The article studies the dynamics of the cultural benefits provision to the Russian population from the point of view of the main functional types in the period of 2000—2019, and develops proposals to overcome the existing imbalances. The study is aimed at determining the composition of indicators that characterize the population’s provision with conditions and services in the field of culture; forming a database of five functional types for the period of 2000—2019; selecting the methods of analysis, as well as analyzing the dynamics of the cultural benefits provision to the Russian population; assessing the positive effects and negative consequences of the cultural institutions network optimization.

To this end, the article analyzes the statistical data of the Main Information and Computing Center of the Ministry of Culture of Russia, examines the legislative acts regulating the state guarantees of providing the population with cultural benefits. For each functional type (theaters, concert organizations and independent groups, museums, libraries, cultural and leisure institutions), the authors select the indicators that characterize conditions and services in the field of culture and compare them with the indicators of attendance and demand for the services by the population. The article applies an indicative model using the methods of horizontal (temporal), vertical (structural) comparative analysis. There is revealed that, firstly, the dynamics of the cultural benefits provision to the Russian population during the specified period was uneven in terms of functional types; secondly, the measures to improve the efficiency of cultural budget expenditures led to some positive changes in the conditions of provision. At the same time, there were certain imbalances in the form of a decrease in the provision of cultural benefits to the population and reduced opportunities for participation in cultural life due to some unreasonable optimization of the network of libraries and cultural and leisure institutions. The study concludes that the identified negative trends can be neutralized by creation of new cultural development centers, active introduction of mobile forms of cultural services and inclusive forms of working with people with special needs, modern digital technologies, development of cultural and educational tourism, volunteerism.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the digital revolution has become global. Digitalization has overcome the boundaries of the field of information technology and began to provoke the metamorphosis of sociocultural reality. Gradually, society itself and, as a consequence, social sciences are changing. African studies, despite the fact that digital transformations in the region have been slow, is no exception. New plots and sources started to appear; new practices and methods began to develop and apply. This article is devoted to the evolution of the oral tradition of the Africans and representatives of the global African diaspora in terms of the “digital turn”. It emphasizes the importance of oral history as one of the main directions in the study of the history and culture of Africa, introduces and analyzes the terms of “orature” and “cyberture”. The author focuses on the transformation of the form and content of African narratives in the post-colonial era. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that it is the first time an African podcast is considered as an oral historical digital source. The article provides a brief overview of podcasts created by people from Sub-Saharan and Southern Africa in the 2010s, describes the prerequisites for creating these projects, their thematic field, and analyzes their features. Particular emphasis is placed on issues of representations and interpretations of the cultural and historical experience of Africans and members of the African diaspora. The main dilemmas of placing podcasts into the context of oral history are articulated at the end of the article. The author also concludes that African podcasts are in line with the metamodern discourse.

This article examines the phenomenon of Chinese realism, as well as the prerequisites and factors that influenced the processes of reception in modern Chinese art. At the beginning of the 20th century, under the influence of Western academic realism and the artistic system of social realism, a new direction and artistic method was formed — realism, which became mainstream in the art of China of the mid-20th century. According to its aesthetic and ideological motifs, Chinese realism is an object of social realism reception, which was determined by cultural and historical factors, and the development of political, economic and cultural ties with the USSR. Studying the realistic painting, which reflects the atmosphere of the era, the worldview, and the dialogue of cultures, is relevant for both Chinese and Russian contemporary art studies. The article examines the role of realism in the development of Chinese art culture of the 20th century, including its socio-political components, as well as the dynamics of artistic and expressive means and the iconographic system in the context of the historical and cultural situation. In the 1980s and 1990s, as a result of the liberalization of economic and political life, the artistic consciousness formed new concepts of realistic painting — neorealism and cynical realism, associated with a critical rethinking of the historical heritage. The neorealism and cynical realism, which would significantly enrich realistic painting with new forms and content, adopted Western postmodern concepts of pop art, and debunked, in a grotesque and satirical form, the political stereotypes of the past. The analysis of realistic painting of the 1990s demonstrates how the transformation of past painting canons reflects the desire of society to free itself from the pressure of totalitarian ideology and to rethink the value orientations of the previous era.

The novelty of this study lies in the fact that it applies a systematic and holistic approach to the analysis of realism in Chinese painting, reveals the diversity of its forms and directions, and gives ground for the specifics of its evolution in the context of the artistic culture of the 20th century China. There are almost no comprehensive studies of this issue in modern art history, so this work is an attempt to create a scientific approach to the study of this artistic phenomenon and the formation of ideas about how the artistic consciousness of an entire epoch was changing.

The article deals with a little-known mo- nument of Seljuk woodcarving — a door from an ancient Friday mosque (Jami-i Kebir) in Kayseri (Turkey). The carved door, exhibited now in the Ankara Museum of Ethnography, has not yet been the subject of a comprehensive publication. Therefore, this artifact belongs to the group of Anatolian Seljuk woodcarvings, made in the 12th — early 13th centuries, that have a special significance. As rare monuments of Islamic art of the pre-Mongol Middle East, they stood at the origins of the blooming of Anatolian Seljuk art that would occur some decades later.

The door was ordered and installed during the Jami-i Kebir mosque renovation, carried out in the second reign of the Seljuk Sultan Giyseddin I Kayhosrov (1205—1211), on the instructions of one of his emirs — Muzaffar al-din Mahmud son of Yagy-Basan, a descendant of the Danishmendid dynasty. The article considers the door’s ornamental decoration, organized as a classic “mihrab” composition, in a set of technical and stylistic aspects. For a comparative analysis, the author inspects a wide range of woodcarvings of the 11th—13th centuries from Anatolia and Iran. The close resemblance of used techniques and decoration, as well as motifs, ornamental themes and epigraphy makes it possible to suggest that the cabinet maker Ibrahim son of Abu-Bakr al-Rumi, who left his signature on the Minbar of the Alaaddin Mosque in Ankara Fortress, could be the author of the magnificent carved door from Kayseri’ Jami-i Kebir.

The article deals with the features of mythopoetic models in S.T. Konenkov’s sculpture. Despite the fact that monographs, albums, dozens of articles are devoted to the maestro’s works and they are quite well studied, the nature of the mythologism of S.T. Konenkov’s artistic thinking has not been fully revealed. In the ideological context of Soviet art studies, which were based on the methodology of the “social history of art”, only the fact of the sculptor’s deep interest in archaic folk traditions was noted, while this topic can be considered as a natural manifestation of the myth-making process characteristic of the art of the 20th century as a whole. Using the example of S.T. Konenkov’s works, the article attempts to retrace the formation specifics of the “non-classical artistic language” of mythopoetics in the Russian land, which consisted in the fact that, unlike Western European artists who would immerse in the exotic world of archaic art of non-European origin (primarily Africa), Russian masters were fascinated by their home antiquity. When considering the mythological structures that served as the basis for the mythopoetic models of S.T. Konenkov’s sculptural projects, three basic groups can be conditionally distinguished: a direct appeal to ancient mythology, pagan Slavic reminiscences, and a mythological interpretation of a freshly created new world. It is thanks to myth-making that the characters of S.T. Konenkov’s sculptural compositions, despite all the heterogeneity of specific subjects, belong to the integrity of a single cosmos created by the mythopoetic consciousness of the maestro. At the same time, the common mythological foundations of the Russian sculpture development in that period determine the commonality of the mythopoetic models, characteristic not only of S.T. Konenkov’s works. In many ways, they are also quite clearly manifested in the works of S.D. Erzia, A.S. Golubkina, and others.

The article offers a phenomenological view on civic competency, openness of education, and values as type of competencies. The need for such a comparison is dictated by the discrepancy between the humanistic meanings of education and the social reality in which they are supposed to be implemented. It is assumed that a phenomenological perspective can present civic competency as a borderline connecting both the areas. This study is methodically supported by explication of the philosophical (transcendental-phenomenological) logic of the concept of openness.

The appeal to openness, which is the essence of human subjectivity (autonomy), clarifies the substantive character of civic competency structure.

Firstly, the study underlines the connection between openness and universalism as cultural principle (that is, in culture and through culture) of self-determination of the mind, constituting civic mindedness as a universal moral and legal modus of subjectivity. Bringing the civic idea to the competency range is the own task of education, which can be accomplished only in continuous actualization of the concept of openness.

Secondly, the article proposes to consider the concept of value in the meaning of “type of competencies” according to the Council of Europe’s “Reference Framework of Competence for Democratic Culture” as a tool for crystallizing the self-determining mind into civic competency. Attention to this document is drawn by the coherence of openness and universalism with educational policies and practices, which is formalized in the pedagogical design of values as a type of competence. The study’s argumentation confirms this connection and ascertains that an open edu­cational system is defined in its essence not by a set of accessible educational environment technologies, but by the depth of its rooting in the logic of openness.

Thirdly, the actualization of values as a type of competence in the logic of openness provides an opportunity for phenomenological designing of pedagogical technologies. The essential idea of this approach is that civic competency can be constituted as a semantic determination of different types of subject knowledge and, through their correction, can transform broad social contexts. As an example of that sort of transformative participation, the article presents the values’ influence on the strengthening of human capital in aggregation of new technologies and inequality.

This article examines online educational products developed by museums both independently and in cooperation with educational institutions. The analysis revealed a pool of museum online products, including mass open online courses (MOOCs), specialized professional online courses (SPOCs), educational games, mobile apps, and podcasts. The authors identify advantages and features of each type of the museum online products (MOPs) and determine the prospects for their inclusion in the educational process.

The study aims to reveal the activity of different kinds of museums and museum communities in the development and implementation of educational online products both in their own educational activities, carried out by an increasing number of museums, and in the process of formal and non-formal education in cooperation with universities, schools, and further education institutions that implement it. The study discovered that museums develop both MOOCs that are traditional for the system of higher professional education, and educational online products, such as educational games, podcasts, and mobile applications with educational content, that are not widely used at present, but are promising for formal and, especially, non-formal education. An important result of the study was the conclusion about the common practice of cooperation between museums and universities in the joint development of online products, as well as about the feasibility of deploying such work with institutions of secondary general and vocational education.

The authors’ analysis of the system of museum educational online products allowed us to conclude that new players — museums — have appeared in the online education market in the role of organizations that create and use various online resources in their activities, including those that can be used in the field of education.

The article endeavors to reconstruct and present a collection of children’s books published during the Great Patriotic War, stored in the Rare Books Department (Book Museum) of the Russian State Library. The term “collection” in this case is conditional, since children’s books of that period were not acquired specifically and are not stored as a separate independent collection. They belong to the three collections — Illustrated Children’s Books, Serial Publications, and A.K. Tarasenkov’s Collection. Such storage of books of the same subject in different collections has its own specifics.

The conducted research considered books published strictly in 1941—1945. Both edge years — 1941 and 1945 — are presented in full, since the war, its premonition, beginning, end, and the features of life in the post-war months, had left their mark on the themes and design of both pre-war and post-war books.

On the occasion of the 70th and 75th anniversary of the Victory, in May 2015 and June 2020, the Book Museum of the Russian State Library held two mini-exhibitions dedicated to children’s books of the Great Patriotic War period. The exhibitions introduced visitors to the publications of 1941—1945, as well as to literary works that had been published in the post-war period but written during the war, hot on the traces of the heroic events. Still, the books presented at the mini-exhibitions do not exhaust the entire volume of publications of that period stored in the Book Museum.

The Rare Books Department has identified 204 items that can be combined in a thematic collection called “Children’s Books of the Great Patriotic War Period”. Due to some peculiarities inherent in this collection, we cannot draw any conclusions about the repertoire of children’s books of the war period in general, but we can picture the repertoire, geography and circulation in relation to fiction for children.

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