The article is based on the methodology of development of the cultural heritage of the past, which translates the value of educational stability. For this purpose, the concept of generatype is introduced in the form of an educational model that concentrates the best of what humanity has preserved for the formation of human. Generatypes are derived from the change of cultural matrices, vary from era to era and depend on the nature of evolutionary changes of these sources within the individual cultural stages of social evolution. The concept we introduce does not mean grandiose “chips” of archetypal ideas, but only correlates them with the new human and the new world. A generatype is a total (collective) image that creates a special edu­cational ideology and determines the nature of human actions. It is the totality of human actions that forms a special type of person developed in a particular era. The most important in this process is the idea of accumulation of meanings. Educatio­nal gene­ratypes act as structural principles of exteriorization of educational reality, in which we distinguish the following periods characterized by specific generatypes: Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the 17th—18th centuries, the 19th and 20th centuries. Classical literature and the art of the past give us examples of spiritual dominants of each cultural era. The anthropological ideals we identify are the following: Antiquity — the hero, the Middle Ages — the saint, the Age of Enlightenment — the encyclopedist (universalist), the 19th century — the engineer/artist, the 20th century — the financier. Actualization of the ideas of the past is the extraction of the studied material from long-term and short-term memory for the purpose of its subsequent use in recognition or direct reproduction in the modern educational process. The combination of educational ideologies (ideas) of different relevance opens up new facets of modern educational theory and practice and reveals their cultural potential. Moreover, the mechanism of actualization should not be based on rough mo­dernization, but involves the use of receptive abilities of people, the development of their imagination and emotional memory. The cognitive-metaphorical scheme of synthesis of humanitarian content given in the article provides an example of the stated idea development both in the research direction and in the educational-applied space of new technologies of teaching eternal meanings.

Since 2004, the Russian State Library has organized all-Russian competitions of library electronic products on culture and art. In total, during six competitions, about 100 electronic publications has been presented, mainly by public libraries of regio­nal and municipal levels, as well as by federal, special and university libraries.

Analysis of the competitions’ materials allows to say that the libraries of Russia produce roughly the same number of network and local electronic publications, while the share of network publications is gradually increasing; in addition to the original editions, deri­vatives are published; there are few updated electro­nic publications, although they are very convenient for online distribution. In content, there are information publications devoted to the most vivid manifestations of national and regional culture and contribu­ting to its preservation and development. Professional literature is provided to help specialists of libraries and other institutions of culture and art.

Evaluation of the competitions’ electronic publications was carried out according to the following criteria: quality of content, compliance with the requirements for publications, design, functionality and technical characteristics. According to these criteria, more than half of the electronic publications parti­cipating in the 6th competition received average and high scores, which indicates a sufficiently high qua­lity of the electronic publications of libraries. Some publications received low scores mainly due to errors in the design and weak functionality.

The main conclusion: libraries have occupied a stable niche in electronic publishing.

The article is devoted to the problem of transferring literary culture from previous generations to “Generation Z”. A brief description of this generation is presented from the perspective of the theory of generations by American researchers Neil Hove and William Strauss. The topic of children’s reading for generations of the 20th century is briefly covered. By the example of the reading repertoire of children and teenagers, works of literary classics and actual children’s literature, the article shows the process of gradual weakening of the transfer of values of literary culture from generation to ge­neration. The materials of complex and sociological research, conducted by the Russian State Children’s Library at the beginning of the 21st century, highlight the problems of reading the best literature that traditionally has been included in the reading of generations. The results of research given in the article testify to the process of losing the nearly century-old literary tradition. For instance, this problem can be seen in the example of parents choosing books for children of primary and secondary school age. In many ways, the repertoire of reading literary classics by children and adolescents is formed by school: this is the school curriculum and lists of extracurri­cular reading. The interest of schoolchildren in classical literature and in books of previous generations continues to fall. The process of changing the repertoire of leisure reading in adolescents is shown. The repertoire of their reading is significantly fragmen­ted. This is largely due to trends in the development of book publishing and the spread of literature. The article indicates the pros and cons of adolescents’ reading, caused by new information technologies; shows the influence of these technologies on reading literacy and reading culture. The process of literature selection by adolescents, boys and girls, is illustrated basing on the results of another new study. It is shown that the choice of schoolchildren is largely random and contains works of modern literature with a predominance of fantasy genre books. The research results demonstrate that today the main factors that have a significant impact on the choice of literature for teenagers and young people are video production and peers’ advice. Solving the problem of supporting reading and forming a reading circle of “Generation Z” schoolchildren, in the context of literary tradition attenuation, is a difficult task to be accomplished by competent adult mentors together with adolescents and young people themselves.

Anthropological cinema is the most representative form of visual anthropological research, due to which it can be considered a kind of calling card of visual anthropology. It is confirmed by facts from the history of the scientific discipline and by constant, continuous interest in anthropological films both from researchers and from the audience. This is caused by variety of different factors, though the key ones are the “visual turn” in the 20th century culture, the development of cinema and television, mostly in the second half of the 20th century, and the media-oriented socio-cultural direction in the period of postmodernism.

We can see that the 20th century, despite a lot of negative events, was a fertile ground for the foundation and further development of visual anthropology. However, nowadays we can still observe new different trends in the development of this scientific direction. The increase in the number of interdisciplinary researches, the high degree of involvement in collaborative work of researchers from various scientific spheres, the advancing level of audiovisual media democratization and popularization, and the continuous development of filmmaking technologies — all these, clearly, are modern factors that determine the further direction and specificity of the development of visual anthropology and, in particular, anthropological cinema.

This article considers and analyzes the above-mentioned characteristic features of the anthropological cinema of the postmodern period. Special attention is paid to the development of interdisciplinary contacts between visual anthropology and related scientific disciplines, the democratization of video production and the sphere of audiovisual media, and the direction of collaborative anthropological filmmaking.

Study and analysis of these features of the anthropological cinema of the postmodern period can help to identify further ways for development of academic and applied visual anthropology in the socio-humanitarian sphere, to understand the nature of media relations within the framework of visual anthropological research, and to determine the role of author-researcher in contemporary visual anthropological discourse.

The article examines the aesthetic category of “interesting” as a dominant of urban environment development. The authors try to comprehend this category from the point of view of cultural know­ledge. The article includes a theoretical section, where, basing on well-known concepts, the authors outline the principles of embedding the “interesting”, as something aesthetics and artistic, in the postmo­dern fabric of modern megacities. The analytical part of the article is based on specific examples represen­ted by urban cultural landscapes, by the post­modern clash of art and non-art in urban space, by event communications and other forms of urban culture representation. The study resulted in designation of one of the main problems of modern cities: as a result of their excessive saturation with “interesting”, there can be observed a gro­wing cultural and aesthetic insensitivity to the “inte­resting” among their citizens.

From the methodological point of view, the study revealed that, in interpretation of modern phenomena of socio-cultural reality, it is not enough to proceed from the basic principles of a particular science. So, the interdisciplinary approach, as a methodolo­gical resource in demand today, allows revealing, by the example of the concept of “inte­resting”, the interconnection and interdependence of the methodological approaches of aesthetics and culturology for stu­dying the cultural environment of modern cities.

The authors analyze the “interesting” as an instrument of influencing on the cultural environment of the city and the perception of its text. As a result, the “interesting” intensifies the nonlinearity and fractality of urban space. On the example of Russian ci­ties development, the article reveals that the formation of a new cultural environment is always connected not only with changing of artistic design solutions or/and aesthetics trends. The authors prove that the need for “interesting” widens the frames of the subject field of aesthetics. The “interesting” is moving to the cen­ter of interdisciplinary cultural studies.

The article is devoted to the problem of transition from oral to written culture in Ancient Greece. Most foreign and Russian researchers associate the duration and instability of this transition, firstly, with some features of power organization in the city-states, in which Greek citizens had to exercise their rights themselves — narrow specialization was condemned; and, secondly, with the anthropomorphic specificity of Greek culture. The article analyzes the use of oral and written communications in the major works of a number of ancient Greek writers: Homer (“Iliad”, “Odyssey”), Hesiod (“Theogony”), Aeschylus (“The Suppliants”), Aristophanes (“The Birds”), as well as in the philosophical works of Plato (“Phaedrus”).

The article specifies that ancient Greek authors, despite the possession of writing, rely in their works on oral communications and on such forms of ensuring trust in oral communication as personal testimony, religious oath, reinforcing all this with a belief in potential religious punishment. As a result, the ancient Greek authors (in the absence of specially created institutional forms of trust) either ignore written communications or depict them as secondary. Therefore, this article aims to explain the distrustful attitude of the Greeks to writing at an early stage. The author proposes an original hypothesis, within the context of which this phenomenon is explained by inability of the institutional forms of trust, created for oral communication, to perform their function during the transition to written communications, which “hindered” the transition process. The author’s hypothesis is based on the theory of documentary information. The article concludes that the final transition to written communications was completed only after the creation of institutional forms of ensuring trust in written communications, in the form of archives and libraries.

The research is dedicated to the problem of dating refinement for a group of monuments (carved limestone blocks) discovered in church ruins in the village of Mramba (Republic of Abkhazia). The author suggests to consider the reliefs from the Mramba church as a single stylistic group within the context of the art of the Abkhazian Kingdom (8th — 11th centuries). This explains the relevance of the study: previously, these monuments were not treated as a compact stylistic unity and were dated to different times. The author’s contribution to development of this topic is the dating refinement, attribution and correlation of a number of architectural monuments of Abkhazia with the art of the period of the Abkhazian Kingdom (and the General Byzantine context). Their stylistic and iconographic parallels are analyzed and revealed, which became possible only due to the researches of the last 10 years when many medieval monuments from the territory of Abkhazia had been correlated with the period under consideration. First of all, the article deals with the reliefs with zoomorphic images from the church of saint Theodor on Anacopia Mountain and the relief with a bull and a lion near the cross on Sukhum Mountain. Recent studies prove that the reliefs from Anacopia Mountain (those with zoomorphic images) may be dated to the 11th century. This conclusion comes from the fact that the bull and lion relief near the cross was made simultaneously with the inscription on it. The inscription on the relief mentions the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos. Numerous stylistic analogies from geographically more remote regions of the Byzantine Empire also refer to the 10th — 11th centuries. Thus, the author concludes that the stylistic and iconographic analysis of the carved limestone blocks from the Mramba church allows to consider them as a stylistically homogenous group that may be dated to the 11th century.

The concept of “Russian North” is actively used in the media and in scientific literature. However, only few people think about its meaning. In the field of bibliology, the uncertainty of the idea of the Russian North territory complicates the selection of material for studying the book culture of this region. Analysis of the practice of using the concept shows that this problem appeared in the 19th century, when researchers differently defined the territory of the Russian North. In most cases, they were directed by the conclusions of historical science, which included in this region all the lands ever and in any way connected with the Novgorod Republic. This stereotype, formed almost 200 years ago, still exists now. However, the data obtained as a result of archeological and historical research carried out over the last 50 years cast doubts on the validity of the Novgorod paradigm.

In ethnography, methods of which began to be actively used in book studies in the second half of the 20th century, there is also no unified opinion on the territorial structure of the Russian North. Attempts to combine its borders with the areas of distribution of North Russian dialects and the complex of traditional North Russian household culture have shown ineffectiveness of this method in modern world.

On the one hand, new culturological theories that appeared at the cusp of the 20th—21st centuries offered new aspects for studying the Russian North, but on the other hand, they moved it into the field of abstraction, actually depriving it of its geographic boundaries. As long as the issue of the Russian North localization remains open in bibliology, this study attempts to systemize and analyze the accumulated information. As a result, the article raises questions about the necessity of further preservation of the stereotype; about the eligibility to classify to the Russian North the territories that are not related to it in terms of geography, or have a conditional relation from the point of view of history; about the rightness of application of the toponymic form of the concept in relation to the North European part of Russia, without regard to the North of Siberia. In conclusion, the article makes some correction in relation to the authorship of the term “Russian North”, which is traditionally attributed to the Civil Governor of Arkhangelsk A.P. Engelgardt.

At the present time, in the socio-cultural space, there are many communities and subcultural movements attractive to young people and aimed at young people. Subcultural diversity, which constitutes the integrity of society’s culture, acts as a space for the formation of identification models and an alternative to cultural unification, which is increasingly embracing the world.

Diversity is a source of social development and, under the conditions of cardinal cultural and civilizational changes, requires scientific understanding to justify the instruments of its support, on the one hand. On the other hand, it needs the development of practical recommendations and a system of measures for effective interaction of the state with subcultural communities.

Male unions have an important role and active development in the life of society and in the subcultural environment. Historically representing a fundamental socio-cultural element of social development, they occupied a social niche and began to play an essential role in society in the 21st century.

It is relevant to study the role of male unions in modern society because of the following factors: 1) the institution of male unions of ancient tribes, with their initiation rites, has acquired a new form and content and still exists, 2) the experience of studying the role of male unions demonstrates that they are included in a complex system of social and spiritual ties and have made a significant contribution to the formation of certain structures of society, once becoming a prototype of the modern armed forces, 3) currently possessing a large network of interpersonal closed ties, including those at the international level, and a well-established collective identity, male unions influence the functioning of the social system and its cultural and spiritual content.

The article aims to describe the subculture of male unions represented by motorcycle clubs, as well as to determine the methodological problems associated with the study of motorcycle subculture as a socio-cultural component of society.

The novelty of the article is in the generalization of life regularities of modern male unions as traditional socio-cultural institutions. The emergence of such a phenomenon makes it important to study the possible prospects for male unions’ development, their role and place in society, and interaction with them.

The article is devoted to one of the Soviet State’s policy directions at the first stage of its existence, aimed at the preservation of cultural va­lues and the formation of museum art collections. The poorly studied question about the features of this policy implementation is revealed on the example of the TASSR (Kazan Province — before May 1920), where in the 1920s a whole network of museums was created; almost in each of them, an art department was organized. The appeal to this topic is relevant in connection with the opening of a large number of public and private museums, which face similar challenges, as well as the active scientific activities of museums to study their own collections, in the framework of creation of the State Catalogue of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation. For the first time, the article introduces into scientific circulation a number of sources, on the basis of which the main directions of this activity, as well as the museums’ art collections themselves, are analyzed. In the TASSR, the interaction with the State Museum Fund (SMF) was carried out by the Department for Museums and Protection of Monuments of Art, Anti­quities and Nature, employees of which (P.M. Dulsky and P.E. Kornilov) were engaged not only in organization of the artworks’ transferring to museums, but also in their selection. The article states that, thanks to the SMF, the Central Museum of the TASSR had the most complete and valuable art collection, and an interesting collection was formed in the Kozmodemyansky District Museum, which was part of the Kazan Province until 1920. This study shows that the SMF was an important and effective mechanism for the implementation of state policy in the field of culture: its activities contributed to the creation of provincial museums’ collections, based on scientific principles and aimed at presenting the history of fine arts development.

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