The article attempts to define the concept of a transcultural symbol as a phenomenon of transculture. Despite the fact that transculture often becomes the subject of interdisciplinary research involving cultural studies, linguistics, sociology, literary studies and other sciences, the transcultural symbol has not yet been studied much. Meanwhile, transculture is understood by M.N. Epstein precisely as a symbolic environment, which makes it necessary to study its objects. A transcultural symbol becomes a global phenomenon when it is perceived by a different, “alien” culture, but its formation takes place within the framework of a national culture. Being rooted in the era of syncretism (A.N. Veselovsky), the symbol retains its connection with tradition, which allows it to have countless variations and meanings. Enriched by them within the framework of national culture, the symbol becomes desirable for the culture of the host, as it appeals to the national consciousness, cultural memory – to the deep, mythotectonic, levels of culture. The perception specifics of a transcultural symbol make it possible to study the entrenched cultural views of a particular cultural formation, to identify significant cultural dominants. Such an analysis is facilitated by the fact that the symbol itself has a certain form, and sometimes coloristics, which in themselves also have semantic and symbolic meanings. Thus, the transcultural symbol of the blue flower has a significant colorative in its composition, and is also associated with the formula of parallelism “flower-girl”. Based on the material of the works of Russian literature, we will try to illustrate the perception specifics of the transcultural symbol of the blue flower by Russian literature.

The paper considers a type of lyrical subject that can be described as a universal “we”. It is a subject that is expressed by the first-person plural pronoun. At the same time, the “we” remains throughout the poem and denotes an unmanageable multitude united in some commonality. The article analyses texts in which such a commonality belongs to a generation: the poems “We” by P. Antokolsky (1927), “We are young. We have stockings with darns” (1980) and A. Gorodnitsky’s “We have been” (2019). The type of subject in those poems is called the personal universal “we”: the subject expressed by the plural pronoun is nevertheless the bearer of a single consciousness and the center of the artistic world, i.e. both the subject of speech and the subject of action, and the bearer of a point of view.

The article considers an episode from the history of Russian free verse associated with the use of that type of national versification by Apollon Grigoriev in his early translation of Sophocles’ tragedy “Antigone” (1846). Vers libre appeared in the work of the young poet to create an equivalent to the socalled “lyrical meters”, that were used in the original to write the choir parts and two key monologues of the classical drama. The real rhythmic nature of those parties, consisting mainly of lines of different syllabic-tonic meters, is determined; however, a small number of verses in above fragments of the text do not lend themselves to traditional metrical interpretation and should be attributed to the transitional form of early Russian free verse – free verse on a syllabo-metrical basis. The place of the bold metrical experiment of the novice author among other ways of translating ancient choirs is shown in comparison with the predecessors (I. Martynov and A. Merzlyakov) and followers (S. Shestakov, V. Vodovozov, F. Zelinsky). It is also shown that later the vers libre used by Grigoriev to convey the specific musical meters of Sophocles were replaced by a more adequate verse form – syllabo- metrical logaedas proposed in 1914 by Zelinsky.

Walter Benjamin’s two strongest aesthetic impressions during his trip to Moscow, the theatrical avant-garde and folk toys, are connected not only by the immediacy of the testimony. His “Moscow Diary” is a complex construction, simultaneously a declaration of love for Moscow and a chronicle of an unfamiliar approach to known phenomena. A man of the constructivist era, Benjamin views the scenography of Meyerhold and Tairov avant-garde theater on a micro level, seeing small wooden structures. Those constructions produce a switch from a mode of protocol observation to a mode of disinterested play, of wondering what is happening. In Benjamin’s text, then, images of fairytale space emerge. Benjamin not only collects toys, but also perceives the constructions of avant-garde theater as a collection, as a way to erase the distinction between model and reality, something that cannot be achieved in the capitalist world. But the search for a job was also perceived by Benjamin as a construction of his destiny, stopping the action of the fairy tale.

Natalia Reznikova, a writer of Russian emigration in China, combined in her stories the tradition of love short stories with a moral view of the earlier forms of passion expression. In her prose, judgment is imparted to a woman who cares less about spiritualizing passion than about narrative coherence, which forbids the overt display of affection. The events must progress as in a fine novel, not a short story. Criticizing the symbolist premature equations between the corporeal and spiritual worlds, Reznikova is close to philosophical idealism in the spirit of Vladimir Soloviev, where a love story should be a life drama, not an episode. But she readily uses the cliches of cinema and mass literature, while morally rejecting their content. Such cliches contribute not to the movement of the plot, but to the cyclization of stories depicting the different ages of a woman, when the similarity of plot patterns frames a lifelong love. In Reznikova’s poetics, the feminine optic regulates the implicit art of love, and the corporeality of woman is manifested in her capacity for life-long readiness to act and self-control.

The article deals with the consideration of the category of action – a fundamental one in the study of a literary character. Methodologically productive in this regard are the achievements of related humanities (psychology, sociology, philosophy) in understanding the individual and his relationship with the world. As a material for analysis, prose about the era of the Great Terror was chosen, which is especially representative from the viewpoint of the aesthetics of the author’s individual imprinting of the character in extreme conditions. Example of “Tulaev’s Case” by V. Serge and “Imaginary Quantities” by N. Narokov is used to consider the behavior types of several groups of characters: those with power, claiming to be free thinking and prisoners. An attempt is made to trace the correlation of the external and internal freedom of the characters in the conditions of totalitarianism, moving from figures with the greatest potential of possibilities to disenfranchised characters. In addition, attention is paid to the phenomenon of external and internal conformism as a product of the epoch, on the one hand, and the consequence of purely personal manifestations, on the other.

The article considers three poems by Roald Mandelstam that form from a lyrical trilogy: “Albs”: “Alba” <1>, “Alba” <2> and “Utro (Morning)”. All three begin the same way: “The whole block is ventilated and cooled down...”; and in each of the three there is an alien word – references to previous literary texts. Among other things, these are references to Afanasy Fet’s poem “Whisper, timid breathing...”. In the article, these references, located in the same positions in all three poems of Roald Mandelstam’s microcycle (the fourth lines of the third quatrains), are considered as one of the ways for forming a lyrical context and, accordingly, forming meanings in a lyrical context. It is shown how the pairing of two works through lexical overlap contributes to their mutual enrichment in terms of meaning.

21 inscriptions from the border regions of southwestern Asia Minor – Pisidia, Pamphylia, Phrygia, Lycia and Cilicia – show us the texts of the dice oracles. The inscriptions are dated to the 2nd – beginning the 3rd century AD. There is no evidence of this type of divination in ancient literature. The author aims to determine the place of astragalus oracles in the system of mantic art, and for that she analyzes the prologues preserved in 8 inscriptions. The analysis leads to the following conclusions. According to the beliefs of the inhabitants of that region, a tall rectangular column with the text of dice oracle carved on it and with the statue of Hermes crowning it was considered to be an open-air divination sanctuary. An oracle (μαντεῖον), believed to be the prophetic spirit of the place, which controlled the fall of the rolled astragalus, invisibly lived near that column. Therefore, the mechanism of getting responses in those sanctuaries was considered essentially the same as in the famous sanctuaries, for example, in Delphi. Hermes was the patron of the dice oracles. But here he functioned not as an autonomous deity, but as the executor of Apollo’s will, who gave him control over the divination by lot. The dice oracles of Asia Minor followed the tradition of establishing small open-air sanctuaries, known in mainland Greece.

Umberto Eco’s book Dire quasi la stessa cosa. Esperienze di traduzione (2003) is treated as a work with characteristics of the novel genre: the study of the nature of desire, the study of the limits of theatricalization, the specificity of gesture, and finally, the speech coloring of the hero, in the book creates the impression of a novel narrative. At the same time, Eco partly mystifies the reader: thus, while studying the translators’ difficulties in conveying the visibility of theatrical action, he himself uses reduced visibility as an argument in choosing a translation strategy. Such a system of mystifications allows Eco to combine his own experience as a translator, in which the skills of epideictic eloquence had to be subordinated to the historicism shared by his readers, and his experience of working with translators of his novels into different languages, where the strategies of domestication and forenization were determined not by the situation of the literary process but by each language’s own history. Thereby, Eco built an epideictic view of language, where archaization, modernization, or sustainable development acted as novel protagonists. Such introduction of novel strategies into the scholarly memoir allowed Eco to discern novel moments in the history of world poetry and to construct a semiotically consistent picture of the development of Western literatures.

Cultural linguistics is an axiologically oriented discipline. The study of the axiological foundations of translation is becoming increasingly important.

The study of issues related to the value aspects of literary translation is of great importance from a point of view of translation, since it draws attention not only to the personality of the translator, but also to the author of the text and its recipient. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the development of its own classification of the parameters of translation axiology, as well as their consideration from the socio-psychological, philosophical, philological and linguistic points of view. It allows concluding that axiological translation studies is an independent section focused on identifying and studying in detail the parameters that characterize the quality of translation of a literary text.

The paper considers “The Times” coverage of the Crimean War in April 1854. That period is chosen because the British Empire entered the Crimean War at the end of March 1854, which could not help but affect the British newspaper’s coverage of the war. The articles printed in “The Times” between March 29 and April 30, 1854 that directly or indirectly mention the Crimean War are analyzed. It is about the battles, the movements of armies and fleets, and the diplomatic intrigue that was unfolding at that moment between the most influential and interested countries of Europe and Asia in the region of hostilities. The article will analyze the presentation of material on the pages of “The Times”, the speed and accuracy of information, and the attitude towards the parties to the conflict.

The article considers specifics in the formation of the image of the enemy – Nazi Germany and the Wehrmacht – by Tula newspapers in the first months of the Great Patriotic War.

Based on materials published in the newspapers “Kommunar” (Tula), “Stalin’s Banner” (Uzlovaya), “Stalinogorskaya Pravda” (Stalinogorsk), features in the description of the enemy are traced that influenced the creation and transformation of the image enemy in the minds of Soviet citizens.

From the first days of the war, journalists in their publications used vivid negative images to characterize Germany and Wehrmacht soldiers, borrowed from the practice of criminal law. The attribution of zoomorphic traits to Nazi leaders and German soldiers was also widely used.

It was especially emphasized that enemy soldiers and officers are war criminals who have stained their hands with the blood of innocent citizens, who have violated the norms of international law, the laws and customs of war, and all their military victories were achieved through overwhelming numerical superiority.

Thus, among Soviet citizens there created the image of a cruel enemy devoid of moral principles, of human appearance, who strives to enslave the Soviet people and is capable of winning only with the help of primitive, very resource-intensive tactics.

The popularity of visual media is steadily growing. Over the past 10 years, the YouTube video holding, and, in particular, its Russian-speaking segment, has grown from an amateur video repository into one of the largest information resources on the planet, and video blogging has turned from a strange hobby into a prestigious and profitable profession. More and more people prefer to watch the news rather than read it. The same applies to journalism. The genre of a video article in which the author complements the material with audiovisual content is easier to perceive, since it uses several channels of perception and does not require active actions from the audience, such as paging scrolling through pages or scrolling the screen. The article will consider the main directions of literary journalism in the vastness of Russian-language YouTube.

The game industry gets more and more people interested every year. Gaming journalism, which aims at describing and discussing video games, deals with the coverage of events that take place in the computer games industry and is a demanded field of journalism. Also, gaming journalism has a unique audience, which is characterized by an interest in new technologies and increased interactivity. Such a field of journalism is characterized by genre diversity, but the present paper focuses on a unique genre – walkthrough. In the following, the specific features of the genre will be considered, the publications will be analyzed, as well as the relevance of this genre in modern Russian game journalism will be shown.

The review considers the book by I.E. Gitovich “The result as new issues. Articles and reviews from many years about A.P. Chekhov, his time, surroundings and Chekhov studies.” It shows how deeply and in a variety of ways the author of the book studies Chekhov’s legacy, demonstrating the aesthetic and ethical perspective of the issues raised in the book.