The article is an analytical essay that precedes L.P. Karsavin’s (1882—1952) work “On Pedagogy”. Despite its mention in bibliographies, it is virtually unknown, as it was published only once in 1926 in a journal with a sporadic circulation. The authors of the preface offer their view on the features that should be taken into account for a better understanding of Lev Karsavin’s religious and philosophical thought and reveal the circumstances of his biography that served as a basis for addressing the topics of education. The central motive of the research preface is the relevance of Karsavin’s ideas for modernity. Among them, the importance of the value hierarchy of theoretical ideas for the development of Russian culture stands out. Karsavin called it the collective notion of the “unified principle” of educational organisation. It is he who ensures the integrity of Russian culture and its “genuine development”. According to the philosopher’s conviction, Orthodox doctrine and Orthodox dogmatics should become such a principle: they have for centuries defined and guided Russian culture, nurtured the spiritual values of Russia’s national consciousness and its traditions. On the contrary, the dogmatic errors of the Western churches have led to individualism, a cult of vices, and socio-cultural deformations.

In the opinion of the authors of the essay, many provisions of this and other works by Karsavin also outline the trajectory of the development of Russian cultural theory, and represent elements of the methodological justification of it as a synthetic (or hybrid) discipline, capable of integrating the potential of theology and philosophy of culture and social sciences, without rejecting the accumulated positive heritage of Soviet and Russian cultural studies schools.

The article is devoted to the theoretical and cultural aspects of risk reduction and increasing the effectiveness of digital platforms for citizens to manage their own health as an element of the development of mass culture of information security. The relevance of the topic is conditioned by the tasks of using the potential of digitalization to improve public well-being by promoting citizens’ health, preventing premature ageing and increasing longevity. The object of the study is modern corporate and public digital platforms that provide users with services to manage personal health. The subject of the study is the culture of safe and effective use of digital health management services by citizens. The objectives of the study are to identify patterns and risks, to develop means to reduce them to an acceptable level, to study the factors of increasing the effectiveness of healthy lifestyles, safety of digital platforms for citizens to manage their health.

The materials were scientific publications of recent years (2021—2024), research and development of digital platforms, mass services for managing personal health, published in Russian (included in RSCI, RSCI core, the list of HAC categories K1 and K2) and international (Scopus) publications. Dialectical-materialist epistemology, methods of structural-functional and evolutionist analysis were applied.

The scientific novelty of the article lies in the theoretical and cultural analysis of information security of digital platforms that provide mass services for managing personal health. The significance of health management in leading a healthy lifestyle, expressed in the achievement of formulated measurable results within a set time frame, is defined. The conclusion is made: at present, in the conditions of digital transformation, the increase of mass culture of information security of citizens, protection and development of traditional values and identity correlate with the actual state social policy. The tasks of increasing public well-being include the strengthening of citizens’ health with the help of digital tools. The results of the study are recommendations for the safe use of digital health management services by citizens to ensure their own well-being and as a means of increasing the effectiveness of state social policy.

The article is devoted to the current issue of children’s book evolution: the transition from the traditional printed form to a digital analogue, as well as from a work of art to the form of an “art object”. The author borrows this term from postmodernist cultural practices, in the framework of which the principles of creating art objects were rethought, which naturally led to the destruction of style and genre canons. Thus, an art object, being a product of modern creative experiments, is radically different from a classical work of art. Its creator consciously goes beyond the boundaries of traditional artistic practices, the object of creativity itself receives unfinished variant forms, while the viewer’s active interaction with the art object is allowed. As an art object, the book, to a greater extent a children’s book, acquires innovative characteristics in design, illustration, and literary material, changing the reader’s usual idea of itself as a canonical object of printed art.

In the course of comparative analysis of foreign and domestic children’s book culture of the 20—21 centuries the tendencies of both careful preservation of the traditions of the art of the book and the development of innovations that allow to ensure the relevance of the printed book form in modern conditions are noted. The author proposes to understand innovation as radical changes in the forms and ways of presenting the content of children’s books, corresponding to the current technological realities, as well as a change in the status of the book in the process of global digitalization of society. In children’s book publishing, innovation becomes a tool that helps the printed form adapt to the fundamentally new circumstances of the book’s existence in the information space of the child in the 21st century.

A children’s book in the format of an art-object is an interactive field that encourages young readers to active interaction, within which the boundaries between reading, dialogue, fantasy, and play are leveled; co-authorship and co-creation become a priority.

The article deals with the peculiarities of the Union of Russian Artists, a significant association of early 20th century painters. The main attention is paid to the aspects of organizational and creative order, which can be defined by the concept of “synthesis”. This definition is key to the history of the Union for a number of reasons. First of all, the synthesis of creative forces was formed in the daily and exhibition activities of the Union, which united painters with different views on the meaning of their profession, as well as with different style and image preferences. The term “synthesis” can describe both the real relationships between the masters and their desire to find their way in painting in the conditions of a sharp restructuring of the basic concepts of fine art in the 1900—1910s. Personal and creative ties between the artists who were members of the association found their expression in terms of subject, composition, colour and manner of painting. The masters jointly created by landscape means a holistic image of the Motherland, which Russian artists of the 20th century could not pass by. Their paintings show topographically concrete but internally generalized views of Russian towns and villages. The Union also touched upon the theme of the Russian manor. Abandoning the elegiac image of the dying manor, which was common in those years, the artists glorified it in their works as a place of recreation and communication between the city dweller and nature. This entailed the revival of the interior genre, to which Russian art had already paid tribute in its time (the first half of the 19th century). The members of the Union achieved unity in the appearance of their exhibitions without monotony, as the danger of “repeating the past” disappeared thanks to the same idea of synthesizing the old and the new, the democratic and the elitist, the city and the countryside. The masters combined their uniqueness with their inclusion in the context of artistic life of the 1900—1910s. At the same time, a separate aspect of this study is to distinguish more precisely the features of realism and impressionism in the painting of the Union of Russian Artists.

The paper is the first to analyse the stained glass ensemble created in 1898—1901 by the workshop of Ernst Tode (1858—1932) for the German Reformed Church in St. Petersburg. The series decorated the interior of the church that was located at the confluence of Bolshaya Morskaya Street and Moika River Embankment. In the 1930s the church was radically rebuilt for the Palace of Culture of Communication Workers, and the stained glass panels disappeared. The lost set can rightly be considered the largest commission completed by the famous Riga workshop for the then Russian capital, but so far researchers have made no attempts to clarify the circumstances of creation, iconographic and artistic features of this piece of stained glass art.

A number of rare and previously unknown images emerged during the project. The article provides new insights into the most prolific and creative period of Ernst Tode who was one of the leading North European glass designers and makers of the day. The findings contribute to our knowledge of the workshop’s output and allow for the comparative analysis of the described panels and the surviving windows in the churches of the Baltic Sea region. Overall, the study fills an important gap in prior research on the history of stained glass in Russia and particularly the use of decorated windows in ecclesiastical buildings of St. Petersburg at the turn of the 20th century.

On the basis of the analysis of sources of personal origin — letters of the Soviet ballet director Y.E. Brunak — the problem of the formation of the national ballet in Vietnam is highlighted. Letters from Vietnam to the ballet master Y.A. Bakhrushin have the character of personal messages and contain information about the initial stage of activity of the Vietnamese School of Dance, the creation of an experimental choreographic studio and its first tours. Special attention is paid to the characterization of the personality of the author and addressee of the letters, their education and professional affiliation, personal attitude to the events described. The aim of the article is to introduce primary sources and facts revealed on their basis concerning the creative biography of Y.E. Brunak, her role in the formation of professional choreographic art in Vietnam. A comparative analysis of the information contained in the texts of Y.E. Brunak’s letters with information about the same events from the memoirs of N.P. Karachentsov, Y.A. Bakhrushin, H.F. Mustaev, Wu viet kuong, Truong Le Zap, etc. has been carried out. The conclusion is made about the significant contribution of Soviet teachers to the formation of Vietnamese national ballet in the 1950—1960s. This contribution was expressed in participation in the creation of a national choreographic school based on the system of Russian choreographic education, in the introduction of the methodology of teaching classical dance according to the Russian school, in the transfer of a number of Soviet productions to the Vietnamese ballet stage, in the formation of the repertoire policy of the Vietnamese ballet theatre. The activities of Russian choreographers played a significant role in the institutionalization of Vietnamese ballet. The epistolary heritage of Y.E. Brunak allows us to see the essential aspects of this process.

The article is devoted to the description of the first development in the practice of harpsichord construction — a model of a single strung harpsichord with a variable position of the register block. Such an instrument makes it possible to obtain several timbre colors with a choir of strings, which was previously a property of harpsichords with two or more choirs of strings. The development of this instrument model is carried out within the framework of a new approach in harpsichord construction, announced by the authors of this publication in 2022. It is based on the application of new technologies and modern materials in combination with historical traditions, which makes it possible to produce instruments that meet the modern tasks of educational and concert practice. It is shown that a newly designed harpsichord with a moving register block supports the performer in achieving of several timbre colors in the thin walled and light body instrument. Such a budget model is relevant both for concert musicians and for the needs of the educational sphere. The stages and process of designing a new instrument are analyzed, several variants of constructive solutions for the organisation of flat-parallel motion of the register block are proposed. Characteristics of the string sound at different points of the plucking and recommendations for the performance of different stylistic keyboard repertoire are given. It is concluded that the practical use of harpsichords built on the basis of the new model allows us to speak about the suitability of this constructive idea and the prospect of its introduction into concert practice and educational work in the field of harpsichord performance.

The intertextual poetics of the novel “4321” (2017) by P. Auster (1947—2024) is considered. “4321” is the last great novel of the American classicist, which consistently reveals the writer’s interest in dialogue with literary predecessors, but to no lesser extent with filmmakers: classics and contemporaries. The article shows that this dialogue between literature and cinema is built around the metaphor of “forking paths” proposed by J.L. Borges and then actively adopted in the culture of the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Forking paths are always variations. On the one hand, this is the principle according to which the novel’s narrative is organized: in it, alternative versions of the development of events are presented one after another. This narrative form brings P. Auster closer to the Polish Director K. Kieslowski (1941—1996), whose films he was inspired by. At the same time, the forking paths manifest themselves in the way the author varies the characters, in the use of genre conventions, in the correlation of different events with each other. Such variations allow us to reflect on what just might have happened to the protagonist, but what did not actually happen to him. Thus, they allow us to shift the emphasis from the “realized” to the “unrealized” and “unfulfilled”. It is noted that in his refraction of the idea of forking paths, Auster inevitably enters into a dialogue with other writers and directors — his predecessors and contemporaries who reflected on similar themes (R. Frost, H. Cortázar, J.-L. Godard, M. Antonioni). He borrows narrative principles, techniques and the effects they create, but he invents much himself, turning his novel into a dense intertextual network within which the reader will have to find his way, and this reader’s movement will also resemble a journey through “The Garden of Forking Paths”. The present study expands our understanding of the problem of the intertext of the contemporary novel in the context of the dialogicality of literature and cinema.

For the first time the history of the discussion of the project of the Museum of Art Industry among Russian creative and technical intelligentsia in the period of 1890—1920s is considered. Two stages of discussion of the idea of the museum in the context of the socio-cultural development of the country are singled out, and the justifications of the museum projects proposed by the representatives of the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia of the late 19th century and the Soviet cultural figures of the 1920s are compared. The platform for the first stage of the discussion (1897) was the Moscow branch of the Imperial Russian Technical Society (IRTS). The initiator of the discussion at this stage was art historian A.M. Mironov. For the first time, the forgotten report by A.M. Mironov, which outlines the discussion around the museum project, is brought into the scientific circulation. Pedagogue P.P. Pashkov, engineer, mathematician K.K. Mazing, industrialist A.V. Lobanov joined the discussion. According to the idea of the authors of the project, the Museum of Art Industry was to fulfil cultural, educational and methodical functions. At the first stage the idea did not receive state support. At the second stage (1919—1924), the People’s Commissar of Education A.V. Lunacharsky took part in the discussion of the museum project; the article pays special attention to the definition of his contribution to the theoretical justification of the museum project in connection with the prospects for the development of the art industry in Soviet Russia. Ceramist and pedagogue P.K. Vaulin outlined the main approaches to the creation of the collection, art historian Y.A. Tugendhold proposed the principles of exhibiting. It is stated that the complex of brilliant ideas around the project of the Museum of Art Industry, unfortunately, did not become the basis for the development of a unified concept of the museum. The disagreements were connected with the unrelatedness of the very concept of “art industry” in Russian humanitarian knowledge. The problem of creating a museum of art industry and the competitiveness of Russian goods on the world market, the technological independence of the country, were firmly interconnected. The echoes of the discussions of 1897 and 1920s around the project of the Museum of Art Industry are also felt in contemporary cultural policy, in the choice of priorities and directions of its development.

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