“Letters of a Russian officer” by F.N. Glinka is a multi-layered work characterized by a combination of various genres. The historiography has been so far mainly concerned with the genre nature of that source. The purpose of the article is to identify historical parallels and cultural stereotypes that arise in the creative mind of the author when thinking about the personality of Napoleon and his historical role. Direct or indirect correlation of Napoleon with the symbolic names – Nebuchadnezzar, Batu Khan, Catilinа – constitute a characteristic feature of the story, the author’s handwriting. The article attempts to identify the sources of these nominations, as well as their transformation.

The article focuses on the propagandistic and artistic features of V’ Grossman’s reports about Red Army soldiers. The researcher analyzes the nature of the interpretation of the reportage material in the author’s war prose – novels “For a Just Cause” and “Life and Destiny”.

The article analyzes the Russian sources used by Curzio Malaparte in his biography of V. Lenin (1932). In particular, the Italian writer attracted the historical journalism of L. Trotsky and also compared Lenin with the heroes of the Russian classic novel (F. Dostoevsky, I. Goncharov, L. Tolstoy). The purpose of the appeal to Russian sources was not only to find facts, but also to create an original image of Lenin – as a representative of the national character and as a typical European bourgeois.

The article is the fourth in a series of publications devoted to the biography and journalistic work of N.A. Logunova the Russian emigrant writer. It deals with the first years of her adult life in Odessa, the beginning of her literary career and the activities of the literary circle “The Green Lamp” (Zelenaya lampa). The authors focus on the first steps in the literature of the later famous Soviet writers and journalists V.P. Kataev, I.E. Babel, E.G. Bagritsky, Y.K. Olesha, etc., their first publications in the Odessa periodicals and their public speeches. In addition, it is about, one might say, a particular lifestyle of Odessa writers, formed under the influence of the cultural specifics of their home-city. Logunova tells in detail about the life of Eduard Bagritsky, who loved birds and was indifferent to the conveniences of life, describes the methods of Babel’s literary work, who from his youth aspired to the maximum saturation of his prose, literally honing every phrase, removing everything that he considered optional. The article also characterizes methods used by Odessa writers for adaptation to the new – Soviet – conditions of literary life, fundamentally different from the pre-Soviet – political situation

The article is devoted to identifying the using features of the sciencetainment method in Russian popular science TV programs. Currently, the method is actively used on television to attract the attention of viewers and implement several functions of journalism at once – the enlightenment and recreational ones. The study presents the characteristics of sciencetainment as a method of television journalism, describes causes for such a content to be in demand, identifies signs of the presence of sciencetainment in popular science TV projects, defines the advantages and disadvantages of using that method.

The paper is focused on the reaction of Soviet media in 1920–1930s to Peresteriani’s movie The little Red Devils. The movie was based on P. Blyakhin’s shorter novel written in the last year of the Russian Civil War. The movie was shot in Soviet Georgia, because the system of filmmaking in Russia was in ruin. The little Red Devils turned out to be especially successful – partly because of the fact that the movie was being strongly promoted by the Party. The movie was a strange mix of ideological cliches and the adventure plot. At the very beginning of work on the film yet, the story underwent significant changes- so that the father of the little Red Devils was turned from a revolutionary peasant into a class conscious railway worker, etc. A decade later, in mid 1930s the movie was recut to delete any allusions with Trotsky’s politics during the Civil War. In early 40-s the new recutting was made as the final version. Such mutations according to the Party’s demands was rather typical for many Soviet art pieces which got the status of the Soviet classics.

The article is devoted to the analysis of a structure functioning in the media text and representing a blend of direct and indirect speech and defined by a number of specialists as semi-direct speech. Relying on oral and written materials of the publishing house “Kommersant” 2000–2021, the author demonstrates both negative and positive qualities of semi-direct speech. In some cases, such a syntactic move creates difficulties in understanding the utterance, so as undesirable ambiguity. In other contexts, semi-direct speech does not provoke communication failures and provides additional expressiveness, giving the effect of combining the points of view of the journalist and the reader/listener or the journalist and the main character of the publication. That property of semi-direct speech makes it much-in-demand in modern media text, the distinctive feature of which is the striving for dialogueness.

The article analyzes the syntagmatic connections of the words “to dream”, “dream”, “dreaming” based on the materials of the news portal “Lenta. ru”. The phrases found in the corpus of texts under consideration (which comprised more than three author’s sheets) with those words represent the semantic core of the concept “dream” and the corresponding fragment of the journalistic picture of the world – to the extent that this fragment was presented in the publications of 2019–2021 of the media selected for research. The journalistic picture of the world is understood by the author of the article as a kind of functional-style picture of the world, i.e. as a communicatively conditioned version of the linguistic picture of the world, which, fixing the specifics in the life of the people, stores information about the world and is “a vivid reflection of the character and worldview of the people” [Bulygina, Shmelev 1997, p. 481]. The journalistic picture of the world created by the mass media influences the conceptual picture of the world of their addressees, including the semantic content and hierarchy of culturally significant concepts. Thus, studying the syntagmatic connections of the words “to dream”, “dream”, “dreaming” in the publications of “Lenta. ru”, we identify modern ideas about the semantic core of the concept “dream”, which are fixed in the journalistic picture of the world of the media under consideration and broadcast to the audience of the publication. 

The article considers political and economic terms in publications of the information and analytical portal “Neftegaz. ru”. It proposes a classification of political and economic terms used in publications of the source under consideration and puts forward a hypothesis about the dependence of the function of the political and economic term on its type.