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The monograph by L.V. Polyakova collects and systematizes the material
concerning the creative biography of E. Zamyatin, his ideological priorities, poetics, the history of publications, relations with writers. The historiosophical concepts of
the fi rst third of the century, facts and phenomena of literary life, disputes of critics,
as well as modern literary thought are presented. A broad context is being built that
allows us to perceive the philosophical depth and artistic power of Zamyatin's prose
in its integrity, multidimensionality, connections with the humanitarian insights of
the twentieth century. Zamyatin's creative individuality is revealed through the
correlation of his views on the people, the revolution, world history with the views
of N. Berdyaev, A. Blok, M. Gorky, S. Yesenin, I. Ilyin, T. Mann, N. Trubetskoy,
S. Frank, O. Spengler and many others. Hermeneutical approach to the comprehension
of works is effective, comparative analysis is actively used. L.V. Polyakova's research
is marked by a vivid polemic and reasoned judgments.

The article deals with the reception of Arnold Böcklin's pictorial
heritage in the Russian culture and literature of the Silver Age. It has gone through
all the stages from a violent passion to cooling and almost complete oblivion. Th e
focus is on the lyrics of Ivan Bunin and Andrey Bely of the 1900s. The author reveals
the ways of acquaintance of the Russian public with the paintings of the Swiss painter
(foreign travels, reproductions) and the peculiarities of their perception. By means
of comparative analysis, the author reveals the similarities in the plots and images
of some of the poems of two contemporary poets with the most famous paintings of
the artist: The Island of the Dead and Th e Battle of the Centaurs. It is concluded that
the culture of Russian modernism as a whole was characterized by a metaphysical
interpretation of Böcklin. Bunin valued more symbolic lyrical landscapes that convey
a sense of the mystical enigma of being and human life, or allegorical canvases
(Oceanids), impressive because of the beauty of the plastic scene. Bely sought in the
artist's work support for the assertion of the existence of another, otherworldly reality,
the realm of myth and ancient legends, and this was refl ected in his poetry. And in
the symphonies, allusions to Böcklin create a satirical effect. Nevertheless, both in
Bunin's poem and in Bely's works, we fi nd interesting examples of a modernist artistic
synthesis that combines painting and literature and is aimed at spiritualizing reality,
overcoming positivism and materialism. We see how the images of the Swiss artist
become the language for someone else's creative thought, fi t into a different national
culture.

Art is not only a form of self-expression, but it is self-knowledge and
self-acceptance. From this position, the Creator Man's image in art represents research optics in which the transformations occurring in human existence become visible. These transformations are connected by a person's experience of the meaning and values of his own existence in their relationship with the world. Understanding art as an existential experience, and therefore understanding the image of the Creator Man as artistic existence, opens up the possibility of understanding the «human code» contained in artistic creativity.
The Creator Man's image is one of the main projects of art, which has gone through many stages during its implementation. The article consistently examines different historical periods of artistic creativity. Their analysis shows the gradual growth of the individual principle of the artist, which had its own version of the «counterweight» in different eras. On this basis, the author of the study puts forward a hypothesis: when a human artist first realized his exceptional creative capabilities in understanding and transforming reality, his individualized position of a creator (a thesis) always had its antithesis. At the same time, the thesis, which is a constant first established by Renaissance culture, could be modified depending on the dominant social, cultural and artistic meanings and values in a given era, but it never disappeared from art. While different antitheses dominated in different historical periods. The author examines various manifestations of this contradiction using the examples of baroque art, classicism, romanticism, realism and modernism. This allows us to fix the reference points in the development of the Creator Man's image.
Analysis of historical transformations of the Creator Man's individualization in art makes it possible to trace the changes that took place in artistic consciousness, reflecting the image of the world with the anthropos operating in it.

This article considers the authors' theoretical complex 'cognitive humanitarian semiotics' (ST (synthetic text) - SLP (synthetic lingual personality) - CPP (cognitive-pragmatic program)) as 'growth points' of philological knowledge. This complex is built in the mode of metadisciplinarity, the essence of which is in a deep epistemological substantiation of those interdisciplinary connections that unambiguously point to the internal kinship of outwardly heterogeneous principles that define a complex (hybrid) cultural and linguistic object.Main results: for a deep interpretation of the 'subject-text' in culture, its model analysis is necessary (according to uniform rules on variable material and with variable components). The specifics of SLP is that it allows modeling heterogeneous in terms of discursiveness zones (for example, verbal and behavioral at the same time) culturally significant 'text of the subject in culture' precisely as an individual one. This is possible because its main parameters are determined by the CPP of the SLP of the source subject. The basic CPP of the artist that is directly related to the intentionality of the acts of his consciousness, demonstrates the inseparability of the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, cognitive intentions of the personality and the forms of its creative (life-creating) self-realization, conceptually indexes the entire synthetic text space and sets the analytical-interpretative / reinterpretative vectors of its perception and self-perception. The creativity of a real artist in the aspect of the CPP appears, on the one hand, as a purposeful developing system (otherwise, the emergence and evolution of a recognizable author's artistic world and poetics, style formation, etc., is impossible), on the other hand, as an 'open system' that constantly 'finds itself' under all transformations. The literary projection of the SLP allows us to give a 'deep' (cognitive-discursive), rather than an external description of many processes of the sociocultural 'field of literature' and - deepened to the analysis of the CPP - the leading strategy of the author-creator, in fact, the 'basic law' of his creative (life-creating) path. The CPP determines the patterns of the culture of the Fate of the Myth-Creating Poet, which has become a precedent text, or any other stable form of 'non-standard discursiveness'.

New monographs of the scholarly series ROSSICA. Russia and the West. Literary Connections and Contacts of the Litfact publishing house examine Russian-French and Soviet-American literary and cultural connections of the first half of the 20th century. Book by Alexandre Stroev is dedicated to the Russian writers (I. Bunin, Dm. Merezhkovsky, A. Bely, E. Zamyatin, M. Voloshin) in France, their literary and public reputation and the reception of their works. Galina Lapina considers American-Soviet contacts and joint projects (theatrical, cinematic, educational) of the 1930s and early 1940s. The heroes of her book are American writers, journalists, diplomats, artists, and students. Both monographs are based on archival documents, letters, memoirs, fictional texts, materials from the Soviet/Russian and foreign (French or American) press. The study of an impressive source array made it possible to reveal unexplored episodes in the life of Russian writers in France and unknown part of their legacy, to reconstruct the history of Soviet-American joint ventures in the fields of culture, education, literature, theater and cinema.

The article presents one of the masterpieces of Renaissance Ferrara illumination – the Breviary of Ercole I d'Este (1502–1505). This manuscript was created during the active development of printing, and this fact underlines its special status and importance for the customer, and also demonstrates the stability of artistic traditions at the Ferrara court. At the same period – the first years of the 16th century – the artistic language of the Early Renaissance was changed for completely different traditions of the High Renaissance art. First of all, it was expressed in the leading role of classical motifs. The Breviary of Ercole I demonstrates the development of the classical tradition in Ferrara illumination. The article presents the manuscript in the context of the court culture of Renaissance Ferrara, providing the stylistic and iconographic analysis of the manuscript decor. The creation of the Breviary of Ercole I reflected the identity of his customer, Duke Ercole I d'Este, who contributed to the development of the humanistic culture in Ferrara. At the same time, Ercole I was a very religious man, and his personal religiosity became an important virtue of a ruler. Matteo da Milano, a representative of the Lombard school of book illumination, characterized by the classical ornamental decoration, created the most impressive elements of the manuscript decor. Besides him, there were other artists to decorate the Breviary, but their miniatures are more connected with the 15th century local tradition. In the art of Ferrara, the classical tradition took part of the «politics of magnificence». The abundance of classical motifs in this manuscript, thus, could be the goal of the customer who wished to glorify himself in this special way.

Restoration is one of the most important areas in preserving the world's cultural heritage. Th e 19th century is a landmark in the history of restoration. At that time, it turned from a private practice of self-taught artists into a real scientifi cally based discipline. Many European countries have faced the problems of cultural heritage preservation, and everywhere they were solved in diff erent ways, depending on local peculiarities and experience. Th is article deals with previously unknown facts from the life and activity of the fi rst Russian restorer Andrei Filippovich Mitrokhin, who was born and studied painting in the town of Toropets. He served as a simple soldier, then on duty he ended up in Saint Petersburg, where he was soon granted a valet at the Hermitage. His career developed under Franz Ivanovich Labensky, who assumed the position of chief curator of paintings in the Hermitage Gallery in 1797. Mitrokhin's role in the history of Russian restoration and, in particular, the Hermitage cannot be overestimated. He not only restored paintings and trained several apprentices, but also worked independently on the development of new methods of restoring paintings. By mastering new techniques and methods of mechanical restoration, Mitrokhin and his students managed to preserve more than a thousand paintings from the Hermitage collection, many of which are painting masterpieces. Unfortunately, some aspects of Mitrokhin's biography, especially his life outside the Hermitage, have long been overlooked by scholars. This paper examines the problem of his alleged date of birth, family and friendship ties, etc. Th e archival data cited by the author allow us to take a fresh look at Mitrokhin as a restorer, and also shed light on some socio-cultural aspects of his time.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) was famous for portraits and moralizing family scenes. At the same time, he achieved exceptional success in popularizing his art by engraving genre compositions. This article examines preparatory modellos for his family scenes and the organization of their engraving process. This aspect of his activity has not been yet studied, and his drawings are little covered in Russian-language literature. The study reconstructs step by step the activity of Greuze as a popularizer of family scenes in prints on the basis of the documents available to the author, analysis of original drawings and prints from Russian and foreign collections. It highlights such aspects of the creative process as preparation of compositions for engraving, achievement of specific qualities in the drawings in connection with the technologies of further reproduction, interaction with engravers and organization of creative and technical works within the special association. The author concludes that the master chose a limited number of engraving techniques by the criterion of the most accurate reflection of the artistic properties of the originals. By engaging a special circle of engravers, he created a monopoly association to control the process of creating, producing and selling prints. As a result, Greuze achieved outstanding and specific artistic qualities in his drawings intended for further duplication. Even contemporaries paid attention to the excellent quality of Greuze's engravings, which amazingly accurately conveyed the individuality of his technique, and singled them out among the mass production of general circulation in eighteenth-century France. This system of creation and popularization of drawings was innovative in the field of engraving. It reveals practical and business abilities of the outstanding artist, as well as a new insight into Greuze's artistry.

In the 21st century, rural population in Russia as a whole continues to decline. However, different levels of urbanization and different rates of its change across regions indicate the heterogeneity of processes and the influence of many factors. The main trends are completion of the withering away of the traditional rural lifestyle, mixing urban and rural lifestyles in the suburbs with predominance of the former (summer cottages, cottages), gravitation of rural economic activity towards the zones of influence of agglomerations, development of an economic base not related to agriculture: seasonal work, tourism and recreation, traditional crafts, remote work, creative projects. Technological progress, development of means of online dissemination of technologies and know-how, withdrawal of industrial production from large cities and their miniaturization allow us to discuss the prospects for development of industries in rural areas that satisfy a significant part of the local demand for consumer goods and the need for certain types of equipment. The course towards a reasonable regional economic autonomy will allow increasing the proportion of local agricultural products in the regional diet, which also requires development of cooperation of small agricultural producers and diversification of sales channels. To ensure competitiveness of rural areas as a habitat in relation to cities, it is necessary to ensure connectivity of those areas with central localities and provision of modern infrastructure, amenities, access to education, healthcare and high culture. This can be facilitated by modern solutions that are currently at varying degrees of implementation in different countries of the world (such as distance forms of education, healthcare, exhibitions, performances; crowdfunding projects) and by the solutions from the recent past that have not found sufficient implementation (for example, local aviation, regional tours of artists and performers).

The article analyzes Karamzin's story Julia in its relation to the literary source - the novel Julie, or the New Heloise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - and to the late stories, written by Karamzin (A Knight of Our Times, My Confession, The Sensitive and the Cold). Comparative analysis proves that Julia is highly dependent on the Rousseau's works, but at the same time contains all the structural elements developed in Karamzin's later stories. Julia is a didactic story; its heroes read Heloise and Emile, comparing their actions with the instructions in these books. Disagreement with the Rousseau's ideas is expressed not by the author, but by the heroine, while at the compositional level the Rousseauist pathos, on the contrary, is affirmed. Three late stories (A Knight of Our Times, My Confession, The Sensitive and the Cold) share a rather simple plot scheme - or content core - Rousseauist love triangle, which includes characters contrasted by the criterion of 'sensitivity'. They should be considered as variants of one idea, because they are created at the same time, are based on the plot model from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel Julie, or the New Heloise and reflect Karamzin's divergence with Rousseau's views. Moreover, it is noticeable that in these texts the novel structure became visible and the type of conflict situation was changed. It is not a moral choice between virtue and vice, but a conflict between the artist and the crowd, which is explained by Karamzin's reorientation to the German novel tradition, in particular, to the genre of the Bildungsroman. This fact allows us to trace Karamzin's creative evolution, expressed in rethinking given plot models and character schemes. A comparison of A Knight of Our Times, My Confession and The Sensitive and the Cold not with foreign sources (works of Rousseau and Goethe), but with an earlier story by Karamzin himself allows us to explicate the specific features of the period of 1799-1803.