In the critical situation of the educational system, it is necessary to create a different educational development paradigm, based not only on dynamism, but also on maintenance of stability, supported by the cultural classics. The cultural classics perform the role of a material-ideal substrate between the past and the present, between the present and the future; and represent the process of personality formation, resulted by the interaction between Yours and Others’, the creation and translation of the new measure as a limit of the new quality and the idea presented in the form of goals and values. The classics become a kind of tacit knowledge, i. e. knowledge of non-problematic (“self-evident”) cognitive basis. The cognitive effort to overcome the “epistemological break” is of creative nature and brings together the humanitarian education and art.

Analyzing ontological issues of an ethnicity, the authors examine the topic of myth and myth-making practices. A myth in itself is a changing phenomenon. The transformations of ethnic consciousness and cultural practices are largely related to this phenomenon. The authors note that at turning points of the history, ethnic consciousness, stimulating the process of cultural transformation, constructs an original world of the mythical notion that will support the ethnos’ survival and self-development strategy in the context of the social and cultural upheaval. Playing an important role in the processes of ethnos’ adaptation to the new, sometimes traumatic for the ethnic consciousness, historical events, the myth allows to retain the sense of ethno-cultural identity. Paying close attention to the proportion of rational and irrational-spontaneous in the ethnic consciousness, the authors show how, on the basis of ethnographic material, it is possible to discover and reveal the myth’s mechanisms of transformations. So, by the example of the people of Khakassia, the article shows the characteristics of the myth-making practices activated in critical conditions. The authors note that, while updating the historical memory, the social and cultural upheavals steer the ethnic consciousness to reconsideration of the history - real and/or mythological. This helps to solve the problem of socio-cultural mobilization and consolidation of the ethnic group. The study of the myth-making practices’ mechanisms permits the further fruitful development of the theory of myth.

This article is devoted to the problem of mortality in the context of developing new media environment. Global digitalization of the world can be observed in all that is connected with the human, including death. In the changing technological conditions, the modern user of the Internet and gadgets regularly faces some new qualities and expressions of mortality, which often surprise, become the subject of wide public discussion and illustrate the lack of intellectual reflection. However, the transformation of this phenomenon still remains understood incompletely and requires a scientific understanding in terms of different humanitarian disciplines, one of which, undoubtedly, should be philosophy, that can be useful in the implementation of modern technological practices. The author outlines the problem field and defines several main vectors of the further study. Among the vectors, there are the transformation of mourning rituals under the influence of new media and the specifics of online memorialization, the legal practices and the necessity to revise them in the new reality, the ethical problems associated with the changes in the status of privacy and taboo of death, the psychological and other aspects, in the light of which the phenomenon of mortality should be considered in the digital era.

The article considers peculiarities of the language, social, and cultural policies of Singapore, which is of particular interest as a “city-state of the 21st century”, a unique aggregation of ethnicities, cultures and languages. The author underlines that the intercultural communication, having a wide area of interaction, includes a variety of cultural practices, difficult to classify due to their unique character. The culture’s growing influence on the selection of civilizational vector and long-term strategies of socioeconomic development of the country causes the interest in the intercultural communication study and, in the author’s opinion, explains why the researchers seek to define “the model framework” for the phenomenon of national culture. Therefore, the national cultures of the states with great variety of racial and ethnic groups are of specific interest. Having analyzed the Singapore government’s policy concerning the culture and language, and its social policy in general, the author puts forward a hypothesis about the formation of a special model of intercultural communication in this country. Studying of this model is an important factor for understanding the essence of the current models and the prospects for the formation of new models of intercultural communication in the era of globalization and information society. Basing on socioeconomic and cultural achievements of the state and results of the language policy implementation, the author draws a conclusion about evolution of the intercultural communication and formation of its new models.

Subcultural issues were in marginal position in Soviet and Russian academic research for quite a long time. Youth subcultures and their social and cultural practices became the subject of Russian sociological analysis much later than it had happened in the European youth studies. The first Soviet researches on youth subcultures appeared only in the early 1980s. This situation dramatically changed in the 1990s due to the serious political and economic crisis, when the youth became one of the most important and visible social groups. During the last decade of the 20th century, the youth problems were studied in different dimensions and aspects. On the one hand, the researches mentioned a lack of political activism among the young people; on the other hand, there was a big attention to the youth as to an important part of the whole body of voters and as to a new emerging group of consumers. The first decade of the 21st century was marked by an intensification of the process of patriotic upbringing programs development; the officials were producing the programs of work with aggressive and extremist youth groups. In the modern political discourse, the youth is the most important object of analysis, research and control. In the modern socio-cultural and political context, Russian researches find it reasonable to investigate those youth subcultures, which have activist resources and a strict value system. This article deals with the straight edge subculture, which can be described as a classical subcultural formation with clear values and ideology, traditional identification practices, and which is known for its antisocial rhetoric and rejection of the consumer ideology. In the first part of the article, the origins and stages of straight edge value system formation are analyzed. In the second part, the author demonstrates structural heterogeneity of the subculture, distinguishing the softline and the hardline subdivisions inside the body of the straight edge subculture, and also examines the social and cultural practices of straight edgers (consuming practices, food practices, body practices, and communication and recreation practices). The third part of the article is devoted to the Russian straight edge community and its specificities.

The article analyzes the role of phraseology, as a most specific and nationally distinctive linguistic area, in the formation of linguistic worldview. Assuming that the figurative content of the phraseological structure of a language embodies its cultural and national worldview, the author examines the national and cultural specificity of phraseological units. Different approaches to the understanding of the scope of national phraseology are described: according to the broad approach to the scope of culturally marked phraseological units, a wide range of phraseological phenomena, all the idiomatic phraseological units in particular, are considered to be nationally specific; other phraseology researchers take the opposite position - they attribute to the nationally marked idioms only those which comprise the names of culture-specific concepts; another approach includes the specific national idioms which embody the inter-language differences. In the semantic aspect, a phraseological system (like any other subsystem of language) is a special unity of characteristics, both common (universal) and exceptional, i. e. semantically unique, typical only for a certain linguistic culture. If the universals are common characteristics of all languages, then the uniqueness represents specific, unique characteristics of a particular language. Besides, there is reviewed the ethnolinguocultural and ethnolinguocognitive specificity as characteristics of the semantically unique idioms in Slavic, Germanic and Turkic language groups. There are given some examples of the semantically exceptional idiomatic expressions in the above-mentioned language groups.

The necessity to correct the image of Russia abroad is an actual issue nowadays. The following article considers the contemporary art as an effective communicative instrument for solving this problem. In this case, the communication process is not limited by a single recipient, as it is in the system: the artist - the artwork - the viewer, but more widely spreads to a heterogeneous, multi-level, international audience. The author considers art exhibitions and events as sources of information about the country, elements of PR, and resources of the state’s “soft power”. The artistic communications are comprehended in a broad context, within the diversity of information processes and social interactions surrounding the art in society. It is not about an ideologically controlled art, but about the diversity of the artists’ creative representation forms making up the contemporary art of the 21st century, whose free functioning in a country denotes the country’s social democratic development, and which can also be a method of forming a favorable image in the international arena. Cultural analysis of the role of art in the shaping of the country’s image is one of the urgent tasks at the present stage of the current social and cultural modernization in Russia, because its goal, among others, is to create the conditions for development and support of the contemporary Russian art at the public level and at the state one.

The article deals with the disposition and musical embodiment of texts in the choral cycle “Just in case” (2004), written by the Russian-French composer Yuly Galperin (b. 1945). Basing on the spiritual lyrics of D. Kharms, children’s folklore texts (counting rhymes, puzzles, games), and the prayer “Kyrie Eleison”, using a montage technique, the composer creates a kaleidoscope of different patterns, moods “for all occasions”. There are shown the logic of the series’ composition, the system of the uniting intonational and textual arches. Developing the word game, a genre characteristic of the counting rhymes (permutations, substitutions, playing with meaningless syllables), the composer converts the original text, plays with meanings, modifies the initial ideas, “looks” between the lines. The combination of spiritual and folklore layers in one composition is a characteristic tendency of the modern music. The series represents a bright example of musical realization of the idea of universality of the phenomenon of game in the human culture.

The article considers those organizational and creative forms of repertory theatres which arose at the turn of the 21st century and are not characteristic for the Russian theatrical practice. They are the theatre conglomerates uniting several theatre groups of various artistic styles as well as some theatres without any stock company, which, while claiming to be project-type ones, nevertheless tend to be repertoire-based. The article argues that the theatres without any stock company should be classified as repertory theatres, which may provide the academic novelty of this work. The process of functioning of the nontraditional organizational and creative forms is examined in correlation with the development of the modern theatrical art language, which makes the article really up-to-date. The article is based upon the materials of such Moscow and Saint-Petersburg theatres as: the Baltic House Festival Theatre, the Osobnyak Theatre, the Praktika Theatre, the Priyut Komedianta Theatre, the Theatre.doc, the Theatre of Nations, the Centre of Dramaturgy and Directing, and the Dramatic Art School. The article also analyzes the interaction between traditional and alternative forms of the repertory theatre activity and compares them with foreign repertory models.

The draft as a cultural phenomenon, whose contents were the preparatory materials, and which represents a kind of intermediate stage between the conception and the completed works of art, is always present in any artistic process. However, its functions and specific forms of existence have significantly changed, and that is due to a number of factors. First of all, it was the creative method that shaped the culture, secondly, the subject-object relations, expressed in the dialectic of the relationship “author-hero”, thirdly, the changes in the artistic goals of the draft according to the creative process in different eras. In terms of the theocentric culture of the Middle Ages, the concept of human creativity emanated from the fundamental philosophical principle “ad imaginem Dei”, and in the socio-cultural context, the draft appeared as a sample whose composition and chromatic characteristics were fixed as a canon. In the context of the Renaissance, when the world outlook paradigm had changed, the artist became the creator of the concept of understanding in society. In such ideological conditions, the philosophical draft ceased to be the canonical model; it got individualized and took on the function of a tool for deeper acquaintance with the world, and was formalized in the form of scrupulous field sketches, i. e. studies. With the advent of the Modern Era in the fine arts, the draft finally became a purely artistic phenomenon, reflecting a variety of forms and stages of the creative process. The draft, necessary to visualize the stages of the creative process, began to exist in the form of drawing, design, sketch, and etude. Analyzing the draft’s function in the aesthetic-artistic paradigm of modernity, the author states that, along with the traditional search tasks of composition and color, the draft is an instrument for creation of the “true” mental experiences of antiquity, so popular in the aesthetics of the Art Nouveau. In the absence of drama of the plot, mental immersion and aesthetic admiration as core pieces, the draft becomes far more valuable than the moment of creativity, rather than in the Middle Ages or Renaissance.

In the 18th century, many nobles used to glorify feats of arms in their manors, using allegories and symbols. S.S. Apraksin turned his ceremonial residency Olgovo into a Pantheon of military glory. He used fine art to emphasize his family’s contribution to the history of his homeland, as all the men in his family, including him, were military. The main decoration of the hall was the large formal portraits: of S.S. Apraksin by B.C. Mitoire, of his father, Field Marshal S.F. Apraksin, and of Admiral Fyodor Apraksin, painted by unknown artists. There were some sculptural portraits of the customer’s ancestors as well. Many of them were killed on a battlefield. For greater clarity, B.C. Mitoire painted, on the initiative of S.S. Apraksin, a series of nine battle pieces depicting those combats in which the owners of the manor were involved. There was a portrait of S.S. Apraksin by J.B. Lampi in Olgovo. The painting was drawn on the occasion of the customer’s wedding. The program of the work, made up with S.S. Apraksin’s participation, is also associated with the glorification of his feats of arms. The epithalamium - song of praise written for the newly married - helps most fully understand the idea of the portrait. In the article, there is a translation of this song. The images of all renowned Russian generals complemented this hymn to the glory of feats of arms.

The article analyzes the specificity of Leo Tolstoy’s activities in the context of the theatrical life of his period. The author tries to represent Tolstoy as a theatrical figure of his time - in contrast to his usual image of a persecutor of the dramatic art. The article explores the problem of dramatic art and its importance in the writer’s private and social life; there are analyzed the dialectics of Tolstoy’s spectator preferences and his requirements for the art. Leo Tolstoy is shown as a co-author of theatrical image and a direct creator of performance. The author of the article uncovers the most important for Tolstoy angle of view of any art’s aims, including those of the dramatic art, - the ethical one. This context gives the opportunity to eliminate the seeming contradiction of relations between Tolstoy and the theatre. By analyzing the sources, the author explores the peculiarities of Tolstoy’s ethical requirements for the theatre, dramatic art, and director’s interpretations of his plays. It was important for Tolstoy to make the spectators understand the main idea which the dramatist had put into the play. To change the person’s private life and to direct them in their attempts to achieve the Christian ideal was the main idea of Leo Tolstoy.

The article presents a new genre of book - webrary. Contemporary challenges of the book as a cultural phenomenon determine its current state as crisis. The authors develop the theory of cultural phenomenology as a basis for a new book genre which will visualize the culture. Combination of the text with the new options of digital technologies opens some unusual perspectives. The theory of cultural phenomenology consists of an object field, concepts, and principles as mechanisms to overcome problems. Theoretically, there is a difference between the “cultural phenomena”, fundamental, constitutive in their nature, and the “phenomena of culture”, caused by the history. The cultural phenomena occur in the “axial time”, and a specific composition of them creates the uniqueness of each culture. Cultural anthropology constitutes a philosophical basis for cultural phenomenology. The reported theoretical developments are brought to the level of practical application by the authors of the article.

This article is a review of the collection of academic articles “Role of Museums in the Information Support for Historical Science” (Moscow, Aterna, 2015), compiled within the framework of the grand publishing project-series “Museums - Libraries - Archives in the Information Support for Historical Science”. This project has the following aims: consideration of the role of the major depositaries of social collective memory in the preservation and support for historical science with sources; definition of their position in the information structure of science; analysis of their collections and stocks, as information resources, including the methods of information retrieving from the sources; examination of the communication between the scientific community and the community of custodians of the historic information - museum curators, librarians and archivists. Within the framework of the project, on the basis of interdisciplinary approach, it is planned to conduct a comparative analysis of the depositaries of historical sources, which creates new opportunities for their usage in historical science. This project unites academic community, scholars, theorists and practitioners, museum curators, librarians and archivists in their efforts to solve the problems of contemporary source studies and to expand the information resources for historical science. The reviewed collection of academic articles presents a wide range of new approaches to the problem of the role and significance of museums in the information support for historical science, representation of their information potential, as well as methods of museum source studies.

There are few descriptions of the journeys on Mount Athos in the Slavic literature. The Greek text of the Proskynetarion by Byzantine nobleman John Komnenos, compiled and published in Ungrovlahia in 1701, has a Slavonic translation, made in 1701 by Damaskin, hierodeacon of the Chudov Monastery (the first edition by archimandrite Leonid (Kavelin), 1883, the second edition by doctor of philology T.A. Isachenko, 2015). The Greek text of 1701 is as rare as the Slavonic manuscript: they are today in the same list. The discovery of T.A. Isachenko (summer 2015), who found the Proskynetarion of John Konmenos in the collections of the Museum-Reserve of Yaroslavl (Snagov, 1701, the book belonged to archbishop of Rostov and Yaroslavl Arseny), allows to clarify all inaccuracies of the Slavonic translation, to prepare the publication of the Greek and Slavonic texts. The relevance of the project is substantiated by the upcoming anniversary: in 2016, it is the 1000th anniversary of the ancient monastic life on Mount Athos.

The article focuses on the biographical sources of the hagiographic lists of St. Paisius Velichkovsky. Moreover, it provides for the first time some documentary evidence from the archives of Ukraine and Athos, confirming the facts of St. Paisius’ rectorship in the Cell of St. King Constantine in the Pantokratoros Monastery and of his dignity of a hegumen in the Simonopetra Monastery of Athos. This evidence opens a new page in the history of the Russian monasticism on Mount Athos and in the life of St. Paisius Velichkovsky, who attempted to restore the spiritual center of the Russian Svyatogorsky monastic life at the new location, in fact - to recreate a new Rossikon on Mount Athos after the fact that the old historic Russian Svyatogorsky St. Panteleimon Monastery (Old Rossikon) had passed into the hands of Greek monks by the middle of the 18th century .