Sculptural monuments to saints are a characteristic phenomenon of the religious and cultural landscape in new Russia. They have already become a mass tradition and moreover strategies of social interactions with monuments characteristic of the current urban environment have spread to them. The latter circumstance is recorded, among other things, in the latest scientific research of urban folklore and anthropology. The article deals with one specific group of monuments to saints which has not yet received special attention. These are monuments to secular persons who were awarded holiness after death, sometimes even after a long period of time. As a rule, these are statesmen or military leaders who have played a significant role in the history of Russia. Many of such monuments combine the features of a civil monument to the hero or the city and of an object of religious worship, accompanied by appropriate symbols and attributes. That combination allows them to perform the functions of ‘dual purpose’: they are used both as ‘Memory space’ in rituals associated with the formation of a certain historical identity and in Orthodox religious ceremonies. Such a duality is expressed not only in the mixing of elements of secular and church commemoration in the public consciousness, but also manifests itself in individual piety in which the representations of the ‘holiness’ of a particular historical person are transferred to the sculptural image.

The author discusses practices of the destruction of the ‘church garbage’ (items that were used in church, but for various reasons became subject to disposal) in present-day Russia. These are ritual objects that have aged, deteriorated and fallen out of use (church utensils, robes, etc.), or household items – rags, brooms, detergents – that were used in the ecclesiastical space. All these objects are supposed to possess the invisible virtue, which was transmitted to them in various ways – through consecration, contact with relics or simply by being in the church. Objects of that type cannot be disposed in the usual way, along with ordinary garbage. In the church tradition, already in the Middle Ages, there existed different ways of ritualized disposal of consecrated objects. In post-Soviet Russia, with the rapid revival of churches and monasteries, many traditions are being restored – or constructed anew. That also applies to the practices of disposal of ‘church garbage’. The article is based on the materials collected during expeditions to the south of the Nizhny Novgorod region and during surveys in Moscow churches and monasteries.

The author of the paper wrote earlier about pre-Hellenism in the Greek world of the 4th century BC and expounded his understanding of Hellenism. His ideas soon received a response from colleagues – in particular, from O.L. Gabelko and I.A. Ladynin. In this paper, the author responds to his opponents by developing some nuances of his concept. The Hellenistic civilization, taken in comparison with the polis civilization that preceded it (the archaic and classical periods), according to the author, was in a number of respects a regression. It was characterized by the impoverishment of the creative spirit and the loss of former civilizational positions. The original cultural achievements of the polis and the Hellenistic eras were incommensurable. As shown in the paper, the Hellenistic civilization lived by reflecting on the cultural heritage of earlier epoch: studying it, imitating it, arguing with it. Those creations of Hellenism that can still be attributed to masterpieces are such only to the extent that they retain something of the Classical traditions. If the Greek polis civilization is characterized by an intensive development, the Hellenistic civilization can be characterized by an extensive one.

The research of terms denoting emotions is the main approach for the study of notions about human feelings that existed in the past. Because of the peculiarities of the ancient Russian book culture, we cannot find thorough and detailed descriptions related to the experiences of people in the works of that period. However, those texts contain emotive vocabulary. Exactly its analysis is especially important for understanding the ideas about the emotions of the Middle Ages. The analysis of the emotive language of fear shows, however, that the authors of the Tale of Bygone Years not only and not so much sought to express the feeling of their characters’ fear, but created the characteristics of the characters of the chronicle with the help of emotives. The article analyses the stories of the Tale of Bygone Years about the princes that contain lexemes of fear. Particular attention is paid to the usage contexts of the discovered emotives. The key result of the analysis presented that chroniclers used the emotive language of fear for the moral characterization of princes. The mention of this emotion marks the characters as villains and defines their actions as unrighteous. Fearlessness is as a positive characteristic of princes. Therefore, the emotive language of fear in the chronicle narrative primarily plays a symbolic role and becomes an important element of the evaluation that chroniclers give to their characters.

The article is devoted to one of the aspects of the cultural policy of the government of Anna Ioannovna – the construction and accomplishment of the infrastructure of Russian cities. The author examines the legislative documentation devoted to various aspects of the issue, such as repair of buildings, decoration of river banks, street lighting, the construction of hydraulic engineering facilities and so on. In addition to stone and wooden construction, the construction of hydrotechnical facilities, the author also focuses on more private government orders, concerning “the measure and width of streets”, covering stone houses with iron and tiles, etc. Most of the legislative documents of the 1730s–1740s are devoted to the capitals, especially St. Petersburg. The “old capital”, Moscow was not being rebuilt as actively as St. Petersburg, but a lot of work was also carried out here (new lighting methods were introduced etc.) The authorities did not ignore the province. New towns appeared on the outskirts – they served not only as fortresses, but also became centers of interaction with the local population. In an effort to minimize the expenses of the treasury, the government shifted part of the costs to residents who were being included in the administrative and economic life of cities.

The article is aimed at studying the effect of the fantastic in a documentary: if it is possible, and what circumstances can influence its appearance. That issue is investigated in the context of the “fictional world”, the very presence and features of which serve as a sign of belonging to the genre of the fantastic. The article briefly examines the concept of “fictional world” and the specifics of the audience’s interaction with it. The main object of the analysis is the documentary “Wrath of the Gods” by the Icelandic director Jon Gustafsson, which is declared as “a documentary about filmmaking in extreme conditions”. It was edited from fragments of video footage shot during the filming of “Beowulf & Grendel” (2005), directed by Sturla Gunnarsson and based on a medieval epic poem. The filming process in Iceland in the fall of 2004 proved to be extremely difficult, and the article traces how the group members describe what is happening to them in expressions that form the discourse of the “pagan” or the discourse of the “miraculous” in general. In combination with the peculiarities of editing, this gives the film the right to be considered as a narrative, in which the fantastic becomes an integral part of the plot. The imaginary Iceland acquires the features characteristic of the fictional world of a fantastic story.

The article considers an emotional regime of the ottepel’ (‘thaw’) period, which found its expression both in magazine photographs of the time and in the comments to them. The era was oriented at sincerity that realized itself in photographs through the affection of a gesture, through an emphasis on the immediacy of emotional reactions. The accompanying text clarified and strengthened a visual part of a publication, often duplicating a meaning of an image, but at the same time added new connotations to a photograph. On the one hand the emotional statements were descriptive, but on the other hand they were prescriptive, offering the Soviet citizens a model to follow. Magazine publications established emotional norms and indicated necessary ways of responding to certain political events. The paper identifies three modes for the desired interpretation of images – ‘subjective’, ‘mimetic’ and ‘regulatory’. The research is based on comments and other text messages that accompanied government photographs in such popular Soviet magazines as Ogonyok, Soviet Photo, Soviet Union, etc. It focuses on the format of publications, comparing texts and images.