's Philosophy or Moralizing Talks between a Certain Lady and Her Children. . . ", "A Guide to True Human Happiness. . . " and "On Souls of Dead People. . . ". Like other Russian thinkers of the Enlightenment, Bolotov believed that knowledge of the truth brings people closer to happiness, which is why any epistemological effort should also have its moral character. The cognition of self, the world, and God not only reveals the secrets of the universe to a curious mind; it also guides such a mind to its life aspirations.
The publication opens with an introduction and is followed by notes.

Key words: Andrei Bolotov, the 18th century, 19th century Russian Enlightenment, epistemology, philosophy, truth, happiness, manuscript.

References

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Mikhail MIKESHIN

St. Petersburg, Russia.
Gorny University. Head of Philosophy Department.
Director of St. Petersburg Center for the History of Ideas. Prof. Dr

“They Imagined They Became Quite Free”

The paper is a publication and commentaries of a special text, written by an intellectual aristocratic elite, the Russian Ambassador to Britain, Count Simon Vorontsov’s farewell letter to his son Mikhail. The letter was written in 1801 and contains a sharp, straightforward estimation of the Russian rule and society of that time. Ignorance and autocracy result in corruption of the nation. From this estimation, it follows how a young active man, who strives to build his career in the civil service / government and preserve his honor and decency, should behave and organize his life. The letter reflects how the aristocracy perceived its responsibility and place in the country’s history.

Key words: Vorontsov, Woronzow, letter, intellectual aristocratic culture, Russia, the beginning of the 19th century.

References

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Maria LESKINEN

Moscow, Russia.
Institute for Slavic studies Russian Academy of Sciences. Department “History of Slavic nations’ culture”.
Dr. Hab, leading research fellow.

“Physiognomia” and “types” of Russia: Images of Great Russians in Anthropological and Ethnological Russian Empire Descriptions from the Second Half of the 19th Century

The descriptions were considered to be the major research procedure, which was to determine the distinctive features - including bothexternal appearance and “the Spirit” (psychology, character) – of Russian people. The principle of illustrativity has dictated the forms and methods of ethnos’s representations in the scientific literature since the 18th century. Discussions about ways to objectively-scientifically revealethnically-typical Great Russians, which took place in 1860s (because of the diversity of the Great Russian ethnic type at that time), have defined both the similarities and distinctions of this image. The contradictions have not been eliminated, in spite of the use of photographic images in ethnological descriptions; both scientific-anthropological and "intuitive" methodology functioned simultaneously till the end of century. The definitions of type/ typical in Russian humanities language has played a dominating role in the formation of ethnic physiognomical conception (with it’s opposition external / internal) and in the manner of visual representations of Russians (Great Russians). It has also defined the tendency and canons of the visual and verbal images of Great Russians in Russian scientific and popular ethnographic texts from the second half of the 19th century.

Key words: history of Russian ethnology, national identity of Russians, the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century, Great Russians, the visualization of ethnicity

References

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Alexander LYUSY

Moscow, Russia.
Russian Institute for Cultural Research
Seniour Rearcher, PhD in Cultural Science.

Pond of Liza's Crib: To Prosveshchenchesky Sources of the Moscow Text

Is there a Moscow text/supertext? In case of all unwillingness in Moscow of one house (and words) to look back on another (another), to become with it online, to make the general company ensemble, to lodge among themselves the regular, solid space of the city (text)? The relevance of this problem is caused by tasks of adequate judgment of a spatio-temporal continuum of the Russian culture. The review of an extensive field of the mythology, connected both with capital Moscow and Petersburg metaspace, and with separate points of a city locus or events of city life, the Moscow mythologized model and its textual quality, allows us to answer the main question of article positively.

Key words: panoramic look, dual opposition, myth, utopia, space, structure of the birth of the text, ensemble.

References

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Vadim RABINOVICH

Moscow, Russia.
Russian Institute for Cultural Research.
Prof., Dr. of Science

Five Minutes to Eternity

This is the last text written by Prof. Vadim Rabinovich (1935- 2013). This article concludes the epoch of poetical intellectualization, which characterizes the Russian philosophical tradition. In this article, the author focuses on the philosophy of language and non-narrative “inner” speech, raises the question of the possibility of "replicating" and portraying inner speech, analyzes two major cultural and avant-garde projects - Khlebnikov-Kruchenyh, and an internet project about modernity, entitled "To Everyone”.

Key words: poetic language, philosophy of language, no-narrativity, inner speech.

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Dennis SOBOLEV

Israel, Haifa.
University of Haifa.
Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature. Professor.

Literary Text and the Problem of Historical Memory

The paper aims to clarify the cognitive content of a literary text in its relation to the historical process. In more specific terms, it aims to compare the literary text — as a vehicle of extremely rich information about the ‘reality’ of a particular period and the processes of the cultural formation of the empirical subjects of history — with the traditional historical narrative, which is focused on the problem of historical events and structures of knowledge. On the basis of my works published in recent years — the book The Concepts Used to Analyze 'Culture', as well as a series of essays — the paper analyzes the general configuration of cultural contents, which are retained by the literary text in its relation to the historical process, on the one hand, and familiar historical narratives and representations, on the other. After a general theoretical introduction, the essay proceeds to the discussion of traditional historical narratives, whose form and modality can be traced back to Greek historiography. It also briefly discusses some of the later types of historical narratives, like those focusing on the dynamics of historical ‘formations’ or technical developments. In all these types of historical research, a literary text can be little more than just one among many subsidiary assets. In contrast to these narratives, in different types of 20th century historical research literary texts emerge as a major focus of interest. These trends range from the French ‘Annales’ School’ in the first half of the 20th century to the American New-Historicism of the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time, the theoretical reasons owing to which a literary text that describes imaginary worlds and persons may become a more important source of historical information than a document narrating ‘historical events’, have not yet been analyzed in detail, and deserve in-depth, independent theoretical scrutiny.
After a brief enumeration of the ‘traces’ of literary history as such, which — as is well known — are retained by literary texts, the paper concludes that the awareness of their existence contributes relatively little to the general understanding of the problem. In contrast, drawing upon the works mentioned above, the paper enumerates the broad range of diverse cultural contents, processes and structures retained by the literary text. These components, most of which are crucial to the functioning of culture as a whole, range from the conceptual and epistemological fields, basic behavioral scripts and norms — through the processes of the archetypization of symbols and the metaphorical ‘mappings’ of cognitive fields — to the general interrelations of meaning and power and, to use Fredric Jameson’s felicitous term, the ‘political unconscious. ’ In the discussion to follow, two corollaries from this understanding are stressed. First, these are cultural processes and contents that form the very ‘reality’ wherein a particular ‘historical event’ takes place, as well as the empirical subjects of these events. Second, most of these cultural structures, processes and contents are situated below the threshold of the consciousness of the empirical subject. Correspondingly, in normal circumstances they do not become an object of reflection — not only in documents that are written by the participants and witnesses of the events, but also in much later historical works, as they are based on these documents. This, in turn, means that from the point of view of the problem of historical understanding, the literary text is far from being just an auxiliary carrier of historical memory which is, however, capable of enlivening and beautifying the ‘dry language of historical fact,’ as historians used to say. It is rather the vehicle of a much more authentic and scientifically significant form of historical memory — not only in comparison to textbooks in history, but also to traditional historical research. Therefore, like the psychoanalyst, who seeks to transform the unconscious, confused or forgotten contents of the patient’s mind into clear and conscious understandings, so the cultural analyst must also strive to transform the unconscious knowledge and vague memory of a literary text into the clear and conscious memory of cultural and historical analysis.

Key words: literature, history, problem of historical narratives, the ‘Annales’ School,’ American New-Historicism, historical information, historical memory, historical self-reflection, the cultural unconscious, cultural construction of reality, analysis of culture.

References

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Elena BOGATYREVA

Moscow, Russia.
Russian Institute for Cultural Research.
Leading Researcher, Doctor in Philosophy.

Cinema Imagery “à la russe”: Glimpses of History of Perception on Both Sides of the Boundaries

The article discusses occurrences and trends of imagery “à la russe” in movies from the1920s and contemporary cinema. The image is analyzed according to the coordinate system, developed in the modern era. In this article, the question of the subject of this representation is significant. Here, two options are possible. This image either reflects impressions of “others” or is a result of self-description. The image of the “other culture” is discussed through Bakhtin's concepts of “other-for-me” and “me- for-other”. The image “à la russe” is not static. This image appears at the crossroads of divergent intentions (“other-for-me” and “me-for-other”).

Key words: à la russe, identity, film art of the 1920s, contemporary European cinema, the image of “the other”.

References

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Irina MARTYANOVA

St.Petersburg, Russia
Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia
Philology Department. Full professor

Two “Johns”: Overcoming “Observed Mania"

This paper will offer a look at the presentation and functions of the non-observed in S. Еisenstein’s screenplay, “Ivan the Terrible” and A. Ivanov’s book, “The Chronology of John” (the after-text of P. Lungin’s film, “Tsar”).

Key words: observed, non-observed, text, screenplay, function.

References

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Vyacheslav SHESTAKOV

Moscow, Russia.
Russian Institute for Cultural Research.
PhD, Professor.

Sergei Prokofiev’s Ballets for the Russian Seasons of Sergei Diaghilev

The musical career of Sergei Prokofiev was closely connected with the Russian seasons of Sergei Diaghilev, who brought to Europe not only ballet performances, but also the best representatives of Russian avant-garde Art. For two decades, Russian art — opera, ballet, theater design — prevailed in the artistic life of Europe and America. The success of a young composer named Sergei Prokofiev, who began to work with Diaghilev, was evidence of the intellectual power and energy of Russian art. Diagilev’s seasons became a Russian intellectual center, even though it was outside of Russia.

Key words: ballet, entrepreneur, avant-garde, grotesque, opera, synthesism / synthesis, intellectualism.

References

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Olga KIRILLOVA

Ukraine, Kiev.
National Pedagogical University named after M. P. Dragomanov.
The Department of cultural science. PhD in philosophy, senior lecturer.

Mikhail Uvarov: The Third Nature. Dead Contra the Dead

The review of Prof. Mikhail Uvarov’s (1955-2013) last book, "The Third Nature: A reflection of culture and civilization" (SPB, 2012), presents a look at the main questions of this book. The article reviews the notion of culture as a "third nature" in correlation with the "fourth nature” (virtual reality), the necessity of its humanization and anthropologization, the status of metaphysical things in post-modern culture, and the problems of life, death and immortality.

Key words: third nature, socio- cultural reality, virtual reality, people, applied metaphysics, immortology culture, vitalogical interpretation.

References

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Anna KONEVA

St.Petersburg, Russia.
St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Institute of Cultural Research. Head of department. PhD in philosophy, senior lecturer.

Imaginary Space in the 21st Century

A review of Tatiana Bystrova’s book, "From Modernism to Neorationalism: The creative conceptions of architects in the 20th — 21st centuries" The article deals with the ideas of Prof. Tatiana Bystrova. The author of the book believes that the main trend in contemporary architectural thinking can be called neorationalism, perceived as a continuation of the rationalism of European culture. Agreeing with the author of the book, the author of the article shows that modern architectural thinking viewed through the prism of creative biographies of architects demonstrates the transformation of the imaginary, not only the development of the rationalist's paradigm.

Key words: design, architecture, creative concepts, rationality, imagination.

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