Vol 2, No 2 (2021)

V.K. Trediakovskii’s poem «In Praise of Summer» was not included in his collections of poetry or complete works and only appeared in manuscripts, and many well-educated people remembered it as example of his bad poetry. In collective memory the poem was reduced from six to four lines and was always cited ironically, almost as a self-caricature. However, over time its original lyrical quality could also be perceived. In the 1840s. the poem, despite the ironic quotation marks presumed by lovers of poetry, «In Praise of Summer» began to reassume its original function – the function of a lyric utterance describing the summer season.

In our country, the attitude of the power structures to science as an institution of culture remains very important. Тhe degree of state interference in the internal affairs of the academic community is growing, and the petty tutelage of scientific institutions and control over their intellectual activity are increasing. Study of the Soviet state under Stalin shows what damage such interference in scientific institutions, especially those of a humanitarian profile, can cause. This article describes the start of repressions against one of the most significant philosophers and philologists of the USSR, Alexei Fedorovich Losev. In this case the target of persecution was the humanities, which, in the opinion of the ruling elite, opposed the ideology of emerging Stalinism. Scientists were accused of adherence to idealism, and, consequently, to bourgeois values. By the end of the 1940’s-early 1950’s, the internal logic of repressive mechanisms in the Soviet Union led to the destruction of genetics, then cybernetics and sociology. This caused the country’s lag in these branches of science that has still not been fully overcome.

This article studies the Reformation and Protestantism as a religious potential for cultural evolution. The religious confession influenced all areas of social life, including education, science, and culture. The ideas of Protestantism, based on the need for every believer to read the text of Holy Scripture independently without any intermediaries and external authorities began to form a special type of personality in Protestant culture. An individual began to seek education and to develop his point of view on the phenomena and processes of natural and social genesis. The study has also revealed that in the development of English Protestantism the tendencies highlighted in the article led to an «educational revolution» of the second half of the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. The increase in the number of university students during this period is evidence of young people’s desire for pragmatic knowledge in scientific research. The reliance on the word in all spheres of a culture shaped the specific logocentrism of the period of English history studied in the article.

The Russian State Archive in Samara is a unique center for storing materials on the history of Russian science and technology and preserves many interesting documents from the All-Union Research Film and Photo Institute concerning the history of Soviet cinema. In world cinema, the 1920s and 1930s were a time of technical experiments and research, and «combined shooting» became one of the best ways to solve increasingly complex production problems. This article presents two archival documents that provide a detailed description of the practical application of one method of combined shooting – that of perspective alignment. The films «The Golden Key» (1938) and «Ruslan and Lyudmila» (1939) were made using this method, and they represent a milestone in the development of special effects in the history of world cinema.