Vol 3, No 2 (2022)

The ambivalence of utilitarianism is analyzed by the author within the discourse of culture and philosophy. The positive aspect of this theory is to be found in its ability both to stimulate collectively productive creativity and to act as an effective means of reproducing today’s culture. The negative aspect of utilitarianism is to be found in the subjectively pragmatic interpretation of usefulness as a value, which opens up unlimited opportunities to manipulate a person’s perceptions of value.

Tom Stoppard’s play and film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are analyzed in the article as metatexts at different levels of their semiotical and narratological structure. The specificity of dealing with dramaturgical praetextae of a film reinterpreted through a different semiotic system, in which sound, montage (film editing), frames and frame boundaries are significant, is presented. Particular attention is paid both to the theoretical grounding of “metacinema” as a genre and to the film analysis from the indicated viewpoint. The authors identify the manner in which both the play and the film reveal the core issue of the relationship between life and art, as well as provide their own analysis of the principles of interaction between the author, the text, and the reader. It is pointed out in the conclusions that the “text” of the cinema is structured as a complex cinematic game enjoying a multitude of semantic “layers.” Numerous oppositions — such as fictional world vs. real world, traditionalism vs. the non-classical paradigm of aesthetics, etc. — together with the use of “a-text-within-a-text” technique, allow to have the boundaries between theatre and cinematography outlined.

The tradition of les concerts historiques as a form of popularizing musical legacy of the past dates back to the period between the second quarter of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th centuries. The article deals with the origin of the named phenomenon in France (F.J. Fétis), Germany (I. Moscheles), England (E. Pauer) and Russia (A.G. Rubinstein, S.V. Smolensky, S.N. Vasilenko, and M.F. Gnessin). Based on the critical articles in the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, an episode of the artistic biography of Charles-Valentin Alkan (an outstanding French composer of the time of Romanticism), namely his six-year cycle Petits concerts (1873–80), may be taken as a unique example of “musical co-creation.”

Churches and cathedrals built in Uglich (the Yaroslavl Region of today’s Russia) during the second half of the 18^th and the first half of the 19^th centuries received the status of architectural monuments rather late, so their wall paintings have largely been lost. The study provides a brief overview of the history of the town churches. The author proves that the wall painters used to work in strict accordance with the old canons, yet in a Western academic manner. Future prospects of the study of the eighteenth-nineteenth-century wall paintings in the churches of Uglich are considered.

An outstanding Russian enlightener N.A. Rubakin left rich scholarly legacy related to the study of psychological and pedagogical aspects of reading. The article deals with the basic theoretical provisions of library psychology, as well as shows the relevance of this field of scholarship and practice for the libraries of today. The author outlines the future of the development of library psychology and library pedagogy in the reality of the digitalization of reading, proving that no proposals to rename library psychology to “noocommunicology” are tenable.

The article deals with an analysis of the specificities of young people’s communicative behavior and values significant for intensification of their reading commitment. Empirical data of the research “Reading Commitment of the Student Youth of the Southern Urals: Motivations and Practices of the Forming of Regional Intellectual Resources during the Digital Era” (2021) are used. The priorities of cultural policy of stimulating the Internet-oriented audience’s reading commitment are outlined. A necessity of monitoring various manifestations of the reading commitment within the non-institutional area, mainly in the network realm, is grounded in order to identify the specificities of reading practices generated by the reality of the digital era, as well as to harmonize both virtual and real worlds.

The publication introduces a document identified in the collection of B.N. Rubinstein at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. The cited sketch, written in a friendly manner on the occasion of celebrating the 15th birthday of I.P. Ladyzhnikov’s publishing house in Berlin, describes several important episodes of the work of Russia’s commercial firm abroad (at the time), which was closely associated with the underground activities of the RSDLP’s Bolshevik faction. The author provides an overview of the history of I.P. Ladyzhnikov’s publishing house, as well as certain facts to prove that this sketch is a reliable historical source.