The article provides a critical conceptual analysis of the theological approach to consideration of relationship of the sacral and secular as well as postmodern interpretation of “sacrificial” and “sacral” concepts. The article gives the characteristic of the subject of postmodern “reflection beyond logocentricity” from the perspective of the logocentrically conducted classical Hegelian concretism of truth. Moreover, the postmodern subject appears incomplete from the epistemic point of view, with domination of subjectively varying logic of interpretation of the considered phenomenon. The study was undertaken in a manner of critical analyticity conducted in a systematic and dialectic way. It is meaningfully revealed in the historical and culturological relationship and is concretized in a substantial way. It supposes the achievement of such logic of consideration that appears to be aimed at the achievement of conceptual completeness of the concerned matters. Accordingly, importance is being increasingly attached to the methodological provision about conceptual and contextual diversity of the supposed meanings of the terms. Therefore, their interpretation overcomes the single attachment to the fixed type of discourse. The main findings of the undertaken study concern the peculiarity of discursive practice of theological and postmodern forms of thinking. There is shown that difficulty of true foundation of concepts of the religious discourse in its own frames does not overcome in efficiently conceptual way. The article stresses the absence of a mandatory link between sacral limits and their religious interpretation. There is highlighted the provision on the reactualization of rudimentary naturalistic religious ideas, which occurs as a result of the general crisis of ideologies and scientific form of consciousness. The author justifies the conclusion about the incomplete correctness of Eliade’s interpretation of the religious ritual as a process that eliminates historical time. The historical role of ritual practice lies in the formation and development of sacralized topos of value tracks of emerging sociality. The article shows that postmodern interpretation of concepts of self-sacrifice (victim) and sacredness takes place in an emphasized non-historical manner of psychologized narrative description.

The article presents an overview of the all-Russian scientific and practical conference (with international participation) “Information Context of Culture: Resources, Technologies, Service” (the 11th conference of heads and specialists of information services for culture and art). The conference, orga­nized by the Russian State Library, the Russian State Library of Arts, and the St. Petersburg State Institute of Culture, on the instructions of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, was held in Moscow on September 24—25, 2019. Its purpose was to summarize the results of scientific research and practical experience on the issues of information support of the cultural sector in the digital age, to identify some problems and find ways to overcome them, and to demonstrate the best achievements in this field. The conference was attended by more than 90 representatives of cultural management bodies, federal, regional and municipal libraries, universities, training centers and other organizations of culture, science, education and mass media from 22 regions of Russia, as well as heads and specialists of national libraries of Armenia, Belarus and Kazakhstan (via video link). Thanks to the online broadcast, the total audience of the event increased by almost 200 people. The conference participants noted the importance of scientific and information activities in the cultural sector both for society in general and for the sector’s development in particular. In order to improve this work, the conference participants recommended to promote its digitalization, which is aimed at creating public resources for culture and art and organizing information services in the 7/24 mode via the Internet, including on mobile devices; to intensify the mutual use of resources through participation in joint projects; and to strictly observe copyright when creating information resources and methodological materials.

The article examines the chronotope of fairy tale as a basic plot component in the structure of the novel “My Children” by the contemporary Russian writer Guzel Yakhina. The article investigates the ways of archetypical space functioning within the system of mythological time, and analyzes the principal space and time coordinates of the lives of main characters and their interaction. There is shown that Yakhina’s appeal to the genre elements of fairy tale allows her to underscore the universal and all-encompassing nature of the historical processes that shaped the tragic fate of the Volga Germans in Soviet Russia. In the novel “My Children”, the plots and images of German folklore serve as a basic model for organizing different types of space arising from the stable archaic communicative mo­dels and cultural archetypes of folk tradition. The no­vel presents such elements of the space and time continuum of fairy tales as the existence of borders (both open and closed) and the character’s travels within different worlds; the transformative capacity of space and time (extension and compression, appearance and disappearance, plasticity and rigidity, dynamic and static properties, etc.); the link between the “lower” and the “upper” worlds or the “space of giants” and the “space of dwarves”; and the mutual influence of space and time characteristics. The article identifies the semiotic and semantic properties of the underground, underwater, aquatic, terrestrial and aerial spaces presented in the novel. The everyday and socio-historical space and time continua in the novel are a mirror reflection of the space and time characteristics of fairy tale, while archetypes are incarnated in the domain of social interaction. Yakhina’s novel “My Children” presents such chronoto­pic features as relativism, invariance, and symmetry. The use of the archetypical structure of fairy tale allowed the writer to make a literary analysis of complex socio-cultural and socio-psychological processes.

The article provides the analysis of mytho­logical dimension of the film “Ilych’s Gate” (Zastava Ilycha) by M.M. Khutsiev. The author concludes that the text of this film represents self-reflexive structure. Firstly, the plot of the film quite clearly depicts the mythological perception of reality. Secondly, the course of narration reproduces the influence of mytho­logical codes on the perception of the audience. The text of the film contains a description of its own mechanism of influence on the viewer as well as the processes taking place in the minds of the audience at the moment of viewing.

The first part informs of the main principles of mytho­logical thinking and the idea of time and space in the myth, referring to the works by C. Lévi-Strauss, R. Barthes, M. Eliade, A. Losev, E. Cassirer and others. Special attention is paid to the role of myth and initiation ritual in the psychological formation of a personality, as, based on the following, this is the theme that forms the basis of the film plot.

The second part deals with the methods by which the mythological dimension is manifested in the text of the film.

In the third part, the researcher shows how the contrast of secular and sacral becomes the main semantic opposition promoting the motion of the plot.

In the fourth part, the author proves that the reflection of reality in the characters’ minds is a referent of the images shown on the screen. The characters’ development lies in the actualization of the sacral and mythological perception of the world. In turn, the cultural codes contained in the text of the film are designed to evoke a kind of response in the minds of the audience — to actualize the same sacred modus of perception in its ideas, the achievement of which is the ultimate goal of the characters. Thus, the inner path of the characters in the film reflects the processes that excite the studied film in the perception of the audience.

The relevance of the article lies in the discovery and description of the principle of self-reflection in the structure of the film “Ilych’s Gate”, which allows us to understand at a qualitatively new level its structure and place in the historical development of Russian cinematography.

The object of the study is the creative intuition, which belongs to the mystical and secret phenomena of personality existence. The acting mecha­nism of intuition in the creative process is not fully clarified, which makes it an actual scientific problem. Thanks to intuition, a poetic work displays the reality of possibilities, which might eventually become the actual reality in the form of personal being-in-the-world not only of the creator, but also of the rea­der. For the first time ever, the article analyzes, from the position of intuitive ontology of poetic word, a small lyrical poem by Marina Tsvetaeva “Mother in the Garden”, which she presented to Lena/Galya Dia­konova/Gala. This poem contains the life story of Gala, who became the wife and the muse for the great people — poet Paul Éluard and artist Salvador Dali. Gala, having intuitively chosen her favorite Tsvetaeva’s poem, did not leave any records about its text. It remains a mystery whether she had interpreted it or, having left Russia, tried to forget about it forever. A performed interpretation of the poetic text led to the conclusion: the lyrical poem by Marina Tsvetaeva demonstrates, in a rolled-up form, the fate of Gala and her difficult relationship with her husbands — P. Éluard and S. Dali. The article explains many of the woman’s oddities in her communication with men by the specifics of her being-in-the-world. Gala’s exi­stence was based on multiple fears. Their dominance in her life caused her hysteria, which turned her into a femme fatale. In her youth, Gala had been coping with the pressure of her fears, reducing their active force; while in her old age, the woman fell in their grip, which played a destructive role for her. Despite her intuitiveness of thinking, Gala was broken by her fears, which had been prophetically foretold, long before the real events, by the poetic lines of M. Tsvetaeva.

The article explores various aspects of the practice of collecting works of classical art in Renaissance Venice, as well as its influence on the content program formation of the so-called “Collector’s Portrait”, a typological kind of portraiture common in the art of the 16th century. The most interesting examples of it are the “Portrait of Andrea Odoni” by Lorenzo Lotto and the “Portrait of Jacopo Strada” by Titian, considered in this article. The study is relevant because of its connection with the research attention, outlined in recent decades, to the history of collecting, antique trade and the role of socio-economic factors in the development of art history. The article aims to investigate, on the basis of written sources, the matter of how the content of such paintings reflects the moral and ethical ideas about the meaning of antique collecting, as well as to identify its characteristic features on the Venetian grounds. One of the features was that a significant proportion of the artistic material in private collections was composed of works of Greek-Hellenistic art. The interest in collecting these works speaks about the special aesthetic predilections of collectors, their sensitivity to the actual artistic merits of antiques, and not only about their desire to possess antiquities. In addition, the practice of collecting was intended to express the moral virtues of the collector, the greatness of their spirit and the nobility of their thoughts. On the other hand, it served as an important way of social self-assertion for those who were not part of the exclusive elite of Venetian society (patricians), but sought to approach it in their social ambitions. First of all, the article is of interest to historians, art historians, culturologists, museum specialists and antique trade specialists.

Ippolit Novsky and Vladimir Pollak are the names that will say nothing to modern theatergoers, and even those experts who know the theatrical past of our country well may hardly recollect them. Nevertheless, these two made their contribution to the development of Russian theatrical art. Educated, multi-talented, antiquity experts, they, unfortunately, did not leave any memoirs. Even their letters are almost not survived to our days. The Soviet history of the 1930s knows many similar examples. That time, when people had to destroy their priceless records, personal correspondence, their own memories, can be called the New Middle Ages. Unfortunately, that fully affected our heroes, especially V. Pollak, who was an assistant director in the V.F. Komissarzhevskaya Leningrad Drama Theater in the 1960s.

Otherwise, we would surely know much more about their lives and companionship. And the people around them were more than worthy of our notice.

Hereditary nobleman Ippolit Petrovich Semenovsky (pseudonym — Novsky) was a close friend of E.B. Vakhtangov and B.M. Sushkevich; together with the collaboration of B.M. Sushkevich and N.N. Bromley, he shared their Leningrad creative period. He played first in the Moscow Art Thea­ter, and then on the stage of the A.S. Pushkin Leningrad State Academic Drama Theater, taught ac­ting at the Cent­ral Theater School, in the workshops of B.M. Sush­kevich and E.I. Time, and at the Kare­lian-Finnish Studio.

During the siege of Leningrad, I.P. Novsky was working on the radio, and the works of Russian classics in his performance supported the strength and hope of the Leningraders. I.P. Novsky and V.M. Pollak had to go through many dramatic events, but they retained their devotion and deep love for the theater. They were among those inconspicuous but indispensable servants of Melpomene.

A scientific journal is an important part of scientific communications that, through text messa­ges, reveal meanings and their understanding objectively existing in modern culture. Scientific journals accumulate the results of new research and provide an opportunity for studies, interpretation and discussion around it, which contributes to the promotion and development of humanitarian science. In general, the texts published in a journal not only carry the content, but also have a certain categorical design, which creates some ways to understand and unite a circle of associates around the journal. Its communicative role is largely determined by its editorial policy, requirements to authors and reviewers, ethical principles, openness, editors’ authority, popula­rity in the scientific community, and place in the socio-cultural space.

An important role in fixing these processes, their generalization, structuring and explication of their meanings have modern databases, which collect information about scientific journals and are engaged in their processing and identification of various quantitative relationships, dependencies, characteristics and indicators. Usually, they are created on the platforms of well-known European and American publishers: Springer, Elsevier, Sage, Thomson Reuters, Wiley, etc.

Thereby, this forms a zone of interaction, with complex intercultural scientific communications arising, and with its parties represented by both people (experts/specialists) and scientific texts. The article attempts to use the frontier thesis to understand the basis of the methodology of intercultural communication analysis, which is formed in the process of expert evaluation of a scientific text. The frontier is used in the paradigm of postnonclassical science as a process of constructing the mental space arising in the images of the experts’ virtual representation of the text they are reading and trying to understand — its meaning, the meaning of its words, the main idea, the parts that make up the text — and to form an opinion about its scientific parameters in the context of a variety of linguistic and cultural matrices.

In this study, the authors set out the task of identifying experts to develop a methodology of discursive practices for library and information scientists-specia­lists on harmonization of the conceptual apparatus used in Russia and abroad. A comparative analysis confirms the hypothesis that the issue of harmonization of the conceptual apparatus in the field of library and information sciences is a problem whose solution is not solely restricted by scientists representing this field. Only the interdisciplinary format of scientific communications can provide means for finding common approaches and forming a concep­tual apparatus in the professional scientific sphere that will correspond to the modern vision of the humanities development.

The article is devoted to the works of I.S. Lukash, a significant writer of the first wave of emigration, that were published abroad in Russian. Previous literary criticism comprehended I.S. Lukash’s works fragmentary, sometimes one-sided, sometimes biased. The aim of the article is to complete two tasks: to trace the creative evolution of I.S. Lukash; to formulate and substantiate the hypothesis of appropriateness to unite in a dilogy his mystery “The Devil” and his poem “The House of the Dead”, never considered separately before. These tasks caused the structuring of the article into sections, of which the first is devoted to the ideological and thematic evolution of I.S. Lukash as a writer, the second — to the hypothetical unity of the mystery “Devil” and the poem “The House of the Dead”. With the help of catalogs and collections of the largest libraries in Russia and abroad, the article identifies and engages foreign publications of I.S. Lukash’s work in Russian. On the basis of this material, there is performed an analysis of the ideological diversity of I.S. Lukash’s works. The article reveals the main range of narrative themes, the genre diversity, the author’s individuality, the uniqueness of philosophical vision. There is traced the evolution of I.S. Lukash’s works, in which three main chronological stages are distinguished: ego-futuristic, military-patriotic, “St. Petersburg”.

From I.S. Lukash’s creative heritage, the article, for the first time, pays special attention to the mystery “The Devil” and the poem “The House of the Dead”, and emphasizes the genre originality of both the works. In the context of the identified ideological evolution of I.S. Lukash’s works at various levels — chronological, genre, textual, narrative, philosophical — there is examined the hypothesis of appropriateness to unite the two works into a conventional dilogy. The conclusion notes the up-to-date relevance of both the works by I.S. Lukash.

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