The paper is devoted to the memory of Andrei Vital’evich Karavashkin (1964–2021) the philologist and historian, professor of the Russian State University for the Humanities. His scientific activities are considered. Its main results are noted: participation in the development of the methodology of historical phenomenology, that includes innovative ideas of “premiseless hermeneutics”, the concept of “royal sacrifice” and its role in the formation of the ideology of power in medieval Russia. Karavashkin made a great contribution to the study of the history and culture of Moscow Russia, the narrative of Ivan Peresvetov, Ivan the Terrible, Andrei Kurbsky. In the book “The Literary Custom of Old Rus” he proposed an original concept for the development of Old Russian literature. The importance of A.V. Karavashkin’s research in the humanities, synthesizing the historical and philological fields of knowledge is highly assessed.

It is for the first time ever that the excerpts from the diary of A.V. Karavashkin (1964–2021), Professor, Doctor in Philology, are published. An outstanding researcher of Old Russian literature, Professor Karavashkin was an all rounded man of versatile personality, a truly major representative of the humanities, he was close to different fields of knowledge: philology, linguistics, cultural history, philosophy. Diary entries show an extraordinary personality in his time of life. Thoughts and judgments of the humanist were aimed at the most acute and deepest issues of life.

The article considers the principles of constructing a “micronarrative” in Russian iconography. The author analyzes the functioning of subtle visual signs and small figures in well-known compositions. As the paper shows, with their help, icon-painters not only made numerous clarifications and nuances in the depicted scenes, but also created new motifs and autonomous “micro-stories”. The paper focuses mainly on the icons “The miracle of the icon ’Our Lady of the Sign’, or the Battle of Novgorodians with Suzdalians”. Analyzing a series of icons that have survived to this day or are known from sketches, the author shows how differently semiotically Russian masters built the common visual story and what new features appeared in various compositions. The most rich in signs icon was the one painted in the 1460-es and stored nowadays in the Novgorod Museum. Its creator denounces the aggressors-Suzdalians not only using general visual techniques, but also with the help of small, hardly noticeable signs and details that are clearly not aimed at the mass audience. Among other images considered in the article, that icon demonstrates clearly the high variability and plasticity of ‘visual texts’ of Russian iconography – the problematic that has rarely attracted attention by specialists.

The article considers an issue of legislative regulation of political penal servitude and exile to Siberia on the example of the post-reform period in the 60–70s of the 19th century. in the dichotomy of general criminal laws and rules about political exiles. The author proves in the article that the interpretation of the Siberian exile by the past and present historians of the forms and methods of legal regulation, the prevailing views and assessments by researchers of the legal norms value are far from the realities of the times of political penal servitude and exile in the post-reform era.

The article analyzes the specifics of the functioning of the social ideologeme “reaction” in the Silver Age of Russian culture. When analyzing its genesis and specifics S. Vengerov, the historian and left-wing publicist, compared the Silver Age with the period that preceded it. That period is commonly called the “Pobedonostsev’s Reaction”. To determine its specifics, Vengerov proposed a classification for the types of social reaction in Russia, using the original conceptual tools.

The article, based on archival materials, deals with the transformation of the power formula in Russia during World War I from the “government of trust” to the “government responsible to the people”. The evolution of that political strategy is analyzed in relation to the objective requirements for all warring countries to a new type of war, which were the national unity, including the widest strata of the population, and the national economy regulation, limiting market mechanisms and leading to the transition of the economy to the rails of comprehensive regulation right up to planning. The article focuses on the specifics in the formation of representation for public and democratic elements in the public organizations of All-Russian unions of zemstvos ( system of local administration) and cities, which provided support for the change of the formula of power depending on the socio-political processes during the war. The author comes to the conclusion that in the Russia conditions it occurred within the framework of the change of the power formula: from the “trust government”, responsible to the “Progressive bloc” of the census State Duma (1915), to the concept of the government responsible to the bloc of census public elements within the “trust government before the country” (1915–1916) and then under the pressure of a broad bloc of democratic public elements in the city and the countryside involved in the organization of the country for defense and of the national economy to the formula of “government responsible to the people” (1916 – early 1917).

The article studies the concept of “general line” in the history of the Bolshevik Party during the second half of the 1920s. N.I. Bukharin first introduced that concept into the political lexicon, speaking at the Fourteenth Party Conference (1925). The concept fixed the basic idea of the new economic policy – that it was necessary to fight against two tendencies: against considering the kulaks as the main peasant force in the village and against ignoring the main figure in the village – the middleman. That notion had a debatable meaning – above all. It was actively used by representatives of the united opposition. It was not until the beginning of 1929, when the transition from the new economic policy to the methods of military-administrative management of agriculture was outlined, that the notion of the “general line” of the Party began to express the opinion of the Central Committee of the Party and the General Secretary personally. At the beginning of 1929, Stalin posed the question that any disagreement, even the slightest, with the “general line” of the Party in conditions of aggravation of the class struggle meant a “rightwing deviation”. Subsequently, the concept became the symbolic designation of totalitarianism.

The article considers the history of the term “wrecking.” The study allows describing and analyzing political events which the chosen terms correlate with. The authors manage to trace the functions of the term “wrecking” at different historical times, as well as to establish a connection between the function of the term and the political tasks of the leadership.

The article analyzes how Joseph Brodsky and Olga Sedakova depict the posthumous existence of a human. Brodsky holds an agnostic view on the world, tending to a positivism. The poet concentrates on depicting the Homeric horror of the very fact of death and its inevitability. Olga Sedakova tends to the Christian view of the world, taking into account the experience of the catastrophes of the 20th century, literature after Auschwitz. Unlike the traditionalist image of Paradise, Sedakova sees in it not only ‘incredible happiness’, but also an experience of tragedy and compassion, which leads her to a very unconventional form of idyll.