The world around us is a collection of things in constant motion and influencing one another. In other words, the world changes every instant. Each moment it differs from itself a moment ago, never staying the same. The difficulty discovered by the Greeks is that what is constantly changing cannot be cognized for if the world is always in motion, always new, knowledge becomes obsolete and useless the very instant after we acquired it, as the world will never be the same as we knew it. So we need to stop that movement, to see the unchanging in change, to understand the change as the renewal of the permanent. The Greeks learned doing it relying on the notion of substance, i. e., the immutable essence of a thing that constitutes its self and survives any of its changes. Such a way of conceptualizing the world was inherited by the big European culture. The big Arab-Muslim culture learned to conceptualize change as a renewal of an action, considering the action itself unchangeable as long as it flows from the actor to the recipient. Those two logics of sense positing gave birth to the metaphysics of substance and metaphysics of action. They the two ways of sense positing, manifest themselves in any activity of consciousness. They are not hard to find in the functioning of language either – both theoretical and ordinary. The classical Arabic texts provide possibility of reading them in perspectives of both substance and process logics, where the two contrasting meanings are suggested by the same verbal design.

The article considers contexts from Quintilian (Quint. 3.6.96–103; 7.8.3–6), Tacitus (Tac. dial. 35), and Juvenal (Iuv. 7.150–151) in order to show some features of the genre of Ancient school recitation and the typical images found in these exercises. At the same time, a criticism is made of the opinion widespread in the editions that some of these images (tyrants and tyrannicide) could be perceived as anti-monarchical and threatening to imperial power; two alleged cases of repressive actions of Roman emperors against specific rhetors are suggested to be regarded as excesses (and one of the cases can be considered unreliable at all); oppositional sentiments in Tacitus’ “Dialogue on Orators” are associated not with the genre of recitation at all, but with drama; Quintilian, loyal to Domitian, repeatedly uses examples of tasks with tyrants and tyrannicide as absolutely neutral. It is supposed to see in the exotic nature of the plots and characters the everyday need of school teachers to invent sufficiently complex conditions of rhetorical tasks to develop students’ abilities to find arguments. Thereto Quintilian actively applies the theory of statuses, an example of the use of which is given in the translation of previously unpublished fragments from the third book of “Institutes of Oratory”.

The article studies the speech situation that arose during the communication between the detective’s office of G.I. Koshelev and the Dvinsky zemstvo burmasters (1716), who were brought as witnesses to investigate the official abuses of the Archangelogorod vice-governor A.A. Kurbatov and Prince M.I. Volkonsky, the first investigator in the “Archangelogorod case”. The author proves that the effect of semiotic “unrecognition”, or communicative dissonance, arose between the communicants. That effect was due to the fact that representatives of the Zemstvo worlds used the traditional language of the Zemstvo acts of the pre-Petrine era, and the investigators tried to speak to them in the emerging language of rational political culture generated by the situation of Peter’s reforms. The considered case is aimed at understanding the communication issues that arose during routine everyday life, in which ordinary contemporaries of the reforms lived and interacted.

The article considers the specifics of the functioning of relativizing and auctorial elements in some texts of Alexander Pushkin on the example of the poem “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” and the tragedy “A Feast in Time of Plague”. It is shown that relativistic tendencies in those works coexist with auctorial tendencies, as if “without noticing” each other. It avoids both the dictate of auctoriality and the ethical indifference characteristic of consistently relativistic aesthetic models. We see parts of a single meta-relativistic composition that deliberately contradicts the seemingly incompatible. Thus, a sympathetic description of the Circassians and an enthusiastic description of their military exploits in “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” neighbors an equally enthusiastic glorification of the punitive actions of the Russian army in the Caucasus. Particular attention in this article is paid to transgressive forms of representation of everyday life in the tragedy “A Feast in Time of Plague”. At the forefront of such a context is not Walsingham’s explicit dispute with the priest but the hidden representation of the ideal in Mary’s song, in which the heroine, Jenny, opposes both the relativizing actant of the vulgar feast and the normatively abstract moralizing of the priest by the very possibility of her existence. Jenny calls to nothing and nowhere, but the very presence of her tragic image in the partially relativizing actant of the play introduces a very significant metarelativist counterbalance and meaning to what is depicted.

The article is about the history of the failed marriage of the Decembrist M.P. Bestuzhev-Ryumin to the niece of another Decembrist, V.L. Davydov – Ekaterina Borozdina (“mademoiselle Catherine”). The author assesses Bestuzhev-Rjumin’s role in the Southern Decembrists Society and his propaganda abilities. The author also analyses documents describing the course of that love story and the reasons why the marriage did not take place. The main emphasis is placed on the disastrous consequences that Bestuzhev-Ryumin’s refusal to marry had for the fate of the Decembrist conspiracy.

The article studies the functioning of mass rumors in the everyday life of rural and urban strata on the eve of the revolution of 1917. The author analyzes the intertextual nature of rumors, draws attention to the archetypal and religious layers of peasant rumors, the influence of fiction (fantasy, spy detective and religious-mystical drama) on the rumors of the educated strata, as well as the connection of rumors with historical facts. The study notes the variety of social functions of rumors in society and emphasizes the fact that rumors record the emotional state of society and thus act as an important source for the study of public sentiment. V.B. Aksenov concludes that under the conditions of a crisis of trust between the authorities and the society, rumors become a political factor, forming mutually distorted images of the main political actors and predetermining erroneous strategies, which lead to the realization of initially absurd rumors, in which the function of rumors to “self-fulfill prophecy” is manifested.

The article demonstrates the difference between two interpretations of conscience – traditional and post-revolutionary. In the first case, conscience is the inner distinction between good and evil (V. Dal’), which is present in every person. In the second case, conscience is “responsibility for one’s behavior to other people, society” (S. Ozhegov). The author of the article shows that in A. Fadeev’s novel “The Debacle” positive characters evolve in the direction from the first interpretation of conscience to the second interpretation.

The article deals with Afinogenov’s play “Weirdo” in the context of the emerging Stalinism, which at the moment of its formation demanded not revolutionary enthusiasm, which was much spoken and written about, but direct submission to the orders of the party apparatus – that is how the conflict appears in the play, and in the Soviet society. Afinogenov himself experienced the difficult moods of a transitional time, when the liberal era of the NEP was gone and the era of civil war was returning. The playwright portrayed the enthusiastic Boris Volgin, whom he saw as his friend Boris Igritsky, and simultaneously wrote to him about the state of complete political uncertainty, in which perspective and faith in the future are lost. As a playwright of the “general line” Afinogenov suppressed his critical mood in an attempt to correspond to the new times, which, in turn, demanded not a romantic hero, but a class struggle with any “exit” beyond the full and unconditional subordination to the decisions of the Party.