Publications

In this article I analyse retrospectively main directions in the interpretation of the notion sobornost’ in modern Russian philosophical thought. Key for religious Russian Philosophy on the border of the XIX - XX centuries, this term hasn't lost its importance today, but it has acquired some new senses and significations. Religious-philosophical and epistemological notion first and foremost, it was transformed into ontological and anthropological category, what allowed to describe the Russian national current community as "conciliarity" corresponding to “Russian idea”.

Michael Glycas wrote in different genres; his most significant work is the Universal Chronicle. It has no value as a historical source, since it is a gigantic compilation, and the great majority o its sources has survived. Yet, it excels among other chronicles by both its structure and its content. Whereas the second, historical part is extremely superficial and piecemeal, the first part is a huge and independent Hexaemeron containing answers to hundreds of questions about the configuration of the Universe. The number of sources used by Glycas is strikingly high, he easily combines theological treatises with ancient paradoxographic and scientific texts, Aristotle is quoted side by side with Physiologus. In both parts of his Chronicle, the author manages to extract from his sources what he needs most: entertaining stories, curious data and moral admonition. We know from Glycas’ theological letters that he was highly educated but his Chronicle was aimed at the “broad audience”.

Malevich has usually perceived as revolutionist and iconoclast, and completely not as divine worshiper.  Meanwhile, those are two interconnected sides of his intellectual activity, and probably his way of glorification of God demanded revolutionary form at his time. In this article, I would like to show Malevich not only as art theorist, as it ordinarily applied, but as metaphysician, and even religious metaphysician. Still it can be said, that Malevich’s theoretical legacy haven’t been understood properly. The situation is this because only ten years has passed since the most complete collected edition of his works by the editorship of Alexandra Shatskikh have seen the light of the day. 

The paper deals with St. Basil's distinction between κήρυγμα (kerygma) and δόγμα (dogma), which has been the subject of much discussion over the last sixty years (Spir. XXVII.66-67).

The main concern of the article is the ways plague was explored and conceptualised by Russian doctors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Medical theories and epistemologies are accessed in comparison with those employed during the pre-bacteriological era as well as with the European medical ideas of the period.

The article discusses the transformations that happened in creating and perceiving fantastical bodies in American comics from 1960s to 2020s.

The poetic texts pose a challenge to full morphological tagging and lemmatization since the authors seek to extend the vocabulary, employ morphologically and semantically deficient forms, go beyond standard syntactic templates, use non-projective constructions and non-standard word order, among other techniques of the creative language game. In this paper we evaluate a number of probabilistic taggers based on decision trees, CRF and neural network algorithms as well as a state-of-the-art dictionary-based tagger. The taggers were trained on prosaic texts and tested on three poetic samples of different complexity. Firstly, we suggest a method to compile the gold standard datasets for the Russian poetry. Secondly, we focus on the taggers’ performance in the identification of the part of speech tags and lemmas. We reveal what kind of POS classes, paradigm classes and syntactic patterns mostly affect the quality of processing.

There is published a female burial in the catacomb 1119 of Ust’-Al’ma necropolis situated on the southwestern shore of the Crimea. There are found personal jewellery (gold ear-rings, amphora-pendants and beads of a necklace, sewn plaques) as well as grave goods (gold leaves of a funeral wreath, gold eye-pieces, two hand-formed ceramic incense-burners, a ceramic jug, an iron knife, a ceramic unguentarium of the bulbous type, a ceramic red-slip bowl, two ceramic spindle-whorls). The grave might belong to a representative of social elite, and dates to the period from the first half to the middle of the 1st century AD.

In America today, two communities with sub-Saharan African genetic origins exist side by side, though they have differing histories and positions within society. This book explores the relationship between African Americans, descendants of those Africans brought to America as slaves, and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, who have come to the United States of America voluntarily, mainly since the 1990s. Members of these groups have both a great deal in common and much that separates them, largely hidden in their assumptions about, and attitudes towards, each other. In a work grounded in extensive fieldwork Bondarenko and his research team interviewed African Americans, and migrants from twenty-three African States and five Caribbean nations, as well as non-black Americans involved with African Americans and African migrants. Seeking a wide range of perspectives, from different ages, classes and levels of education, they explored the historically rooted mutual images of African Americans and contemporary African migrants, so as to understand how these images influence the relationship between them. In particular, they examined conceptions of ‘black history’ as a common history of all people and nations with roots in Africa. What emerges is a complex picture. While collective historical memory of oppression forges solidarity, lack of knowledge of each other’s history can create distance between communities. African migrants tend to define their identities not by race, but on the basis of multiple layers of national, ethnic, religious and linguistic affinities (of which African Americans are often unaware). For African Americans, however, although national and regional identities are important, it is above all race that is the defining factor. While drawing on wider themes from anthropology and African studies, this in-depth study on a little-researched subject allows valuable new understandings of contemporary American society.

This article is an analysis of metadata from 955 closed trials of Soviet people accused of being collaborators during World War II. The trials reveal Soviet officials' understandings of who was capable of collaboration and what kinds of acts were collaboration. At the same time, the aggregate data from trials demonstrates that the accusations were grounded in the realities of the war and were not falsifications like the investigations of the Great Terror in the 1930s.

This paper discusses novel facts regarding adpositional agreement in Avar in light of recent theories of feature valuation. I show that the traditional notion of downward Agree/upward valuation is sufficient to account for the observed facts, rendering the competing mechanism of upward Agree/downward valuation superfluous. 

The 2019 Shared Task on Automatic Gapping Resolution for Russian (AGRR2019) aims to tackle non-trivial linguistic phenomenon, gapping, that occurs in coordinated structures and elides a repeated predicate, typically from the second clause. In this paper we define the task and evaluation metrics, provide detailed information on data preparation, annotation schemes and methodology, analyze the results and describe different approaches of the participating solutions.

The early decades of the nineteenth century were a period of “proactive” improvement and “balance of the imperial situation,”1 both in the content of administrative projects and in their implementation in practices of territorial administration in the Russian Empire. However, Alexander I’s attempt at reforming local administration in 1816–25 remains understudied. The emperor, known for his cautiousness and indecision, endorsed the ideas of Aleksandr Dmitrievich Balashov2 and Viktor Pavlovich Kochubei,3 who called for introduction of viceroyalties (namestnichestvo) as administrative units in the empire. It is still unknown whether Nikolai Nikolaevich Novosil’cev or A.D. Balashov was the true author of the project,4, but without the political will of the monarch, implementation would have been impossible. The empire was to be structured in accordance with a document titled “The List of Governorates and Their Distribution across Viceregal Regions” (Spisok gubernii s raspredeleniem po namestnicheskim okrugam). Amended in 1823–24, it was included in the Book of Civil Statutes (Kniga shtatov po grazhdanskoi chasti)5 and preserved in the archives of the secret “Committee on December 6, 1826.” At the end of the nineteenth century, this list of governor-generalships—as found in the committee papers—was published in the Sbornik Rossiiskogo Imperatorskogo Obshchestva, with further amendments simply ignored.6 This version of the text is most referenced by scholars.

This is my review of the 'Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and the School of London' exhibtion at the Pushkin Museum

In the first, still unpublished, volume of The Blessed Compendium (al-Majmūʿ al-mubārak)—the historical work of the 13th-century Arabic-speaking Christian writer al-Makīn ibn al-ʿAmīd, there is a chapter on the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II the Younger (r. 402–450). In this chapter, Ibn al-ʿAmīd retells the famous story of Moses of Crete, “who appeared among the Jews” and declared himself to be the Messiah to subsequent tragic disappointment of those who believed in him. The present article discusses this story and suggests an explanation for the discrepancies between Ibn al-ʿAmīd’s and its Arabic source—the Book of the Heading (Kitāb al-ʿUnwān) of Agapius of Manbij (Hierapolis).

In 1944-46, five million Soviet citizens returned from displacement to the USSR. They had been forced labourers, refugees from conflict, and prisoners of war in occupied Europe. As they returned, all faced official scrutiny and some were arrested, but the majority of Soviet repatriates went home and not to the Gulag. Repatriation was not an episode of mass repression perpetrated by an all-powerful state. Instead, recently declassified archival collections demonstrate that Soviet administrators and police could hardly keep track of returnees. In the absence of strong state control, the crucible of return was in the relationships between repatriates and soldiers, local bosses, and neighbours. The chaos at the end of the war combined with the popular assertion that repatriates were guilty of collaboration with German occupiers made them attractive targets for abuse. Aspects of this story depended on specifically Stalinist practices, yet repatriation was not uniquely Stalinist insofar as it generated problems found in other incidents of mass displacement, particularly in the aftermath of the Second World War. Rather than exclusively a creation of the Soviet system, the often harrowing experience of return was largely a by-product of war.