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The article analyzes the milestones of the biography of Vaclav Klaus – a highly qualified economist and prominent political figure in the Czech Republic, who influenced the course of events in his country and answered the challenges of the time. The article also features Klaus's increased activity in 2019-2021 associated with the creation of the Tricolor party in 2019 by his son Klaus Jr., the coronavirus pandemic and the Vrbetice incident. The author emphasizes Klaus's commitment to Czech national traditions, including the support for constructive Czech-Russian relations.

The Greco-Serbian Treaty of 1867 is the second attempt to create a military coalition of Christian states in the Balkans, aimed at fighting a common enemy ‒ the Ottoman Empire. The agreement reflected the irredentist policy of the two states in solving the Eastern question, the purpose of which was to expel the Turks from the European continent and prevent the seizure of the Balkan territories by the Great Powers.Russia closely followed and moreover, actively influenced the negotiation process, which revealed a serious conflict of interests around the issue of border delimitation in Macedonia.The study highlights three key issues. The first concerns Russia's position on the provisions of the Greco-Serbian Treaty affecting Russian interests. The second has to do with the details of the negotiation process related to the future territorial division of the European territories of the Ottoman Empire and in particular Macedonia and the Bulgarian population living in the northern part of this territory. The third is devoted to the examination of the intermediary role of Russian diplomats.

The article reconstruct the ideologema based on the chronicle story about Prince Oleg (Prophet Oleg) hoisting a shield on the "gates of Tsaregrad". This action as a sign of victory acquired a symbolic status becauseof Pushkin's «The Song of Prophet Oleg»(1822) and later, due to the inclusion of «The Song» in the literary anthologies for children, this plot became a stereotype image of Tsaregrad / Constantinople. It became very popular during the Russian-Turkish wars of the 19th - early 20th centuries. The author analyzed the main interpretational trends of the legendary story about Oleg's shield in the context of the history of ideas and images, which had a direct impact on the stereotypes of the mass consciousness.

This article examines the theoretical problems of studying literary utopias and dystopias. Since utopia and dystopia exist far beyond fiction, it is proposed to approach the analysis of a literary work as a particular case of the manifestation of a universal model of utopian/dystopian consciousness. First, in the texts under consideration, their elements should be identified with the support of research in social philosophy — the structure of utopian consciousness is outlined in the article, and the structure of dystopian consciousness is derived by the author of the article by analogy. If a work shows signs of utopian or dystopian consciousness, the next step in working with the text is to compare its genre features with the established genre invariant developed by literary critics. The article also presents the corresponding conditionally universal genre models of utopia and dystopia. This approach allows, firstly, to reasonably attribute the work to utopias and dystopias in the presence of signs of utopian or dystopian consciousness, secondly, to expand the body of texts that can be considered utopias or dystopias, and, finally, to fix individual genre features and correlate them with the corresponding invariant. During the formation of the genre of literary dystopia, i.e. in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the diversity of genre features in national literatures was extensive, this algorithm helps to fully trace the formation of the national invariant of the genre and establish its national specifics. At the same time, destroyed by the twentieth century, the genre of "classical utopia" is reborn and significantly modified under the influence of the novel form, so the identification of literary utopia becomes difficult — in this situation, the combination of philosophical and literary methods considered in the article also seems productive.

This article provides a comparative analysis of the concepts of the world of the future as presented in the story Noon: 22nd Century (and partially in other parts of the Noon Universe cycle) by A. and B. Strugatsky and the novel Pandem by M. and S. Dyachenko. It discusses the common basic principles (infinity of knowledge, creative work, personal self-realisation) underlying the social models proposed by the writers, analyses salient characteristics of the writers' "happy tomorrow" (society organisation, management system, upbringing of the younger generation, and space expansion). The article pays close attention to the similarity of the artistic structures of the story and the novel, representing an "in-the-story-narrative" with the mosaic composition of chronological type, which shows the main stages of the development of the society depicted. The author enlarges on the fantastic premise (the works under analysis do not give its detailed substantiation), typical of social science fiction, and both duos are recognised masters of it. The author singles out functions of the cross-cutting characters that bind together individual episodes with independent plots into a single large-scale canvas, revealing not only general processes and global events in the world of the future, but also details of private life and the ups and downs of personal destinies of our descendants. Additionally, the author analyses the finale of the story (and more widely, of the cycle about the Noon Universe) and the novel. While externally opposed (an optimistic assertion of the utopian world by the Strugatsky brothers and the growing social imbalance and rejection of the social experiment conducted by Pandem in Dyachenkos' work), both works demonstrate common aspects of the writers' views on the fate of humanity. Observations and conclusions reflect similarities and differences in the interpretation of multifaceted utopian and dystopian social models in Russian-language science fiction of the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century.

This article analyses the novel International (2011) by Piotr Czerwiński, a representative of the so-called "post-PRL" generation and describes the worldview of this generation as a whole and its reasons. The change of the system rendered the romanticism of social resistance, which had been one of the most important pillars of Polish mentality and culture, pragmatically unclaimed. This tool of national consolidation, which had repeatedly proved its real effectiveness, lost its obvious field of application, and turned into an instrument of violence, because romantic myths continue to be present in Polish public consciousness and the subconscious, and are actively used by the authorities. The deadlock between the two discourses — the new and the old, global consumerism and heroic martyrology — has led to a massively expressed sense of hopelessness, fear, and their own inferiority by young writers. Czerwiński's text is considered from the perspective of the genres of utopia, dystopia, and post-dystopia. The aim of the study is to analyse and identify the supertask of Czerwiński's ironic reinterpretation of the extra-literary context, to bring to absurdity the merged ideas of (super)Polishness and (super)consumerism. First of all, the novel refers to the specificity of the Polish mentality and only secondly is a warning for any nationalist "accentuation" of society. Attention is also paid to the linguistic aspect of the alarmism of the novel: the prose of the "post-PRL" generation, of which the analysed novel is a vivid example, is a reaction both to the dissatisfaction with Polish reality and to the inadequacy of the language functioning in society to this experience. As a result, the author concludes that for Czerwiński, as for other young prose writers of this time, the generation and experience of comic consciousness becomes only partially a liberating experience.