The homemade anthology book is a little-studied didactic genre today, although it represents an important source of empirical material for studying cross-sections of the era, the availability of information and its selectivity in the context of local and general social history. One of the relevant resources for searching for materials may be a Soviet textbook – it represents social and normative positions on issues of history and culture. During the expedition of the Higher School of Economics “Local history in Schools of Trans-Baikal region” in June 2023, 9 selfmade books were found in the school museum of the village of Kalinino in the Nerchinsky district of the Trans-Baikal Territory. The books were created in the second half of the twentieth century by Matvey Petrovich Koptelov, a history teacher at the Kalinin School. He probably created them to collect and structure information about history, literature, art, and prominent personalities. Topic, personalities, and historical events selection analysis in comparison with textbooks сonten from different years provides foundation to judge the views and reading horizons of the rural intelligentsia representative in the second half of the 20th century.

Pavel Zaltsman (1912–1985) – painter and fi artist, writer and poet. The article presents the artistic features of Pavel Zaltsman’s works. For a long time, Zaltsman was known as an artist, a student of the founder of analytical art, Pavel Filonov. The paintings of Pavel Zaltsman found their audience during his lifetime, but were inaccessible to the general public. Zaltsman’s literary works (poems and the novel “Puppies”) became known and published only in 2011–2012. Researchers began to discover him recently, and many aspects of his work remain poorly understood. The acquaintance of researchers with the literary work of Pavel Zaltsman set the researchers the task of determining the features of his innovative writing. One of the aspects that attracts researchers in Zaltsman’s work is the problem of alternative expression in the conditions of Soviet culture. The literary works of Pavel Zaltsman reveal principles that make it possible to describe culture in the USSR in the 1930s–1950s in a new way.

The article discusses modern microurban approaches to changing the urban environment. The concept of DiY-urbanism, which is based on the idea of independent creativity of residents to improve the urban environment, is considered based on the study of cases – materials from the two-day workshop “DiY-weekend in Kaliningrad. Designing urban spaces” (2016) and the sociocultural phenomenon of housing and communal services art. This approach is contrasted with guerrilla urbanism – a utopia that involves informal and unauthorized changes in urban space. An example of the implementation of this approach can be considered one of the tallest private wooden buildings in Russia – the Sutyagin House as an allegory of the utopian approach to architecture. Consciously or unconsciously, all these approaches appeal to symbolic reality and encourage the construction of a prototype of an ideal future that can be realized in reality. And this impulse can be embodied both in the discourse of utopia and in the discourse of dystopia. The article makes an attempt to compare and analyze the noted microurban approaches, to identify their features, in order to conceptualize the sociocultural phenomena under consideration and actualize their influence on the formation of the urban environment.

Among players, games that appeal to mythology, especially the mythological system of the Scandinavian peoples, are extremely popular. This makes it relevant to study the aspect of how mythology is integrated into the gameplay and game narrative. In this work, we analyze the existence of Scandinavian mythology in computer video games as an element of their narrative. The material for analysis was a wide range of visual and textual details, game mechanics, gameplay details, and the game interface. Various ways of incorporating elements of Scandinavian mythology into video games were considered, as well as their impact on the gameplay and player perception. Studying the dynamics of the use of mythological systems by game developers allows us to trace how the approach to the use of mythology in video games is changing and how new interpretations and adaptations of mythological plots are created. The results of the study can be useful for understanding how mythology affects the creation and perception of video games, as well as for developing new gaming projects using mythological elements.

Since the end of the 20th century, foreign and domestic researchers have paid serious attention to the study of family memory and methods of its construction. One of the constructs that accumulates family memories is considered to be a family photo album, which concentrates symbolic, figurative and verbal representations of the family past, which are reproduced, stored and broadcast by members of the same family to ensure its integrity and unity, the formation of individual and family identity, and also the transfer of significant value guidelines. Family artifacts such as albums and home photographs are intended to convey an ideal image of the family and maintain family ties. However, scientists focus particular attention not so much on the past event itself, as on the problems of preserving and transmitting the memory of it. In particular, researchers study the peculiarities of the construction of reality by members of a certain society from the position of narrative analysis. The purpose of the paper under consideration is to present a family photo album as an integral, visual narrative about the family’s past, identifying the key aspects of this method of forming family memory. Therefore, the article compares home photography and family photo album as different forms of visual narrative in terms of strategies of narrative text organization, its structure and the specifics of its creation.

This paper explores the dynamics of historical memory through the example of the Israeli short film “The Story of Aharon Barak: A Holocaust Story” (2021), which is dedicated to one of the episodes of the Holocaust: the escape from the Kaunas ghetto and the rescue of a Jewish boy who later became the President of the Supreme Court of Israel. The process of representing the memory of this episode goes through several stages: the personal memory of Aharon Barak, recorded in his speeches and interviews, the mediation in the mass media, when it becomes part of the collective communicative memory, and, finally, the remediation in the film. In the process of remediation, the audience expands: firstly, at the expense of children, to whom the film is primarily aimed, and secondly (after its translation into English) – at the expense of the English-speaking audience. The film uses several media (feature film, documentary newsreel, personal and historical photographs, animation, video reports, video message), which contribute to a diverse, including visual and emotional, perception of the story being told. Also of great importance in the process of remediation are the ethical aspects emphasised by Aaron Barak himself. Overall, the film considered to be a part of the process of creating a cultural (in J. Assman’s terms) memory of the Holocaust.

The article analyzes the structure of the spatial solution of Georgy Danelia’s film “Tears were dripping”; the three most clearly defined worlds are emerged: this is fairy-tale, real and imaginary areas. Danelia builds the dramaturgy on the subtle interweaving of these realities, on the blurring and permeability of their boundaries. The fairy-tale world passes through the film narrative as counterpoint, creating the effect of high tragedy and “lingering” rock gravitating over the hero. The category of “low” and ordinary is embodied in the everyday reality in which the main character exists. The space of the “real”, as well as the fluctuations in the level of the “sublime”, do not provide for relaxation with laughter – on the contrary, the tension grows, the hero and his world move extensively from misfortune to even greater misfortune. Gradually, in the course of the development of visual dramaturgy, the shell of the “imaginary” world first cracks, and more and more intensively breaks up into fragments, exposing the unfriendly and gray “real” world of the era of stagnation. The director presents this world of the Late Soviet era with general plans or, on the contrary, with extremely large urban spaces that prevent identification. This paradoxical crowding, tightness of objects in the frame is given in the context of emptiness and / or darkness (evening and night shots), which forms the effect of a tense oppressive atmosphere, a brewing catastrophe.

This article focuses on the visualization of ruins in the digital environment, drawing on materials from Russian and international publications dedicated to abandoned places. The main emphasis is on the visual practice of “urban explorers” who share their photographs under the hashtag #urbex (urban exploration). The article analyzes the visual strategies employed in representing ruins, as well as the phenomenon of their popularity in social media. In contrast to “sites of memory” as conceptualized by Pierre Nora, which refer to objects that connect the past and present through commemoration, deteriorating places can be described as “sites of oblivion” – a form of expulsion from collective memory and societal life. While sites of memory may encompass ruins that hold significance for national identity, sites of oblivion refer to ruins on the periphery of historical memory, which society has lost interest in. Followers of the UrbEx movement are particularly drawn to these forgotten places, which they essentially rediscover for the world. Today, ruins have become an integral part of visual culture, both in mass media and artistic expression, aimed at individual expression. This is evident in disaster films, video games, and the numerous photographs shared by bloggers, who replicate established genre codes and reference widely circulating cultural texts. Images of ruins can evoke the past, bearing witness to former grandeur, document present decline, or serve as warnings of impending disasters. However, in these photographs, different temporalities often intersect, overlap, and permeate each other. Abandoned artifacts trigger memories and evoke intersecting temporalities in the imagination. The history of a place is shaped by experiences, memory, oblivion, politics, encounters, and myth-making. This expands our understanding of the urban environment as an ever-changing construct.

The article is attempted to interpret the museum in the context of a new modernity, formed in the context of structural changes in the society. As a result of the active introduction of digital technologies into the museum space, the content of cultural potential has been significantly transformed and representation in the global network has led to the complication of representation models. The dual nature of the museum – physical and digital spaces, makes it possible to diversify the process of communication with visitors, introduce qualitatively new interaction practices. The realized cases of museums are a timely response to the request from visitors and act as an alternative to expanding their cultural capital. In the context of new sociocultural trends communication between the museum and the visitor is based on the principle of equality not subordination, it is implemented in the format of a participatory museum. In the modern world the scope of museums has gone beyond their classical understanding. Today museums are social innovators in solving significant problems of society.

The article characterizes the importance of virtual museums in the field of culture and education in the context of digitalization. A brief overview of the activities of some domestic and foreign virtual museums is presented. The possibilities and difficulties of using VR technologies in organizing virtual museums and the necessary software are considered. The main focus of the article is a discussion of the importance of virtual museums created on the basis of educational organizations in introducing students to the historical and cultural heritage as a form of broadcasting knowledge and world experience in a new accessible digital format. The case study presents the experience of the Kemerovo State Institute of Culture (KemGIK) in developing the concept of a VR museum, creating a memorial complex dedicated to the Honored Artist of the Russian Federation Andrei Panin, and implementing a number of other VR exhibition projects.

Art and fashion exert a significant influence on the formation and perception of society, acting as a mirror that reflects the intricate symbiosis of historical, cultural, and social aspects among diverse ethnic groups and national communities. In the context of globalization and cultural interactions, the issue of representing the cultural “Other” in fashion becomes particularly pertinent, sparking extensive debates. As a platform for discussing this matter, this article analyzes the exhibition “China: Through the Looking Glass” held at the Metropolitan Museum, where China was presented as the muse of Western fashion, and also profounds motivations and consequences of such representation. Using the exhibition as a case study, the analysis scrutinizes the dynamics of cultural relations between the West, especially the United States, and the East, notably China, shedding light on the contradictions associated with these interactions, emphasizing the distorted transmission of cultural codes, the perpetual reproduction of stereotypes, and the creation of the cultural “Other” within the context of Western fashion. Special attention is devoted to the works of Chinese-origin designers who seamlessly blend traditional motifs with contemporary fashion trends. In conclusion, the article asserts the necessity of developing a more profound approach to the representation of cultural symbols and elements, aiming to overcome superficial handling of these cultural facets.