Spinoza regarded life as an active play of affects, and human freedom as the taming of passions by means of the concepts of reason. Following him, Lev Vygotsky treats affect as the alpha and omega of mental development. The key theme of Vygotsky’s last manuscripts is the same as in Spinoza’s Ethics: man’s path to freedom via the reasonable mastery of his affects. Vygotsky defines freedom as the affect in the concept; in the last years of his life, he investigates the processes of synthesis of emotional and intellectual forms in a child’s psychical development. Following Spinoza, Vygotsky defines affect as a dynamogenic state of the body, increasing or decreasing its capacity for action. Thus, affect acts as the intrinsic driving force behind the behaviour of all living beings. In the Spinozist view, psychology is the science about production of affects in the process of objectoriented activity and about exchange of affects in the process of communication of living beings. Vygotsky did not have time to carry out his project of the new psychology of man, and his successors refused or failed to continue this work. Aleksey Leontiev, Vygotsky’s closest disciple and associate, denounced his turn to Spinoza and returned to the phenomenological treatment of affect as a form of experiencing activity. As a consequence, Vygotsky’s problem of the relation between affect and intellect proved to be unsolvable. The philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, who adhered to the Vygotsky school, linked the beginning of psychical activity to the formation of images of the external world, losing sight of affect and, thus, of the problem of freedom as understood by Spinoza. Resuming of L. S. Vygotsky’s height psychology project and studying the evolution of the psyche, based on the concept of freedom as the active mastery of human affects and communication relationships, form two growth points of cultural-historical psychology.

The object of this study is the work of the outstanding sociologist and philosopher of the 20th century Pitirim A. Sorokin as is evident from his work The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation [Sorokin, 1954]. Herein Sorokin provided his elaborate scientific analysis of the crisis state of contemporary society and considered the causes of this phenomenon. To put the above-mentioned ideas into the context of Sorokin’s scientific and philosophical theories means to organize into a system his approaches to crisis phenomena of the contemporary society. Moreover, the solutions suggested by P. Sorokin need to be compared across his various works. Still The Ways... with its analysis of philosophical and religious understanding of love, its functioning, and versatility, makes up the heart of the research. According to the philosopher, love is an ultimate cure for societal maladies and evils. It is love that is capable of turning societies over in the times of crisis and collapse of sensual culture. Sensual culture is stated as one of three cultural supersystems evolving in cycles. That said, love is a real social process that determines the minimal level of consensus in a society. It should be noted that despite having no translation into the Russian language, Sorokin’s book has been widely introduced into the scholarly discourse and those concerned are well aware of its importance. My translation of Chapter 15 of the work presented in this issue of the journal Concept: Philosophy, Religion, Culture can be considered as a vast quotation of Pitirim Sorokin’s writings and will let Russian-speaking readers learn more about the key ideas of the philosopher on understanding the factors and techniques of moral education in different sociocultural contexts in connection with peculiarities of religious self-consciousness.

Here we present the translation of Chapter 15 Types of Control of Biological Drives of the work The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation by Pitirim A. Sorokin, an outstanding American sociologist and philosopher of Russian origin. Sorokin’s notes translated from the original text are presented in the footnotes, the references in English are given in the Author’s spelling. The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation represent an example of late writings of Pitirim Sorokin when he lived in the USA, leading one of the Harvard Research Centers. The first edition of the book was first published in 1954. His sons initiated an extended edition of Sorokin’s work in 1982. This translation based on the publication brought back into print in 2002 allows a new generation of readers to acquaint themselves with the work of a distinguished thinker. His late work is a pioneering endeavor of considering love in its multiple forms at the intersection of science and religion. We chose to offer a translation of Chapter 15 as the most interesting from the point of view of philosophy, cultural and religious studies. Herein P. Sorokin considers the interconnection of religious practices of curbing passions and provides a critical analysis and comparison of multiple approached to holding back the flesh as an attempt to attain a valuable result from ethical and religious perspective.

The subject of this article is the mystical poetry of Parvin Etesami (1907–1941), the article analyzes the religious foundations of the poet's work of the first half of the 20th century (the era of the turning point in Persian culture), continuing the Persian tradition of searching for God on the paths laid by her predecessors and expressing her knowledge of God in old poetic forms (monazere, qasida) with a new poetic language. The study of the poetic ontology of Parvin Etesami, that is, the poet's reflections on God, is based not only on the collection of 60 poems published in Russian (Journey of the Tear, 1984), but primarily on the exact translations of the poems of the Persian poet published for the first time in the article, which could not be included in the Soviet edition and which were carried out by two of the authors of the article. The article analyzes the poet's ideas about God as the creator of man, about God's predestination — the establishment of human mission on earth as a reflection of divine beauty, and about the Grace of God as the essence of human destiny. In the monologues of the dervishes, ideal personalities in the verses of Parvin, the value of the fruits carried by the mystical consciousness of a person who has achieved contemplation of true reality is affirmed. It opposes the ideas of ordinary consciousness, for which the style of behavior of the mystic is like madness. The love to God and the love of God are shown in the poetry of Parvin as the center of the heart, so that externally manifested religiosity (the Kaaba as a shrine is the architecturally revealed center of the world) and inner comprehension of God (the Kaaba of the heart) are affirmed by Parvin in their complementary wholeness. In this way, it is shown that in the verses of Parvin, fidelity to a thousand-year-old spiritual tradition and individual creativity appear as an organic unity.

The article is devoted to the models of ecumenical dialogue in the Russian context on the example of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. The wide-spread and flourishing discussions about ecumenism in the religious studies and theological fields constitute the problem of this study. The author investigates the problem with the aim to identify existing models of an ecumenical dialogue. Following from this purpose the most significant and discussed concepts of ecumenical dialogue in Russia are noted. The emphasis is placed on the widespread concept of two ecumenisms, most fully disclosed by A. V. Shishkov, and related discussions in the scientific and theological fields. Also, a discussion in the church discourse was revealed, which is based on the concepts of representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church: prot. M. Kozlov, mitr. Hilarion (Alfeyev), fr. Georges Florovsky, archm. Sophronia (Sakharova) and others. To outline the broad picture, there was established the position of the Roman Catholic Church as well as its messages addressed to Orthodoxy. In addition, three main trends in the Russian Orthodox Church in relation to ecumenism are identified and described. The first is anti-ecumenism, its members are against any dialogue with non-Orthodoxy. The second is moderate ecumenism, where participants advocate the idea of acceptable and unacceptable forms of ecumenism without making edits to the Church doctrine, and the third are modernist ecumenists who are ready for changes in the teaching of the Church for the sake of the dialogue. Then, there was a transition to the term ecumenism in the context of modern conceptions about the phenomenon and also in the context of the history of the ecumenical movement of the 20th century. The author makes a conclusion about a fundamental importance of the idea of the unity of Christians for the identification of models of ecumenical dialogue. The unity can be determined as unity in one Church, as well as unity within a common space of communication without crossing borders and making one united church. It is noted that the existing concepts and terminology do not reflect this aspect, thus the author suggests the possibility of using such terms as adaptive and integrative dialogue, and lays out prospects for solving the problem.

The article analyzes the approach of Georges Florovsky to the problem of the secular (worldly, earthly, immanent). Georges Florovsky gave the secular tendencies in the Christian world a negative assessment as they led to cultural crises. He proposed to seek their origin in the antinomic (God-human, both earthly and heavenly) nature of the Christian church. He deduced that the origins of secular culture stemmed forth from the medieval attempts to break this antinomy, to create Heaven on Earth. This could be seen in the Byzantine Empire (subordination of the Church to the Emperor), in the Latin world (assignment of secular power to the Pope), in the European postReformation thought (through the blurring of the distinction between theology and de-Christianized philosophy), and later in the Russian religious philosophy (attempts to formulate the idea of Christian state). Drawing on the concept of the divine-human antinomy of the Church, Georges Florovsky insisted that the Church should neither try to blur the line between the religious and the secular not try to influence secular politics, but should instead proceed from the fact that culture is intrinsically religious and substantially theologised. In fact, he objected to the ecclesiasticisation of politics and offered to proceed from the assumption that Christianity (religion) is universal by default. Georges Florovsky used a dual, dialectical approach in which secular discourse is seen as a religious one that aspires to secular power and consequently ceases to be religious, creating a kind of secular culture that threatens Christianity itself. In order to overcome this secular culture Christianity is called upon to abstain from direct political influence on it. While avoiding limitations of the religious-secular dualism of the Enlightenment and allowing the Church thought to prevent aggravating relations with secular politics, this approach fails to properly distinguish between the causes and the effects of the secular discourse. The conclusion identifies ways of furthering Florovsky’s approach and thought.

With the revival of nationalism and identity politics, imagological studies that analyze attitudes, stereotypes and prejudices about one’s own and others’ national character are becoming increasingly relevant. These studies investigate relationships that govern rhetoric, discursive representation, literary activity, and ultimately international relations in general. Imagology is currently intensively developing in literary criticism and other humanities, which also determines the relevance of this study. The purpose of this review article is to analyze scientific publications on the theoretical and practical aspects of imagology over the past 10 years in order to determine its significance and development prospects in the era of globalization. Тhe object of the study is the significance and prospects for the development of imagology; the subject of the study are scientific publications on imagological topics over the past 10 years. The choice of sources for this review was made by the keyword imagology on the following resources: Scopus, Cyberleninka, as well as Imagologica.eu — a site dedicated to imagological research over the past 10 years. An analysis of the main specialized series and collections of articles on imagology was carried out in order to identify the predominant topics of publications and confirm the role of imagology in literary criticism and other humanities. The study of modern Russian and foreign publications on imagological topics has shown that the modern environment is open to studying the discursively constructed nature of many social and cultural values. Thus, a large number of publications on imagological topics testify to the importance of modern imagology, its great prospects and continuous development. The analysis showed the main directions of research in modern imagology and proved that at present imagology is not concerned with isolated images, but with their relationships and associative links with other images, chronological boundaries of the dispersion of images, and shifts in content elements. Combining various approaches of contextual analysis (socio-historical, ethno-psychological and cultural-political), makes the imagological method effective and universal. It must be emphasized that imagology takes on the political mission of deconstructing nationalist reasoning and thus contributes to a better understanding between peoples. In cross-cultural, transnational and globalization studies, imagology has the potential to break stereotypes that oppose nations to each other and to find ways to interact.

Music culture plays an important role in historical development of culture. Performers face the problems of finding their place in the world, choosing the trajectory for their personal evolution and professional development and nowadays these issues have become pressing for the professional community of musicians. One of the complex issues researchers need to address is the evolution of the concept of popularity of music performance. Even though the topic of the popularity of the musician, especially in the spectacular genres of performance, has been extensively studied, there are very few works, which focus on the performer of classical music in the context of cultural pragmatics. The study of a significant historical period in the development of European culture from the Ancient World to the present reveals a number of features in the interpretation of the concept of popularity in different historical periods. Complex cultural analysis as the primary method of research was used to investigate the unique features of each period. The study analyzed popularity of the performer of classical music within a particular sociocultural context and resulted in a set of distinct historyspecific concepts of popularity. This paper presents the findings on the evolution of public’s attitude toward musical performance and investigates historical group values determining popularity. It is noted that popularity is a matter of both church and secular music. Classical music performer, intentionally or not, addresses the problem of cultural education of the public and forms their values. At the same time, musicians directly depend on the existing tastes and preferences of their audience. This paradox of popularity has existed through all ages of European music culture. Popularity may take various forms from adoration to hate. In the field of classical music, popularity is achieved by people who have a certain charisma that in terms of attractiveness to the public matters more than professionalism.

 National science is being transformed under the influence of global processes, which are mainly, although not entirely, dictated by the dominance of neoliberal ideas in a wide range of developed and developing countries. The term neoliberalism, (or neo-liberalism), which was coined in the 20th century, offers recommendations that include a set of political, economic, and ideological actions. The article examines the impact of the neoliberal turn in science on the process of interaction between science and society. It is substantiated that this affects the development of vector models for the spread of scientific neoliberal ideology. Academia is a research field that deals with a wide range of issues from actual dissemination of scientific research to the models of involving new constituencies, in which non-professionals are encouraged to participate in research via scientific discussions and polls. Academia is a global and debatable topic to be discussed. It should be noted that scientific communications as a process of promoting scientific knowledge outside the scientific communities have not been thoroughly studied by domestic researchers yet. In the international scientific community and the Russian scientific field, until recently, the understanding of the tasks of scientific communication varied greatly. However, the development of scientific communities is widespread in different countries and reveals the impacts of neoliberalism research on this process. The neoliberal initiative encourages the creation of conditions in which, firstly, citizens take an active part in solving scientific issues. And secondly, the prestige of the pursuit of pure science does not deter researchers from promoting commercialization and the free development of their scientific activity. The peculiarities of interaction between science and society are regarded from the point of view of the Italian sociologist Massimiano Bucchi. Distinguished in academic discourse for his classification of relationships among science, technology, and society, M. Bucchi specifies three patterns for such relationships: deficit, dialogue, and completion.

Today public speaking as a form of communication calls for the development of actives ways of speaker’s interaction with the audience, with the audience taking on an increasingly active and meaningful participation. In the cultural environment of modern higher education, in universities, student debates are becoming one of the most relevant and popular activities. Basing on the assumption that debate is an effective tool for developing both communicative and speech skills of future professionals in any field of activity focused on social interaction, this study aims to investigate the specifics of the organizing and conducting debates to develop mastery, professionalism, and leader potential of students in the framework of the course of Russian as a second foreign language (RSL). With this approach in mind, we set the following objectives: 1) to clarify the main approaches to the meaning of oral communication and the role of debate in it for the formation of basic competencies of students today; 2) to study the structure of typical units of public speaking; 3) to identify problems students face in the process of verbal communication; 4) to substantiate the advantages of using debates for the development of the necessary general cultural, professional and communicative qualities and skills of a future professional. In its methodology, this study was based on the works in the field of the theory of communication, the language of business communication, the culture of speech, pedagogy, and methods of teaching the Russian language to non-native speakers. The research methods included surveys and interviews, as well as content analysis and case study methods. The study has proved that solving the pedagogical problems of fostering responsibility, independence, and proactive social attitude requires the development of general cultural, research and communication skills, and debates have proved to be an effective form of practicing these skills in the educational process. The communicative culture and the overall training of students for their future professional career means leadership development, and for this cause debates are an effective teaching tool.

This paper focuses on the director's theater as an important stage in the evolution of the opera genre and at the same time an ambiguous cultural phenomenon. Due to the rapid growth of interest in opera in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the concept of director's opera, which owes its formation and flourishing to the postmodern condition, begins to spread in the West. At present the term director's opera is actively used in Russian art criticism. As a result, it was found that the majority of researchers of musical theater in their works associate this concept with the provocative nature of works and too speculative stage interpretations of operas, as well as apparent liberty in the treatment of classical heritage, leading to the destruction of the opera canon. Simultaneously, with the theoretical reflection of the phenomenon of director' opera, as a result of the major crises of the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as fatigue from the corrosive, destructing irony of postmodernism, the concept of metamodernism appears. According to the theorists of metamodernism, the new cultural paradigm aims to recode modern culture through art, and music was the first to embrace metamodernism that later on penetrated and conquered various cultural spheres. Defending its social significance and vitality, opera theater, following other art forms, changes its aesthetics, demonstrating trends associated with metamodernism, for instance allows for unexpected collaborations that welcome very different people to shine their otherness. As a result of the study of literature and empirical materials, the author concludes that the outlined intensions, which appeared in the period 2016–2018, can be considered as significant examples of the penetration of metamodern trends in contemporary opera theater. As the examples, the writer considers production of Verdi's opera La Traviata by Wilson and Arthur Honegger’s oratorio Joan of Arc at the Stake by Castellucci.

The article deals with the issues of cultural interaction between Russia and Italy in the sphere of cinematography. Cultural dialogue between Russian and Italian cinema can be viewed from different angles. The first level is intercultural communication as a tool of communicational system, the second is cultural interaction as a process of cultural practices of the two countries, and the third level is cultural diplomacy where intercultural interaction with its various forms of communication and contacts is regarded as the implementation of soft power. Based on academic research and Pavel Parshin’s theory, the following main tools of soft power can be named: mutual attraction, steady positive attitude, and permanent exchange of cultural experience. Thus cultural interaction is both the search for artistic unity and the embodiment of the dynamics of cultural dialogue analyzed through the chronotope theory of Mikhail Bakhtin within big and small time. It should be mentioned that it was M. Bakhtin who introduced the concept of dialogical nature of culture and the term of cultural dialogue. This approach makes it possible to follow the evolution of cultural dialogue between Russia and Italy over the years and define and characterize the types and stages of cultural dialogue between Russia and Italy within a broad system of cultural diplomatic relations between the countries. This paper analyses specificity of the following stages: the stage of indirect dialogue; the stage of adoption of cultural practices; the stage of suspended and re-established dialogue; the stage of activization of cultural dialogue; the stage of cultural intercourse in the era of globalization and digitalization; the modern pre-pandemic stage of cultural dialogue between Russia and Italy. The research is based on a wide range of scientific papers, data from international documents, memoirs of Russian and Italian film people as well as Russian-Italian co-production.

The book under review was published in 2021 and its title can be translated as The Temple and the Rite: Social Functions of the Sacred. It became a result of fifteen years of work conducted by Doctor of Philosophy Ivan Pavlovich Davydov. Epistemology and methodology of religious science, problems of myth and rite, as well as the issues of religious art, are central to his research. The basic method used by I. P. Davydov is structural functionalism and the theoretical base he applies is the philosophy of Postmodernism represented by the names of G. Bataille, R. Caillois, J. Kristeva, M. Foucault, M. Blanchot. The book is divided into two main parts. In the first part I. P. Davydov focuses on theoretical issues: the concept of transgression in the philosophy of Postmodernism, definition of the term religion, description of the functions of religion, and specification of the myth-ritual concept. The author introduces his original method of functional analysis of archetypal images of the collective unconscious. In the second part of the book, the author deals with the study of Christian hymnography, iconography, and architecture through the prism of the method mentioned above. It can be regarded as an attempt to substantiate and verify the theoretical constructions of the first part by analyzing the empirical material of religious art. This part of the research serves to illustrate the practical application of the author’s method. Here the author defines major religious concepts, such as semiotics of sacred spaces, iconography, iconology, and icon, from the position of religious studies and philosophy and substantiates their scientific importance. We may conclude that this work in light of the latitude of the problems raised in it can be useful for the wide range of researchers working not only in the field of religious studies but also in the other fields of knowledge: anthropology, cultural studies, art history, psychoanalysis, etc. The readers can acquaint themselves with the method of functional analysis in the first part of the book and adapt it to their research, using the examples from the second part of the book as the patterns.

In early March, 2022, Moscow State Pedagogical University hosted the 26th researchto-practice international conference Linguistic for All devoted to language contacts in the modern world. Aiming to provide a venue for young researchers to present their findings and practice their public speaking skills and to advance their access to the world of science, the conference brought together students of schools and universities from across Russia and abroad. Professor Lubkov A.V., Rector of the University, Corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Education opened the conference by remarking the increased need for communication the world has experienced recently. He encouraged the participants to promote Russian education, culture and language through wider contacts and fruitful work. Professor Tarasov S. V., Rector of Herzen University that was another organizer of the conference, noted that linguistics unites people regardless of their backgrounds and field of study. Drozdova O. Ye., Chairman of the Organizing Committee of the Conference, addressed the importance of personal and professional communication by all means, be it in person or online. The two-day conference began on March 3 with speeches from students and three panel discussion of Professional Communication and Labour Market Competitiveness (hosted by Shcherbakov A. V.), Language and Languages in the World Today (hosted by Dorofeev Yu. V.), and Language Games in Russian: Yesterday, Today, Always (hosted by Belorusec S. M.). The next day Chernyshove Ye. G. welcomed school students who presented their reports before the panel of renowned scholars from Russian and foreign universities. Participants in ten sections of the conference were awarded with diplomas. Another important stage in the work of teachers, university and school student ended, but hopefully next year the 27th conference Linguistics for All will gather those interested in languages again.

From April 14 to 16, 2022, the Moscow State Linguistic University hosted the 3rd International Scientific and Practical Conference Dialogue of Cultures and Civilizations. The event was organized by the Moscow State Linguistic University in cooperation with the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Association of Educational Organizations Scientific and Educational Theological Organization. Researchers from Astrakhan, Voronezh, Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Syktyvkar, Ufa, Yaroslavl, as well as from China and France took part in the sessions. Those were: Philosophical Search for the Foundations of Language, Culture and Society; Historical and Cultural Heritage and Modern Documentary Sources of Information in Russia and Foreign Countries; Cultural Identity in the Modern World: Analytical Models, Ways of Construction and Forms of Representation; Religious Identity and Theological Discourse in the Context of Modernity; Intellectual Potential Management in Organizational Structures of Digital Economy; Psychology and Pedagogy: Methodology, History, Theory, Practice; Foreign Language in the Sphere of Professional Communication; Physical Safety and National Health. The 3rd International Scientific and Practical Conference Dialogue of Cultures and Civilizations became a significant event in the scientific life of the capital, the high content level of which has been repeatedly noted in speeches by leading Russian and foreign researchers, as well as representatives of public authorities.