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The article provides a critical conceptual analysis of the theological approach to consideration of relationship of the sacral and secular as well as postmodern interpretation of "sacrificial" and "sacral" concepts. The article gives the characteristic of the subject of postmodern "reflection beyond logocentricity" from the perspective of the logocentrically conducted classical Hegelian concretism of truth. Moreover, the postmodern subject appears incomplete from the epistemic point of view, with domination of subjectively varying logic of interpretation of the considered phenomenon. The study was undertaken in a manner of critical analyticity conducted in a systematic and dialectic way. It is meaningfully revealed in the historical and culturological relationship and is concretized in a substantial way. It supposes the achievement of such logic of consideration that appears to be aimed at the achievement of conceptual completeness of the concerned matters. Accordingly, importance is being increasingly attached to the methodological provision about conceptual and contextual diversity of the supposed meanings of the terms. Therefore, their interpretation overcomes the single attachment to the fixed type of discourse. The main findings of the undertaken study concern the peculiarity of discursive practice of theological and postmodern forms of thinking. There is shown that difficulty of true foundation of concepts of the religious discourse in its own frames does not overcome in efficiently conceptual way. The article stresses the absence of a mandatory link between sacral limits and their religious interpretation. There is highlighted the provision on the reactualization of rudimentary naturalistic religious ideas, which occurs as a result of the general crisis of ideologies and scientific form of consciousness. The author justifies the conclusion about the incomplete correctness of Eliade's interpretation of the religious ritual as a process that eliminates historical time. The historical role of ritual practice lies in the formation and development of sacralized topos of value tracks of emerging sociality. The article shows that postmodern interpretation of concepts of self-sacrifice (victim) and sacredness takes place in an emphasized non-historical manner of psychologized narrative description.

The article provides the analysis of mytho­logical dimension of the film "Ilych's Gate" (Zastava Ilycha) by M.M. Khutsiev. The author concludes that the text of this film represents self-reflexive structure. Firstly, the plot of the film quite clearly depicts the mythological perception of reality. Secondly, the course of narration reproduces the influence of mytho­logical codes on the perception of the audience. The text of the film contains a description of its own mechanism of influence on the viewer as well as the processes taking place in the minds of the audience at the moment of viewing.The first part informs of the main principles of mytho­logical thinking and the idea of time and space in the myth, referring to the works by C. Lévi-Strauss, R. Barthes, M. Eliade, A. Losev, E. Cassirer and others. Special attention is paid to the role of myth and initiation ritual in the psychological formation of a personality, as, based on the following, this is the theme that forms the basis of the film plot.The second part deals with the methods by which the mythological dimension is manifested in the text of the film.In the third part, the researcher shows how the contrast of secular and sacral becomes the main semantic opposition promoting the motion of the plot.In the fourth part, the author proves that the reflection of reality in the characters' minds is a referent of the images shown on the screen. The characters' development lies in the actualization of the sacral and mythological perception of the world. In turn, the cultural codes contained in the text of the film are designed to evoke a kind of response in the minds of the audience — to actualize the same sacred modus of perception in its ideas, the achievement of which is the ultimate goal of the characters. Thus, the inner path of the characters in the film reflects the processes that excite the studied film in the perception of the audience.The relevance of the article lies in the discovery and description of the principle of self-reflection in the structure of the film "Ilych's Gate", which allows us to understand at a qualitatively new level its structure and place in the historical development of Russian cinematography.

The article examines the chronotope of fairy tale as a basic plot component in the structure of the novel "My Children" by the contemporary Russian writer Guzel Yakhina. The article investigates the ways of archetypical space functioning within the system of mythological time, and analyzes the principal space and time coordinates of the lives of main characters and their interaction. There is shown that Yakhina's appeal to the genre elements of fairy tale allows her to underscore the universal and all-encompassing nature of the historical processes that shaped the tragic fate of the Volga Germans in Soviet Russia. In the novel "My Children", the plots and images of German folklore serve as a basic model for organizing different types of space arising from the stable archaic communicative mo­dels and cultural archetypes of folk tradition. The no­vel presents such elements of the space and time continuum of fairy tales as the existence of borders (both open and closed) and the character's travels within different worlds; the transformative capacity of space and time (extension and compression, appearance and disappearance, plasticity and rigidity, dynamic and static properties, etc.); the link between the "lower" and the "upper" worlds or the "space of giants" and the "space of dwarves"; and the mutual influence of space and time characteristics. The article identifies the semiotic and semantic properties of the underground, underwater, aquatic, terrestrial and aerial spaces presented in the novel. The everyday and socio-historical space and time continua in the novel are a mirror reflection of the space and time characteristics of fairy tale, while archetypes are incarnated in the domain of social interaction. Yakhina's novel "My Children" presents such chronoto­pic features as relativism, invariance, and symmetry. The use of the archetypical structure of fairy tale allowed the writer to make a literary analysis of complex socio-cultural and socio-psychological processes.

The object of the study is the creative intuition, which belongs to the mystical and secret phenomena of personality existence. The acting mecha­nism of intuition in the creative process is not fully clarified, which makes it an actual scientific problem. Thanks to intuition, a poetic work displays the reality of possibilities, which might eventually become the actual reality in the form of personal being-in-the-world not only of the creator, but also of the rea­der. For the first time ever, the article analyzes, from the position of intuitive ontology of poetic word, a small lyrical poem by Marina Tsvetaeva "Mother in the Garden", which she presented to Lena/Galya Dia­konova/Gala. This poem contains the life story of Gala, who became the wife and the muse for the great people — poet Paul Éluard and artist Salvador Dali. Gala, having intuitively chosen her favorite Tsvetaeva's poem, did not leave any records about its text. It remains a mystery whether she had interpreted it or, having left Russia, tried to forget about it forever. A performed interpretation of the poetic text led to the conclusion: the lyrical poem by Marina Tsvetaeva demonstrates, in a rolled-up form, the fate of Gala and her difficult relationship with her husbands — P. Éluard and S. Dali. The article explains many of the woman's oddities in her communication with men by the specifics of her being-in-the-world. Gala's exi­stence was based on multiple fears. Their dominance in her life caused her hysteria, which turned her into a femme fatale. In her youth, Gala had been coping with the pressure of her fears, reducing their active force; while in her old age, the woman fell in their grip, which played a destructive role for her. Despite her intuitiveness of thinking, Gala was broken by her fears, which had been prophetically foretold, long before the real events, by the poetic lines of M. Tsvetaeva.

The article explores various aspects of the practice of collecting works of classical art in Renaissance Venice, as well as its influence on the content program formation of the so-called "Collector's Portrait", a typological kind of portraiture common in the art of the 16th century. The most interesting examples of it are the "Portrait of Andrea Odoni" by Lorenzo Lotto and the "Portrait of Jacopo Strada" by Titian, considered in this article. The study is relevant because of its connection with the research attention, outlined in recent decades, to the history of collecting, antique trade and the role of socio-economic factors in the development of art history. The article aims to investigate, on the basis of written sources, the matter of how the content of such paintings reflects the moral and ethical ideas about the meaning of antique collecting, as well as to identify its characteristic features on the Venetian grounds. One of the features was that a significant proportion of the artistic material in private collections was composed of works of Greek-Hellenistic art. The interest in collecting these works speaks about the special aesthetic predilections of collectors, their sensitivity to the actual artistic merits of antiques, and not only about their desire to possess antiquities. In addition, the practice of collecting was intended to express the moral virtues of the collector, the greatness of their spirit and the nobility of their thoughts. On the other hand, it served as an important way of social self-assertion for those who were not part of the exclusive elite of Venetian society (patricians), but sought to approach it in their social ambitions. First of all, the article is of interest to historians, art historians, culturologists, museum specialists and antique trade specialists.

Ippolit Novsky and Vladimir Pollak are the names that will say nothing to modern theatergoers, and even those experts who know the theatrical past of our country well may hardly recollect them. Nevertheless, these two made their contribution to the development of Russian theatrical art. Educated, multi-talented, antiquity experts, they, unfortunately, did not leave any memoirs. Even their letters are almost not survived to our days. The Soviet history of the 1930s knows many similar examples. That time, when people had to destroy their priceless records, personal correspondence, their own memories, can be called the New Middle Ages. Unfortunately, that fully affected our heroes, especially V. Pollak, who was an assistant director in the V.F. Komissarzhevskaya Leningrad Drama Theater in the 1960s.Otherwise, we would surely know much more about their lives and companionship. And the people around them were more than worthy of our notice.Hereditary nobleman Ippolit Petrovich Semenovsky (pseudonym — Novsky) was a close friend of E.B. Vakhtangov and B.M. Sushkevich; together with the collaboration of B.M. Sushkevich and N.N. Bromley, he shared their Leningrad creative period. He played first in the Moscow Art Thea­ter, and then on the stage of the A.S. Pushkin Leningrad State Academic Drama Theater, taught ac­ting at the Cent­ral Theater School, in the workshops of B.M. Sush­kevich and E.I. Time, and at the Kare­lian-Finnish Studio.During the siege of Leningrad, I.P. Novsky was working on the radio, and the works of Russian classics in his performance supported the strength and hope of the Leningraders. I.P. Novsky and V.M. Pollak had to go through many dramatic events, but they retained their devotion and deep love for the theater. They were among those inconspicuous but indispensable servants of Melpomene.

The article is devoted to the works of I.S. Lukash, a significant writer of the first wave of emigration, that were published abroad in Russian. Previous literary criticism comprehended I.S. Lukash's works fragmentary, sometimes one-sided, sometimes biased. The aim of the article is to complete two tasks: to trace the creative evolution of I.S. Lukash; to formulate and substantiate the hypothesis of appropriateness to unite in a dilogy his mystery "The Devil" and his poem "The House of the Dead", never considered separately before. These tasks caused the structuring of the article into sections, of which the first is devoted to the ideological and thematic evolution of I.S. Lukash as a writer, the second — to the hypothetical unity of the mystery "Devil" and the poem "The House of the Dead". With the help of catalogs and collections of the largest libraries in Russia and abroad, the article identifies and engages foreign publications of I.S. Lukash's work in Russian. On the basis of this material, there is performed an analysis of the ideological diversity of I.S. Lukash's works. The article reveals the main range of narrative themes, the genre diversity, the author's individuality, the uniqueness of philosophical vision. There is traced the evolution of I.S. Lukash's works, in which three main chronological stages are distinguished: ego-futuristic, military-patriotic, "St. Petersburg".From I.S. Lukash's creative heritage, the article, for the first time, pays special attention to the mystery "The Devil" and the poem "The House of the Dead", and emphasizes the genre originality of both the works. In the context of the identified ideological evolution of I.S. Lukash's works at various levels — chronological, genre, textual, narrative, philosophical — there is examined the hypothesis of appropriateness to unite the two works into a conventional dilogy. The conclusion notes the up-to-date relevance of both the works by I.S. Lukash.

The article deals with study and attribution of rare portable iconostases ("movable church"). Their features include the Sovereign tier (with the Royal Doors) absence, the small size, and the four remaining tiers (Deisis, Great Feasts, Prophets, and Patriarchs) painted on one board. Portable iconostases were used during long pilgrimages, missionary trips, or military campaigns, as well as in Bezpopovtsy (priestless) houses of worship.In liturgical practice, both in ancient times and now, portable iconostases were used under certain circumstances for long journeys. They are easy to set up in any place, whether it is a house, a tent or a field. In the 16th century, embroidered iconostases, rapidly installable in field and stationary conditions, were brought along in military campaigns. Thus, in his military campaigns, Emperor Alexander I used a silk-painted iconostasis made by masters of the Moscow Kremlin Armory. Movable chur­ches were also used in remote and sparsely populated areas (for example, in the Olonets Governorate). The services were held in a big house and lasted for two or three days.There were quite a lot of portable iconostases in the past, but only few of them have been preserved, among which there are rather peculiar ones, shaped as cupboards, nightstands, kiots. At the beginning of the 20th century, an iconostasis icon was painted with five tiers on one board.

The article examines a number of gra­phic works by M.V. Dobuzhinsky: the drawings "Magnificent City, Poor City...", "View of a Petersburg House", and a decorative drawing with a fragment of a house in the style of classicism. In spite of the fact that M.V. Dobuzhinsky's creativity is quite well stu­died, these works are considered for the first time in the article, in order to explore the process of finding the original artistic language in which the master "spoke" about his favorite city. The article identifies the architectural monuments of St. Petersburg that served as prototypes of those depicted, reveals the sources (visual and literary), analyzes the stylistic features. The scientific novelty of the article is defined by a new methodological approach to studying M.V. Dobuzhinsky's graphic heritage consi­dered in the context of intersection of literature and fine arts — Russian, Western European and Japanese. For the first time, the author makes an attempt to determine the stylistic affiliation of the mentioned works. Their traditional (formal) analysis, in comparison with works by Hiroshige, A. Dürer, G.B. Piranesi, E.E. Lansere, and J. Whistler, is supplemented by an analysis of M.V. Dobuzhinsky's memoirs and letters. This significantly expands the existing ideas about the visual sources of the artist's work. The article reveals that the drawings "Magnificent City, Poor City...", "View of a Petersburg House", as well as the decorative drawing with a fragment of a house in the style of classicism, depict the house of Galashevsky — V.Ya. Lebedev (87, Fontanka Embankment). The author ascertains the influence of Hiroshige's woodcuts from the series "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo" on the artistic solution of the drawing "Magnificent City, Poor City...", as well as on the drawing "Market" by E.E. Lansere, who, in turn, had influenced the abovementioned drawings by M.V. Dobuzhnisky. The article shows that A. Dürer's and G.B. Piranesi's engravings influenced the artistic solution of the drawing "View of a Petersburg House", likewise J. Whistler's etchings and lithographs exerted influence on a number of works by M.V. Dobuzhinsky and E.E. Lansere. The author concludes that M.V. Dobuzhinsky's works over various versions of images of the house of Galashevsky — V.Ya. Lebedev were in line with his intensive creative experiments: the search for his own vision of the ima­ge of Petersburg.

The article reveals artistic features of the unique ancient frescoes of the Protoevangelium cycle of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral of the Mirozhsky Monastery in Pskov, dedicated to the life of the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as well as her childhood and youth. The article considers a brief history of the first artistic ima­ges of the Virgin, her life and the Protoevangelium cycles in the history of world art and the monumental painting in the period from 2nd to the 12th century. In previous scientific publications, the attention was paid to the history of the monastery, the disclosure of ancient fresco technique and technology, the conditions of frescoes preservation, as well as the main characters and the content of the scenes. The novelty of this study lies in the analysis of artistic features of the Protoevangelium compositions of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral of the Mirozhsky Monastery and in the disclosure of a narrower to­pic insufficiently covered in the specific literature and requiring further in-depth research: the perception of the ancient frescoes' background details by vie­wers of the 21st century. The article analyzes the artistic features of additional, secondary background details of the frescoes, whose thoroughness is unique for the medieval period of Christianity formation in Russia. The author focuses on our contemporaries' perception of the features of the composition and color of the Mirozhsky Monastery's Protoevangelium frescoes' background in comparison with similar scenes of medieval murals in temples of Kiev, Veliky Novgorod, Polotsk and other cities. The artistic compositions of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral were developed on the initiative of Archbishop Nifont, one of the most educated people of his time, and made by Byzantine masters invited to Pskov to paint the walls in the first half of the 12th century. The frescoes of the Protoevangelium cycle are located in a separate South-Western compartment under the choirs. This article organically complements the scientific publications devoted to the analysis of gospel scenes, acts of the apostles, the life cycle of the Pope Clement, prophets and martyrs depicted in the paintings of the Mirozhsky Monastery.

The paper approaches the techno-humanitarian balance of physical (accelerating) and humanitarian (controlling) technologies. It demonstrates that the absence of the human in this ba­lance makes the idea about ensuring the socio-system's sustainable development through the establishment of techno-humanitarian balance erroneous. The required adequate proportion of "powers" between the technologies in the techno-humanitarian balance necessitates the civilization to attempt to "harness" not only the technological singularity but the humanitarian singularity, too. It is shown that the techno-humanitarian balance in the singularity mode destroys the human physical and mental nature. The human is introduced into the binary technological balance through transforming it into a triple balance and adding the semantic technologies inherent to human beings. The triple balance is characterized by the oppositions between intelligence and thinking, information and meanings. The paper explores the triple balance and its edges in the context of the ultimate singularity. It is shown that the human being, through thinking and meanings, can correlate themselves with the semantic singularity (the infinity of the semantic field) — thus becoming Homo Singularity. These conclusions are substantiated through the V.V. Nalimov's probabilistic model of consciousess, which also mathe­matically formalizes the process of semantic decapsulation of the personality and the personal interaction with the semantic vacuum (infinity).The paper introduces the concept of finite dilatation of the cultural semantic field and the big semantic transition as the era of formation of Homo Singula­rity and beginning of their practical work with semantic infinity. The paper provides examples of such practical work in the fields of art and science. Homo Singularity not only prevents their physical and mental nature from destruction but also keeps the po­werful artificial intelligence under control by counte­ring big data with their ability to integrate the multiple into the single (whole) and make a transition from the discrete level of information to a continuous (infinite) level of meanings.

A characteristic feature of the artistic life of Russia at the turn of the 19th—20th centuries was the growth in the number of private art collections and the expansion of the social composition of collectors due to the addition of industrialists, merchants and intellectuals. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, these collections became one of the important sources in the formation of art collections of metropolitan and provincial museums of Russia. The article is devoted to one of the most interesting private collections of the Kazan province — the collection of A.F. Mantel, formed at the beginning of the 20th century from paintings and graphics by the leading masters of the World of Art association: A.N. Benois, I.Ya. Bilibin, A.F. Gaush, B.M. Kustodiev, D.I. Mitrokhin, G.I. Narbut, N.K. Roerich and others. The article reveals the fates of once famous works of the artists from the World of Art association, which were shown at the association's exhibitions and published in well-known books, magazines and almanacs such as Apollo, Libra, Rosehip, At Dawn and others. A.F. Mantel's collection played an important role in the formation of museums in several cities of the Volga region — Kazan, Tetyushi, Kozmodemyansk — becoming one of the sources of contemporary national art collections. Due to various reasons, the most of the collection, including the part received by museums, was lost in the late 1910s — 1930s. Relying on archival and literary sources and museum collections, the author, for the first time, managed to restore, with a high degree of accuracy, the composition of the part of A.F. Mantel's collection that was purchased for museums of Tetyushi and Kozmodemyansk, and to clarify the composition of the Kazan Museum's collection.

The sphere of creative industries is the activity based on applying creative approach. Due to the complex composition of the areas of production attributed to creative industries, and the interdisciplinarity of approaches to their study, a consolidated position regarding their definition, composition, classification and essential characteristics has not been developed yet. At the same time, many resear­chers believe that activities in the field of creative industries have the ability to develop human potential. The inclusion of the topic, principles and approaches of the creative industries to the educational process of the higher education institutes of Russia conforms to the educational field development tendencies connected with the formation of necessary metasubject skills and abilities in present conditions. In those si­tuations when there is no possibility and need for introducing specialized educational courses in creative industries into educational programs, the same positive results can be achieved by applying a practice-oriented approach to the disciplines, provided by curriculum plans, educational and work practi­ces, and educational events. Through acquain­tance with creative businesses, inventions of their own creative projects, students have the opportunity to expand the future professional field, to apply the know­ledge, gained in particular from stu­dying a wide range of disciplines, to solve real problems in public life. The practice-oriented approach in educational programs can be embodied in the forms of specialized edu­cational programs, project semi­nars (competitions, incubators) and educational events. The article considers the practical examples of the specified formats implemented by "Creative Industries" Agency from 2015 to 2018 in partnership with a range of state institutes of higher education (Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow City Government University of Management, Petrosavodsk State University, Siberial Fede­ral University) and cultu­ral institutions.

The article focuses on the 19th-century American history schoolbooks as primary sour­ces in historiography and cultural studies. The re­levance of the topic is determined by the fact that historically several regions with different econo­mic, cultu­ral and ideological characteristics existed and deve­loped in the USA. Therefore, broad political powers of the state governments that traditionally made laws in the field of education may give us the reason to assume that the narration of the American history in books produced and used in different parts of the country might have reflected values and beliefs of those particular states.The study was based on the principle of historicism, which let us closely analyze such questions as the authorship, places of schoolbook publishing and areas of their distribution with re­ference to the changing sociocultural realia of the 19th-century America.The following conclusions were drawn. The advent and development of public education as well as the blossom of the printing industry in New England contributed to the fact that in the 1820s there emerged a big group of authors who wrote the most popular American histories. Simultaneously with the growth of the number and influence of publi­shing firms in New York and Philadelphia, the center of the textbook production moved to the Mid-Atlantic Region in the latter half of the century.The United States territorial acquisitions of the 19th century predetermined the mass migration of the American citizens who amongst other possessions carried their children's textbooks to new places. Due to the fact that the system of public edu­cation was still in its juvenile years and did not enjoy authority among the citizens, school administrations and teachers were not able to make parents buy new schoolbooks from the lists approved by schools, counties, or states, which led to the problem of textbook diversity and to the distribution of the northern books throughout the whole country. Concurrently, high profits in textbook business attracted many people who tried to write and sell as many histories as possible. This resulted in the problem of oversupply of schoolbooks.

The article raises the actual questions: if the theater can be Christian and who in that case the actor is — "a priest" or "a buffoon". The purpose of this article is to consider the issue of "Christian theater" at different levels: historical, psychological, social. The article analyzes the issues of actors' personalities formation and their religious sear­ches. There are considered the conditions of Christian upbringing in families and faith preservation in the complex historical period of the Russian history of the late 19th — mid-20th century. The no­velty of this study lies in the fact that it introduces into scientific circulation little-known manuscript materials stored in the Manuscripts Department of the Russian State Library: 44 autobiographies of recognized actors, which were published in 1928 in edited form by the writer V.G. Lidin; as well as some other unpublished documents. The sources show that actors brought up on Christian ideals followed them in their work, despite the difficult conditions of socio-political life in the country. Among them are well-known actors of the Moscow Art Theater, Moscow Art Academic Theater, State Academic Maly Thea­ter, Vsevolod Meyerhold State Theater, Bolshoi Drama Theater, Vakhtangov State Academic Theater (and others): V. Kachalov, I. Ilyinsky, R. Apollonsky, L. Vivyen, G. Ge, A Koonen, A. Orochko, G. Martynova and other masters. The article also uses some little-known writings of the actors, their questionnaires on the psychology of acting, photographs, as well as manuscripts and published memoirs of their contemporaries (E.D. Golovinskaya, E.A. Korotneva, V.D. Markov, Yu. Panich), allowing to consider the issue of "Christian theater" from different sides.