The article considers the contexts from Virgil’s Aeneid (2.376–377, 2.420–423, 8.722–723, 12.821–840) with regard to a possible indication of the issue of interlingual communication in the epic. The analysis of the semantics of the words fidus, discors, os (oris), the government of the verbs signare, facere, the realities of the described events in Troy (2.420–423) and in ancient Italy (12.821–840) allows criticizing modern commentaries and translations, suggesting in all or part of the above places a reference to other languages. The expression ora sono discordia signant (2.423) is suggested to be understood as “they mark hostile persons with sound (shout)”, and the expression faciamque omnis uno ore Latinos (12.837) as “and I will make them all – on everyone’s lips – Latins” (which corresponds to the translation by Frederick Ahl). It allows the epic conventionality to remain intact, in which all the gods and heroes of the poem speak to each other in the same language as the author speaks to the reader, and for one of the most important final scenes (12.821–840) to restore symmetry in the requests of Juno and the answers of Jupiter. An indication of the various languages of peoples can only appear as an attribute of culture along with clothing, weapons, etc. (8.722–723, 12.825, 12.834), that is, as an element of description, but not as an indication of the complexity of the communicative situation.

The article deals with the theoretical problem of studying imposture as a phenomenon of history, which is often seen only as an event frame relating to a certain time. But imposture is recurrent, becomes chronic, and therefore needs to be conceptualized not only as an event phenomenon, but also as a peculiar constant of Russian reality, in which together with the “present” coexist the so-called “sediments”, testifying to the deeper nature of the “past in the present”. The author comes to the idea that a peculiar constant of Russian history was the informalized power, initially asserting its transcendent rather than legal (civil) function. It was determined by both religious postulates and the political specifics of the region itself. The phenomenon of imposture can be extended to the limits of the history of the autocracy itself. In any case, the proposed model of including imposture in the history of the autocracy poses a new question to the researcher – about the nature of legitimacy in the informal legal tradition of Russia throughout the centuries.

The article is about the life path of not the most famous of the “fledglings” of Peter the Great – Count Platon Ivanovich Musin-Pushkin (1698–1742). Thanks to the documents seized after his arrest, it is possible to restore the tortuous biography of a man of the “second plan”. Musin-Pushkin, despite his aristocratic origin, completely fit into Peter’s society: he was educated abroad, served in the guard, tried his hand at the diplomatic service, and generally successfully worked as a provincial governor and an official of the central apparatus. The count did not seek “politics” with its intrigues and “parties”, but at the end of the reign of the stern Anna Ioannovna he came under investigation, which ended with a death sentence and confiscation of property, followed by the replacement of the execution by exile to the Solovetsky monastery. Investigative materials demonstrate instability in the upper echelons of society, when even loyal functionaries lost their careers, property, and sometimes their lives overnight.

“Cornelia”, the manuscript by Nikanor Ivanovich Oznobishin, which was discovered by O.M. Buranok, is the earliest (1761) of the currently known translations of Miguel de Cervantes into Russian. Prior to that, as A.D. Umikyan points out that the novella “Two Mistresses” (“Las dos doncellas”) from the “Exemplary Novels” was considered the first translation into Russian (completed and published at Moscow University in 1763). Oznobishin translated Cervantes not from Spanish, but from French, which was typical for translations of the 18th century. Cervantes’ translations into Russian were studied earlier by such researchers as B.A. Krzhevsky, N.Ya. Berkovsky, K.N. Derzhavin, B. Frank, M.V. Alpatov, M.P. Alekseev, V.E. Bagno, etc. However, none of them knew the translation of the novella ‘Senora Cornelia’ by N.I. Oznobishin. Thus, the article aims at comparing that translation with other later translations by F. Kabrit in 1805 and B. Krzhevsky in 1934; analyzing the content of N.I. Oznobishin’s translation; determining the place of this translation in the context of translated literature of the 18th century in Russia.

The article refers to the relationship between fathers and children on the pages of literary works and in everyday life in the late 18th – early 19th centuries. The relationship between fathers and children is considered on the examples of two families – the families of Decembrists P.I. Pestel and S.I. Muravyov-Apostol. It is concluded that in those families there was a serious worldview conflict between parents and children. The literature of that epoch failed to see and describe the conflict, traditionally continuing to consider children as mere executors of their parents’ instructions.

The article juxtaposes the semantic difference of usage for the word “truth” (“istina”) in Christian vs. secular contexts in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”. The author reveals an infinite multiplicity of conflicting receptive “mirrors” as they diverge from the Christian conceptualization of the notion of Truth, a notion most important for Dostoevsky, viewed by him as inalienable from the image of Christ. The author dwells on various meanings of the word “truth” in the polyphonic context of Dostoevsky’s novels, thus comparing and contrasting the characters’ perception of this word versus the meanings found in the relevant Biblical and liturgical texts, in Russian, Hebrew, Greek, and Church Slavonic. The textual example for this essay focuses on the chapter “Over the Brandy”, referencing the hypocritical policy of Catherine II in her attempt to please the representatives of the church hierarchy at the level of cultural gestures, while actually confiscating church lands and reducing the number of monasteries by two thirds. In this respect, she would find allies not only among the secularists like Miusov or Ivan Karamazov, different as their stances may be, but also among the radicals like Pyotr Verkhovensky, in Dostoevsky’s fiction. The article also shows that both the left-wing radicalism and the right-wing triumphalism equally distort and lead away from Christ, as Dostoevsky sees Him.

In historical contexts, there can be various presuppositional ideas of morality, up to the denial of common human morality. And then the question arises: how can one judge friendship and betrayal if, instead of metaphysical unanimity, we find deep communication gaps between historical epochs? Denying universal concepts, the class morality of the Stalinist era asserted that only the collective, the party, and the class could be the ultimate criterion in interpersonal relations. As an example, the article studies the story of playwright A.N. Afinogenov’s relationship with the writer Vsevolod Ivanov in 1937 such a life context is compared with the dramaturgical one. In Afinogenov’s play “Fear” a similar moral dilemma arises, in which the playwright actually acts as a man who justifies the moral necessity of betraying friendship for the sake of loyalty to collectivist morality.

The article analyzes the painting by artists A. Yar-Kravchenko and A. Zarubin, which the artists painted in 1948–1960. At the beginning, it depicted the meeting of I. Stalin with Soviet writers, which took place in the house of A. Gorky in 1932. Completing the picture under N. Khrushchev, the authors replaced Stalin with Gorky. The history of the painting and the history of the event depicted on it allows one analyze the impact of various ideological contexts on the work of socialist realism.

The article considers V. Nekrasov’s famous poem “And I mean the Cosmic” with its title-final complex, which was finalized half a century after the first publication of the text, as an example for conceptualist “provocation of contexts”: the title sounds a rejoinder in a dispute, and the date indicates a particularly close relation of the work to the time of its creation – 1959. The article focuses on the specifics of the influence by the “cosmic” excitement of 1959 on the figurative structure and themes of the works of those Soviet poets of the “older” generation, whose work Nekrasov valued – Martynov and Svetlov. It is suggested that one of the realized pretexts for Nekrasov’s poem could be Voznesensky’s “Parabolic Ballad”. The connection between Nekrasov’s poem “And I mean the Cosmic” and the time of its creation is apparently not limited to opposition to official rhetoric; the connection is not exclusively polemical, but of a more complex nature.

The article reveals the special role of books and book culture in the novel “The Slynx”, (“Kyss”), which is the centerpiece of T.N. Tolstoy’s work and which is hastily attributed by many critics and literary critics to the postmodernist tradition, whereas it is a novel of metamodernist type, in which modernist, postmodernist and romantic tendencies intertwine, conflictingly interacting and complementing each other. The writer has set herself a special artistic task of sharply condemning the ethics of golubchiki, and at the same time depicting their lives as interesting and fascinating. In particular, it applies to the absurd and in its own way brilliant project of reorganising the library in Kudeyar Kudeyarich’s terem (large house), which is carried out by Benedict, who actually creates an avant-garde installation that represents the de facto radical break with the whole traditional culture. The article also analyses the reasons for Benedikt’s sudden ethical degradation, which is not at all connected with the “metanarrative” search for the “main book”. The phenomenon of Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square”, about which the writer speaks in her essay “The Square”, plays a significant role here. According to Tatyana Tolstaya’s mythology, during the “Arzamas horror” Leo Tolstoy experienced the negative mystical impact of the “red and white square”, similar to Malevich’s paintings, and that had a fatal effect on the writer’s later work. In the novel world of Tatyana Tolstaya, the reproduction of the “Black Square” in an “old-time” art album has an even more devastating effect on Benedict, who turns into a Saniturion and a slynx.