The article is dedicated to the art of the Viennese Secession style of the late period. It is argued that the association Secession and its handicraft venture - Vienna Workshop is a turning point in the formation of the new decorative art (art deco), while in its program it partly remains in the positions of the art nouveau style. The paper considers primarily the creativity of the founders of workshops - J. Hoffman, K. Moser and G. Klimt. As the works synthesizing different types of art, there are two fully realized projects - a sanatorium Purkersdorf and the Palais Stoclet. Both could be taken into account as a Gesamtkunstwerk, works of art that make use of all art forms.
Art Deco highlighted the categories of “quality of life” and “comfort”, but it must be remembered that this trend also appeared in late modernism. So, “artists who in the 1890s under the guise of Secession, got involved in an active search for a new truth - the truth of instincts, now turned away from their alarming discoveries and set about solving a more modest and profitable task: to decorate the everyday life and home life of the Vienna elite. ” According to Hoffman, artists must now solve exclusively creative tasks, and not engage in politics. This point of view is different from the lifebuilding pathos with which the early manifestos of modernity were full. If at most exhibitions since 1898 the slogan “Art for the time. Freedom for art” triumphed, then the catalog of 1908 began with the epigraph “Art never expresses anything but itself.”

Vsechelovecheskoye and obshechelovecheskoye are the two Russian words that cannot be rendered into English without distorting their meaning. They both point to universality of human mind, human culture, and human civilization, but there is a fundamental difference in logical vehicles used to arrive at universal. Vsechelovecheskoye presupposes ‘gathering’ the logically diverse models without imposing any general restriction on them, while obshechelovecheskoye is a wellknown for a Western reader understanding of universal as grounded in generic or general. The article exposes at length evidence for the basic thesis: Greek, European, and Western thinking is grounded in substance-based logic (S-logic), while the process-based logic (P-logic) had shaped the Arab, and later Arab-Islamic, thought, culture, and society. Basing himself on theoretical elaboration of that thesis in his last works, the author provides ample illustrations to verify this standpoint: no branch of Islamic culture, neither the basic categories of classical Arab-Islamic thinking (’aṣl-far‘ and ẓāhirbāṭin), can be adequately interpreted outside the domain of P-logic.

Given its topicality, it is tempting to suppose that one may find important insights into the politics of late 5th C. Athens in Aristophanes’ comedies. The problem, I contend, is when scholars think they can discern Aristophanes’ own political views simply by supposing that some character in the play (or the chorus leader in the parabasis) directly presents the author’s views. As tempting as such an inference sometimes is, it is one that should be made with extreme caution. For each example of what might seem to some scholars as serious political advice, one may find many other instances that cannot possibly be taken to represent Aristophanes’ real views in the lines he has written. In this discussion, I take up just one case of political speech in an Aristophanic play, Frogs, and argue (contrary to most existing scholarship) that it should not be interpreted as didacticism. Instead, I argue that Aristophanes gives samples of political advocacy from the most extreme poles of contemporary ideology, in such a way as to highlight how dangerous and foolish such policies would be. Aristophanes was mocking, not endorsing, the follies that would soon prove to be so ruinous for Athens.

The article considers the role of the phenomenology of time in substantiating the methodology of chronopolicy. In a phenomenological perspective, chronopolicy appears as a field of knowledge that primarily studies the question of how time determines the constructing of political worlds with their political reflection, political thinking and political action. The political reflection is based on the diverse forms of the political time experience, which determine the conditions for political action. In chronopolitical studies of the political worlds constructing, the fundamental importance is the distinction between the directly contemplated time and the discursively comprehended time. The problem of political subjectivity is considered in the context of the internal “temporal bias” arising because of contradictions between the practical, conscious and experienced forms of time. For example, such a “temporal shift” is manifested in the correlation of the political ideal and the actual political reality. It is the temporalization that helps to resolve the contradictions between the due and the existing in political thinking: the due and the existing are correlated, as a rule, in time. The diverse forms of experience of political time and the ability to manage it largely determine the differences in political reflection of different social strata, groups and communities. These differences are determined by the characteristic social rhythms and ways of giving sense to the past, present and future. The political prospects of the individual political actors depend to a certain extent on their dynamism and sense of time. The chronopolicy becomes more relevant in the conditions of modern culture, which is characterized by the multiplicity of temporality.

This article is devoted to an urgent and significant problem - the formation of a man in the conditions of the transition of civilization to the information society. The development of the information environment entails fundamental changes in worldview and culture. A society that is confronted with the global problems of our time that threaten the existence and further development of civilization will have to offer new solutions, relying, first of all, on the modernization of science and education. The key role is played by the university, which should become the conceptual, methodological and institutional basis for a new type of social interaction.
Factors influencing the formation and clarification of the goals of the State scientific and educational policy are more than sufficient. Considering the conditions and prerequisites for the development of the scientific and educational sphere, it is necessary to determine the context without which they do not exist. The most obvious difficulties encountered in getting into this issue are the unilateral approach to choosing the context (when targeting is reduced to a purely pedagogical, social or economic problem) or, on the contrary, the problem field is blurred in such a way in the prism of the principle of universal interaction that it becomes almost impossible to highlight the subject matter of the study. At the same time, there is a risk of substitution of scientific research with popular and/or publicistic narrative. Another difficulty in studying the conditions, prerequisites and, consequently, goals of the development of scientific and educational policy is the sistemacity of the study; especially this is manifested in the choice of the scale of the subject: the state, the region, the world, etc.

The article analyzes the work of Margaret Fuller (1810 – 1850), a key figure of American Transcendentalism; it focuses on Fuller’s writings from the New-York Tribune in 1844 – 1846 and their religious dimension. Methodologically the article is based on a close reading of Fuller’s writings and their analysis in the cultural and historical context. Fuller’s works are divided into three groups. The first group is writings covering events in the religious life of the community. The second group is essays on social problems: Fuller here is both a journalist and a social reformer; she writes on slavery, poverty, homelessness, she informs the public and calls for action.
Significantly, these essays are rich in religious allusions involving the old Puritan heritage in the urgent public debate. The third group isworks written in the form of sermons: Fuller demonstrates that she was a good preacher, as well as a journalist. It is shown that Fuller was immersed in the religious controversies of her time, but was free of religious prejudice; affirming the spirit of Christianity, she often went beyond denominational boundaries; her main accents were on the ethical and social aspects of religious faith and practices. Fuller criticized the New England Puritans; nevertheless, she regarded Puritanism as a source of American identity, the “noble” blood that could play an important role at the time when the country faced new waves of immigration.
The analysis leads to the general conclusion that Fuller’s worksas a publicist werea landmark in the history of American Transcendentalism as it moved beyond the boundaries of New England to encompass the emerging American nation in the international world.

The issue posed in this paper is the problem of academical presence of theology, which refers to the question of the factors determining the possibility or impossibility of theology functioning in the space of the  secular university. A vast research material is provided by the current situation relating to the process of academic expansion of theology which is being realized in Russia.
The development of the issue combines the approaches proposed by sociology of knowledge and political philosophy. The problem of the academic presence of theology is presented as a special case of the problem of legitimation posed by sociology of knowledge, which constitutes the problem of organizing the maintenance of the social universe or subuniverses. Consequently, theology attempts to get into the academic space result in its interaction with the existing legitimation of the university. In the framework of this interaction, theology can implement either conservation strategies (theology determines itself in such a way to correspond to the prevailing legitimation of the university) or strategies of subversion (within the framework of this strategy, theology points to the problematic moments of the prevailing legitimation of the university and requires their rethinking or transformation). Conservation and subversion strategies are implemented both in cognitive and political aspects.
The result of the research is a description of the elements of the university’s prevailing legitimation (at the same time, these elements are the factors of theology’s delegitimation), which serve for theology both as “challenges” and its corresponding “answers” (conservation and subversion strategies).

This article is devoted to the spiritual culture analysis. More specifically, it examines the mutual influence of Orthodox and pagan principles of the middle ages and subsequently modified into folk religious traditions. Research material is a multi-level system of the ancient Russian religious worldview which is reflected as in liturgical practice and polemic literature of Russian Orthodoxy as in peace and cult activities of the people who have preserved the principles of a pagan worldview.
Initially, emphasis was placed on interpretation of the concept of “dual faith” as a simple linear  connection of elements of Orthodox and pagan worldview into something one (E.E. Golubinsky, N.I. Barsov, A.P. Shchapov, M. Azbukin, G.A. Nosova, A.N. Ipatov, A.E. Musinetc.). Then “dual faith” is considered as synthesis of Orthodox and pagan views on the structure of the Universe (E.V. Anitchkov, N.M. Galskovsky etc.). It was found that the spiritual situation of Ancient Russia after the adoption of Christianity reflected the fact of the meeting of two religious trends: affirmation of faith in one God (Orthodoxy) and manifestation of religious syncretism (polytheism of Slavic paganism). 
The spiritual situation of Ancient Russian culture led to the emergence and cultivation of ideological  struggle that does not deny elements of ideological symbiosis, Orthodox teaching and pagan beliefs. The main message of the controversy is reduction of paganism to demonology and treating it as a deification of the world (deification of nature and man created by God).The struggle (interaction) of the Orthodox and pagan principles in Russian spiritual culture of the middle ages is reduced to stating the following development vectors: the official canonical direction (government acts, the Kormchaya Kniga – religious code, etc.) and polemic direction requiring philosophical reflection and mastery of oratory (messages, teachings church sermon, etc.).
“Interaction” of Orthodoxy and paganism involves processes of crowding out and replacing folk and Christian beliefs. Such processes create new spaces for spiritual creativity. This is the birth of Russian spiritual culture.

For some Protestant churches the development logic is characterized by the alternation of periods of institutionalization of religious life and periods characterized by a desire to return to the foundations of the Christian faith. At the same time, the controversy “fundamentalism – modernism” is reflected not only in theology, but also in various aspects of the practical life of believers. First of all, the ministers of the churches are faced with the question of their attitude to music at worship services - should it consist of traditional hymns and spiritual songs, or should they involve modern musical forms that are understandable to a new generation of believers. In this article, using the example of liturgical music of Protestant churches in modern Russia, we show how the above-described logic of the development of Protestantism is reflected in the sphere of liturgical music. According to the research, disputes about the nature and content of music during a worship service remain one of the essential factors of the believer’s separation. Having studied the musical and ceremonial side of Protestant communities’ religious life in modern Russia, we can compare it with the tendency of confrontation between religious modernism and fundamentalism revived in the last three decades. Thus it can be said that the logic of “religious modernism / religious fundamentalism” in relation to the development of liturgical music proves to be untypical.

Perceiving a different country or a different people, a person is most often faced with an image that has developed in his mind long before there was a real meeting. It is very rare that there is no information about the object of perception in the consciousness of the perceiver. As a rule, a person is already secretly waiting for confirmation of the impressions that have developed in his brain a priori on a variety of sources of information. For solving this problem, a special place is occupied by imagology, a science whose task is to study the image, its components and forming factors. Results: Soviet historian, ethnologist, culturologist L. N. Gumilev formulated the “principle of complementarity”, which serves as an indicator of the positive and negative attitude of the countries to each other . Imagology can certainly change to a process of complementarity. Man thinks in images. The more benevolent will be the image of “another” country, “another” people, the less space will be left for the manifestation of a sense of hostility and enmity. What sources provide information and arouse interest in foreigners? Undoubtedly, one of the most important means of image formation is literature. It is literature that has largely changed the attitude of the West to Russia. On the other hand, Russian classical literature has largely destroyed the negative stereotypes that developed in the minds of the inhabitants of Europe and America.

The target of research is the structuralist and poststructuralist paradigm of describing and explaining cultural constants through binary or ternary semiotic codes. The author’s hypothesis, based on anthropological theories of V. Turner and Cl. Levi-Strauss as well as those of contemporary South American anthropologists E. V. de Castro and E. Kohn, is that socio-cultural oppositions must be considered not as binary but as ternary ones. The main aim is to trace the influence of structuralism and poststructuralism on the construction of binary, ternary, tetrary schemes of coordination and subordination of elements of complex «neuro»-systems in Ethnology and Social Anthropology. The originality of the study lies, first, in clarification of the formal components of binarism and its derivatives (such as «monodualism», «monotrialism», and «bitrialism», the latter being introduced into scholarly circulation for the first time) as an approach that claims to be a universal explanation of the existence of cultural constants, and, secondly, in author’s suggestion to replace the discrete horizontal and vertical planar projections of the «primitive ontology», produced by binary and ternary oppositions, with the one integrating them into three, namely tridimensional, «bitriplet». Conclusion: in social sciences logical binarism of structuralism together with post-structuralism were replaced by tetrary, monodual, bitriple semiotic schemes with a large number of poles and fractional scale divisions of the states of analyzed systems that are able to capture and describe not only two-dimensional but three-dimensional statically-balanced and dynamically-non-balanced states of complex metaphysical, mytho-ritual, and social systems.

The key thesis of cliodynamics is a conclusion that starting from the certain moment of human history the technologies began to grow faster than the growth of population of the planet. The followers of the hypothesis suppose that this allowed the humans “to escape” from “the Malthusian trap”, i.e. the regularly overpopulation crises that led traditional societies to collapses. However, the critical analysis draws a more complicated picture. First, we can suppose that many (at least, many) of traditional societies achieved the limits of their social and political durability earlier than the resource limits. Secondly, from the very beginning of human history there were known some deliberate mechanisms of lowering of population growth, such as infanticide and regulated cannibalism. Thirdly, by no means denying that the technological growth increases the medium bearing capacity, we can suppose that the free space reserves was a very important factor of the Earth population achieved at the mid of XX century. That is why the thesis of “the technological growth faster than the population growth” looks controversially. Finally, even the modern societies “escaped” from the “Malthusian trap” through the decreasing of population growth, using the mechanism of fertility decline.

The article is devoted to the study of the perception of wealth in medieval knightly culture. Material values and their accumulation are one of the most important elements in the history of mankind. Based on this, the study of attitudes towards wealth contributes to a deeper understanding of the value-worldview dominants that existed in different eras, cultures and social groups. 
The author considers the role of material values in the context of the specificity of professional activity and social status of chivalry. These aspects allow us to show the existence of an objective need for high incomes for the implementation of professional activities of the medieval European military elite.
The work takes into account the peculiarities of the mentality of medieval Western European society. The worldview priorities of the military estate are given on the basis of works of chivalrous literature, which reflect the idea of the knights about themselves.In turn, these ethnic stereotypes served as a model of behavior in historical reality.
Using the attitude to wealth as an example, the potential contradiction between the declared unity of chivalric identity and the different property and social status of representatives of the upper class is considered.
Particular attention is paid to the category of chivalrous generosity, considered from the points of view of altruism and pragmatism. The influence of manifestations of acts of demonstrative generosity on the status of representatives of the military elite both within their class and in society as a whole is shown. The relationship of the formed knightly psychological attitude in relation to wealth with the specifics of the professional activity of this estate is noted.
The article takes into account the role of the religious factor as the dominant element of the culture of medieval Europe. In this perspective, the perception of wealth in the chivalrous autostereotype is  considered from the point of view of its conformity with Christian axiological attitudes related to material values and attitude to them.

This article focuses on the work of Professor Lev Ivanovich Skvortsov as a lexicographer, explores the main dictionaries he was involved in as a creator and an editor, as well as new dictionaries composed by Professor Skvortsov himself, characterizes them and establishes their practical value.
Standard dictionaries, including spelling dictionaries, dictionaries of grammatical Russian speech and explanatory dictionaries are most demanded in the society. The Large Spelling Dictionary of the Russian Language (BOS), containing more than 106,000 words, under the editorship of Stepan Barkhudarov, Ivan Protchenko and Lev Skvortsov, continue the heritage of academic Spelling Diction ary of the  Russian Language published in 30 editions. The new dictionary included a lot of recent terms from various areas of knowledge as well as data from modern everyday speech.
Many years of language observation resulted in the Large Explanatory Dictionary of Grammatical Russian Speech (8,000 words) dated 2005, 2006 and 2016. It became popular among experts and all people interested in issues of correct speech. This is an explanatory dictionary of prescriptive and stylistic kind first introduced in the Russian lexicography. It served as a basis for a more compact School Dictionary on Culture of Spoken Russian. As for the general reader, the “Culture of Spoken Russian” dictionary by Professor Lev Skvortsov, reissued and revised, was introduced. This is an all-purpose dictionary on pronunciation and stress, formation of grammatical forms and structures, verb and nominal government, word building and phraseology, containing 3,000 entries.
Speaking of the main explanatory dictionaries, we cannot overlook the Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language by Sergey Ozhegov, which runs through numerous editions. One of the recent editions, the 25th one, has been issued in 2006 under the editorship of Professor Skvortsov; it contains around 65,000 words and idioms. This edition of the dictionary includes a fair amount of new words and expressions (more than 3,000) reflecting changes in social and political, scientific, and cultural life of Russia. Moreover, modern linguistic processes were also taken into account. Professor Skvortsov worked on bringing Ozhegov’s dictionary closer to present days.
The last and the most significant work of Professor Skvortsov was the Large Explanatory and Expository Dictionary of the Russian Language. Despite it wasn’t finished, the materials collected were enough to publish the first volume. It represents a new kind of explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. The author noted this himself, emphasizing that that was the new type of dictionary which “together with proper linguistic data also includes general historical and terminological knowledge, details from everyday life and extralinguistic information”.
The article ends with a conclusion that Professor Skvortsov performed a tremendous task, leaving us a vast linguistic heritage. His remarkable diligence, wealth of knowledge and love for his native Russian language made it possible. His dictionaries listed above are of great importance: all of them undoubtedly help their readers to raise their level of Russian proficiency, to speak and to write correctly; these dictionaries can be immensely useful in classes of Modern Russian, Culture of Speech, and Practical Stylistics. Everybody - especially students and experts, both in humanities and engineering areas - would benefit from using these dictionaries.

The article analyzes the denotations and connotations associated with the term “religion” in Russian and Japanese sociocultural contexts from the perspective of “glocal religious studies”. In Russian culture, the term “religion” has been fixed since the beginning of the 18th century, acquiring the forms of two basic  approaches, the first of which is the analysis of the socio-historical phenomena (denotations) themselves, which are referred to as “religion as such” (from non-Orthodoxy to atheism), while the second focuses on the study of the connotations of the lexeme “religion”. In Japanese culture, the European concept of “religion” has been affirmed since the second half of the 19th century, being associated among the majority of the population with the phenomena of Christianity, Buddhism, and new religious movements external to popular Shinto traditions, often accompanied by negative connotations. Historically, the term “religion”, which arose in European culture, has been associated with Christian connotations for about 1,500 years, dating back to the pre-Christian era of the development of Roman culture and the work of Cicero, who separated the local connotations of understanding “terrible” and “dangerous” that existed in popular beliefs (“superstitions”) from “truly terrible” and “dangerous for the state” in the elite consciousness of philosophers, defining religion as “ serving the highest order of nature ”. Religion emerged as the social ideal of solidarity, which needs philosophical understanding of both the ancient traditions of the people (“Mos Maiorum”) and its descriptions by “theologians” (poets and philosophers), where opinions based on fear of the invisible forces that rule the universe could be recognized as “superstitions”, contrasting with the critical thoughts of intellectuals of different philosophical schools “about the nature of the gods”, helping to
reasonably maintain the harmony of “PaxDeorum”, while not falling into the one-sidedness of “atheism”, which was seen as a threat to the social order, law and justice.

During the 19th-20th centuries Gaudi-Vaishnavism was undergoing transformation within the reformist Hindu movement, acquiring the features of universalism and going beyond the bounds of ethnicity. This process was provided by its ideological basis termed bhakti cult, accepting people of any race, gender and social status. Due to a vast missionary activity the members of Russian Society for Krishna Consciousness (RSKCON) created a “Vedic” subculture in Russia covering more than one hundred thousand Russians. This phenomenon brings together the followers of “Slavic Vedism”, Hinduism and New Age movements.
However, this does not indicate that gaudia-vaishnavism integration into the Russian society has succeeded. The information broadcast under the marker of “Vedic knowledge” turns out to be disconnected from its ideological source, and is more often perceived by the Russians out of Krishnaism. In addition, there appeared the reverse side of this mass subculture which is a large-scale criticism of “vedism” proceeding from disenchantment of people, facing deception and extortion of money under the guise of pious donations, mental and even physical violence.
Despite all the efforts of The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISCKON) to integrate into the Russian society, this process has not yet been completed. Uncompromising religious principles, exotic cult practices, internal conflicts, distance from the society, as well as an intense activity of anti-cult associations prevent the Society from competing with mainstream denominations in Russia. At the same time, it can be argued that the ISCKON promoted a new cultural formation in the Russian society at the interface between Hinduism and the New Age movement.

Signs ingrained in our everyday lives have already become an integral part of our nature, although insufficiently perceived yet. The purpose of the paper is the research of signs in modern life, in particular, in tourists’ lives. The scientific review of definitions “sign”, “ethnic tourism” is presented. National signs are predictions checked by time, based on an assumption of peoples’  communication with natural phenomena, various properties of objects and events which happen to them, expressed in a short, figurative form. The national sign passes from generation to generation. Signs form behavior stereotypes in ordinary situations, promote thinking dogmatization as a certain defense mechanism preserving cultural tradition from external influence; maintain separate mythological ideas about interdependence of the nature and society.
In this article national signs of Yakuts and Evenks which reflect their culture, traditions and customs are considered. Studying signs gives tourists a chance to get acquainted not only with nature, but also with original culture; to make comparisons of national characters, mentality and archetypes. Tours oriented to learning foreign traditions and customs gain more popularity nowadays. As a result ethnocultural tourism aimed at studying socio-cultural and traditional patterns, including signs, reflect the way of life of people living in extreme conditions, as well as their environmental friendliness, in the best way possible. The author concludes that preservation and revival of national signs is critical for tourists’ acquisition and the development of ethnic tourism.