The renowned Theseion of Athens remains still unfound. Therefore, due to the lack of the archaeological evidence we may get some information about it only from the written sources. Yet, none of them includes a detailed description of the Theseion. However, bringing together the poor and separated data one may have a try to reconstruct in general outline the shape of that famous sanctuary.

Medieval bestiary is treated in the article as a part of medieval semiotics that considered any thing in the world as a sign. In the bestiary the signs are not the animals themselves, but their individual properties,the meaning of which can vary depending on the context. This explains the exceptional polysemy inherent in the animals of bestiary. The provided examples show how such “animal signs” were used by medieval authors in the construction of extended statements.

The article deals with works of mother Maria (Skobtsova) created on material of the hagiographical stories of St. Dimitry Rostovsky and the “Ancient Patericon”. Some of them are combined into a kind of “pair”. The article analyzes such peculiar couples of Lives, it reveals the principle of association of saints, which correlates with the idea of“paired relationship” of the Russian sanctity offered by V.N. Toporov. The article shows the foundation for “paired relationship” of mother Maria’s hagiography and its relationship with the key ideas of the Russian emigre religious culture.

The article is focused on werewolves, the motif of disguise-shifting in Old Russian iconography, literature and folklore. The author studies semiotic strategies that helped to depict the ghost transfiguration in various languages of the culture as well as the ways of transcoding oral or book narratives into visual imagery. The research shows that at semiotic level the strategies and modalities used for depiction of disguise-shifting in iconography, murals and miniatures unite the iconography much more with folklore than with the direct source of most of its stories - Christian literature.

The article is dedicated to the iconographical analysis of the13^th century wall painting inside the fountain in Massa Maritima (Grosseto). The unique combination of the “world turned upside down”motif with the symbols of the Holy Roman Empire makes this fresco the most interesting piece of secular medieval art and allows us to better understand how functions of public images could alter according to the political context. The author researches the “phallus tree” iconography and gives possible interpretation for the appearance of the Ghibelline coat of arms next to it.

The article is focused on the idea of N. Tarabukin’s “production craftsmanship” the relations between “production art” and “visual art”. The concept of Tarabukin’s “production art” is studied in the context of his theory of artistic spaces and through the works by V. Favorsky and P. Florensky.

The paper is focused on a very important and fruitful period that Russian State Museum of Ceramics has ever experienced. Since 1928,the Ceramic Laboratory started working there and the new forms of vessels were produced. The Laboratory became the center of study of old ceramics and at the same time the demonstration center where all the process of creating pottery was presented to the visitors. The Laboratory was supposed to turn the museum into something totally new - “the museum of industrial type”.

This article analyses what a web-user can find in search engine results pages in the Russian segment of the Internet on the sites Google.ru and Yandex.ru. An attempt is made to classify the Internet sites required by the query “the future of Russia”, and their text content interpretation with reference to notions of the future in the Russian mass consciousness.

The article attempts to approach security as an ethical-anthropological category. As a working hypothesis, the security-aware personality syndrome is described as a construct on the basis of analysis of contemporary security discourses. Their features are indicative of a certain defensive ideology - securitarism (“the security of all against all”).

The article is devoted to the concept of fear on the Russian Internet in mid 2010s. The author considers speech situations in which word “fear” (as well as “treat”, “danger” and the ones derived forms of these words) proves to be an instrument facilitating an interpretation of current events. On the basis of different types of statements (statements by well-known media persons, commentaries of Internet users, visual materials), the author singles out two main discourses in which the subject of “fear” is constructed in different ways.

The article analyzes the action “Menace” by Petr Pavlensky and its perception among Russian contemporary art community. The author analyzes reasons for ambiguous reaction of the professional community(artists, critics, art historians, gallerists etc.) to the “Menace”, as well as how Pavlensky’s activities were identified: as contemporary art, political actionism, vandalism. Is “Menace” is considered as an action,indirectly revealing the problems of the professional art community.

This article considers the place of theatre in modern urban areas. The issue is considered from two perspectives: from the point of view of theatrical communication semiotic “frame”, that expands to the city area where theatre is located and the point of everyday practices of the citizen influencing his viewer’s strategies in the theatre. The famous one: “Petr Fomenko Workshop”, was chosen as a case.

The author of the article analyzes the division of philosophical and sociological practices into “legislative” and “interpreting” proposed by Z. Bauman. He uses this binary opposition as a background for constructing his own conception of philosophical-cultural and communicative rationale of culture and culturology. Special attention is paid to the replacement of philosophical-cultural priorities by communicative ones in the field of higher education in humanities. This replacement manifests itself as a rejection of the idea of humanitarian practical activity rooting in a holistic humanitarian knowledge in favor of the idea of self-sufficiency in humanitarian practices and corresponding forms of professionalism.