Several functions of the Third Section were articulated in such a vague and abstract way that they actually extended the scope of authority and influence of this institution to the point of observing literally all incidents and occurrences countrywide. Nicholas I conceived the Third Section as an institution that would operate outside of and without regard for the existing legislation of the Russian Empire and would report directly to the Emperor. Thus, the criteria for decision-making by the Third Section often were based not on objective laws or statutes, but on the subjective understanding of the ethical by its staff. The Third Section can be of particular interest to a researcher if viewed as a unique institution the competence of which included localizing the borderline between the ordinary, interpreted as the acceptable, “well-intentioned”, and the unusual, and therefore suspicious and potentially dangerous for the state. The article deals with several files of the Third Section (introduced here into scientific circulation for the first time) on surveillance of the writer V. V. Krestovsky. Krestovsky was regarded as an agent of the “writers' league”, traditionally perceived by the authorities as an embodiment of “the strange”, thus making his case an interesting object for analyzing the secret police machinery.

The articles deals with two questions: (1) how, during the 1860s, the transformation of the hierarchy of genres developed in parallel with the formation of the “genre historique” in Russia, and (2) how Russian critics, basing themselves on the concept of the “sister arts”, reconsidered the status of history and genre painting. Over the centuries, “history painting” was at the apex of the hierarchy of genres. According to Horace's concept of ut pictura poesis and Aristotle's “Poetics”, history painting was associated with the high genres of poetry and tragedy. By contrast, genre painting occupied a low rank in the system of genres and was associated with comedy. The sister arts concept began to be revised during the 1830s, due to the emergence of the “genre historique” — a new formula for presentation of history. According to the concept of unity of literature and painting, works belonging to the new genre had to follow the principles of historical fiction and of the works of historians. In addition, the “historical genre” combined features of genre and history painting since it was formed as a consequence of the transformation of the academic hierarchy of genres. In Russian culture, literature had a higher status than the visual arts. For this reason, during this period critics advised painters to follow the example of contemporary literature and to to depict scenes from everyday life. At the end of the 1860s, journalists concluded that both “historical” and genre painting have the same objective — to depict the different sides of life — and that they are equally capable of capturing the interest of the public.

On December 1, 1962, Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Communist Party and Premier of the Soviet Union, attended the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall where an art exhibition, Thirty Years of Moscow Artists' Union, had just opened. On the second floor of the exhibition hall he also saw a smaller-scale exhibition of works by young avant-garde artists and did not enjoy it at all. The curses hurled by Khrushchev at the avant-garde artists, termed “the most direct and acute episode of confrontation between art and power of the Thaw period”, were recorded in the stenogram of his visit and in the memoirs of the artists. They have been studied from the perspective of intrigues within the Party apparatus, Khrushchev's cultural policy, and the relationship between power and intelligentsia in the late Thaw period. The present paper examines Khrushchev's rhetoric in a wider context, traces the transformation of his stormy reaction into a declaration of customary ideological tenets, and discovers the intersectionality of ethnicity, sexuality, and creativity during the rhetorical construction of spiritually alien Others, or even dangerous internal enemies. With alien figures of Jews and homosexuals occupying their due place as “symptoms” of the Thaw modernity, the leader of the state, in condemning “pederasts” and asserting that “normal manliness” was capable of creating “healthy art”, in his chaotic rhetorical way struggled with the post-Stalinist crisis of Soviet masculinity.

In Europe of the early Modern period new scientific knowledge and new scientific practices were perceived by contemporaries as “unusual”, “wonderful”, and “mysterious”, and often aroused suspicion. The reputations of alchemists, kabbalists, and mathematicians were the most dubious, since the representation of knowledge in a noncanonical symbolic system and the difficulty in gaining access to it gave rise, according to Francis Bacon, to speculation and fantasy. Magical practices often provoked accusations of heresy and of connections with evil spirits, demons, etc., as can be seen in the legends about Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, Raymond Lully, Faust, Paracelsus, John Dee, Judah Loew ben Bezalel and others. Scientists of a new type sought to discover the “secrets of nature” and named themselves not only humanists and natural philosophers, but also virtuosos, artists, and magicians. A diverse intellectual discursive environment emerged, one in which different types of magic, philosophy, and theological doctrines were actively developed through polemics. There were several classifications of magic, depending on the area of its application. Thus, Giordano Bruno in his treatise De magia identifies several types and subtypes of magic: natural (physical), medico-alchemical, mathematical (or occult), metaphysical (or theurgy), necromancy, pythian, prophetic, destructive or malicious, etc. These various types of magic also found reflection in literature.

One may come across descriptions of strange incidents associated with sleep in folklore narratives from different regions of the globe. A sleeping person feels pressure, as if some external force pushes them down; they are aware of everything, but cannot move; they hear sounds, see strange images and interact with them in a certain way. Folklore offers specific patterns for explaining such conditions and for modeling human behavior when they occur. Biomedicine calls such conditions “parasomnias” and includes them in the International Classification System of Diseases (ICD) as certain pathologies associated with sleep. However, this approach leaves beyond the scope of medical nosology many other “symptoms” important for folklore consciousness. How appropriate is it to reduce various “folklore facts” related to sleep to several ICD headings? This article considers unusual states that arise on the border of wakefulness and sleep from several positions: (1) ways of organizing and formalizing such experience in folklore texts of different genres (mainly based on the material of Russian folklore); (2) mythologizing of such states and their connection with certain mythological characters; (3) transformation of folklore patterns of Russian oral tradition in urban folklore and Internetlore (based on materials from the Russian-language segment of the Internet); (4) the correlation of folklore and medical discourses in the interpretation of states associated with sleep.

The paper examines ways in which strange events, characters and details are described in dream reports. The author analyzes methods of constructing “strangeness” in dream narratives and compares them with the ones which are common in reports on extraordinary and paranormal events. It is demonstrated that several devices which include so-called “contrast structures” and “X-Y structures” might be employed in dream reports. X-Y structures provide mundane contrasts to extraordinary events, while contrast structures juxtapose wrong actions with descriptions of appropriate behavior. So, by applying the opposition of appropriate and inappropriate, and the opposition of extraordinary and mundane, these devices help to portray events as strange. Though these techniques might be used in dream reports, they could also be employed in other narratives, including reports on paranormal experiences or descriptions of behavior of mentally ill people. Their functions in various types of reports are similar; however, the use of these devices in dream narratives is substantially different in some respects. While reports on waking reality juxtapose normal and strange or fitting and wrong, dream reports juxtapose strange elements of a dream with the same elements as if they normally were in reality. Thus, in dream reports the opposition of normal and strange is closely connected with the opposition of waking reality and the dream.

This paper examines the cultural phenomenon of naive copies of classical works of art that emerged as a common practice in the early Soviet years and functioned as a specific form of mass culture. One major issue with this kind of art, including naive paintings and folk art rugs, is to uncover how its artistic effect works. We suggest that it arises as the ludic effect of the “included middle” (the term suggested by Brian Massumi). It appears as a variative redundancy and may actualize itself (or not be actualized at all) in different ways, including but not limited to reattributing the perceived qualities of originality and uniqueness to banalized masterpieces. Using the conceptual frame of Charles Sanders Pierce we analyze the dynamic productive ability of a “naive” sign and also suggest an approach to the ambivalence of the perception of a “naive” sign based on the notion of twofoldness of a visual image. The study concludes that due to the specific authenticity of naive copies their artistic effect as a sign dynamic may serve as a case to reflect upon the possibility of art as a space for common forms of experience. It may also be considered as a trigger for the distinctive mode of perceiving subjectivity as an “occasion of experience”. The process of producing new, unstable, ambivalent modes of seeing and perception could be an important cultural function of Soviet naive copies in today's artworld.

This article explores the features of narrative structure in South Korean television series (K-dramas or doramas); more precisely, the functions of the typical scenes that are reproduced across various genres of K-drama. Characteristic features of K-dramas are explored through the uses of a typical plot device: a truck collision that brings about the death of one of the characters. Study of a number of such scenes lets us identify both the “standard” version and the variations upon it, including a parody. Analysis discloses that, far from being merely the result of unprofessional scriptwriting, the frequent reproduction of such typical scenes is a tool for engaging the audience in a process of communication with the narrative. A brief description of the features of the narrative in works of ancient Korean literature and folk theater, which precedes the analysis, makes it possible to trace the connection between the modern television series and national cultural traditions. Also, since the topic is placed in the context of 21st century fan culture (it was the K-drama fans themselves who gave the truck its name, the Truck of Doom, or the White Truck of Doom since it is most often white), the article considers more general aspects of the interaction between the creators of cultural products and the fans of their work.

The article examines two pieces of journalism by Maxim Gorky published in early July 1896, where the aspiring writer shared his impressions of a visit to one of the first film showings in Russia. These texts are an important source for studying viewers' reception of early cinema, in particular due to their description of the Lumière brothers' film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station as “horrifying”. At the same time, the author addressed wider social and cultural issues, and it is the non-cinematic context of Gorky's writings on cinema that the present article focuses on. The first section analyzes the connotations of Gorky's references to the cinema as “the kingdom of shadows”. Towards the latter half of the 19th century it became habitual in European literatures and visual arts to depict the life of the lower classes as the world of “shadows” or “spectres”. In his other writings, Gorky openly expressed his dissatisfaction with this representational cliché, and his articles on cinema can be viewed as a further exploration of this theme, drawing attention to the viewer's position with regard to the shadowy spectacle of poverty and privation. The image of the (cinema) audience pictured by Gorky is examined in more detail in the second section of the article. Gorky's texts on cinema are analysed as an episode in the history of images which illustrates the mutual influence of the visual and the verbal.

In world literature of the 19th–20th centuries, as well as in cinema, a narrative plot is frequently employed that involves the abduction of visual representations — paintings, sculptures, etc. This article makes an attempt to highlight the recurrent structures that organize the story about the “theft of an image”, and also form or deform the visual image itself once introduced into a story. Three aspects of the plot are studied: narratological, semantic and rhetorical. The visual image functions as a narrative actant, not different in this from a valuable thing that one can take hold of; originating from a foreign or ancient culture, it acquires the status of a sacred object, enshrined in various envelopes and frames; it is involved in the play of figurative substitutions and associations — metaphorically or metonymically linked to one of the characters, included in closed or open image series. Those series of copies, corresponding to the general virtualization of visual images in modern digital civilization, call into question the original narrative intrigue, which implies the abduction of a unique original work. The article takes into consideration literary works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiel Hammett and Donna Tartt, movies directed by John Frankenheimer, William Wyler, John McTiernan, Giuseppe Tornatore, Eldar Riazanov, Otar Iosseliani, and others.

This paper offers one specific case of the correspondences that exist between verbal and visual figurations. It concerns a single word - caprice - that established itself as a keyword in French and English alike. Seventeenth-century writers of French adapted to their own purposes a language and culture of capriciousness shaped by Italian and Spanish artists and scientists. The discussions surrounding caprice made of it a semantically active term and a complex and contested one, that is, a keyword. Caprice then entered English. It figures among the wave of French imports that Charles II brought back with him to England when, in 1660, he ‘restored' its Stuart monarchy after spending many of the Civil War and Commonwealth years in exile in France along with many displaced English Royalists. Caprice remained, in this period, an untranslated French term in English. It thus brought into English the semantic energy it had gained in French literary and visual culture by acting as a problematic and contested element in that culture's accounts of what a line could be and do. This investigation of caprice is set in a broader methodological context, provided by some remarks about the study of a culture and society from the perspective of language and, in particular, the keywords that occasion debate within the culture and society in question.

This article is devoted to the analysis of Bizzarie di varie figure, a set of etchings by Giovanni Battista Bracelli, in terms of its inclusion in a particular genre tradition. Determining the genre is extremely important, since it makes it possible to choose a provisionally correct interpretation of a work from among an endless field of possible variants and to justify this choice. I view bizzarie as a filiation of the capriccio genre, in the sense of the term formed in the writings of Jacques Callot. This hypothesis is supported by the analysis, presented in this article, of the title page and the dedication of the set. The meaning of the word bizzarie, which is found on the title page, is similar to a great extent to the term capriccio, and has undergone the same changes over time. The dedication, on the other hand, presents the set as an intellectual product, emphasizing, however, the spontaneity of its creation. The plates of Bizzarie di varie figure should be interpreted according to the characteristic features of the capriccio genre and the whole set should be seen as a fundamentally open text, not based on a consistent narrative. For this reason, it is not possible to interpret Bracelli's set as an encrypted message, similar to Arcimboldo's allegorical portraits, whose meaning is hidden from the uninitiated.

The article studies an iconographic topos, ‘discovery of purple', mostly known through Rubens's sketch for the Torre de la Parada. However, its development can be traced not only through pictorial tradition, but also through emblems and mottos, which were very popular in the 16th-17th centuries. In particular, the ‘discovery of purple' is present in the mottos that Jean-François de Boissière created for Richelieu in 1622, to celebrate the latter's ascension to the cardinalate. Unexpectedly, the new cardinal is compared to Hercules' dog, who found a murex on the seashore. This comparison has a number of political implications: some of them are associated with the patronage of the Queen Mother (who probably recalled Santi di Tito's interpretation of ‘discovery of purple' and suggested this story to Richelieu), while others reflect Richelieu's attempt to earn Louis XIII' s trust, symbolically indicating absolute dedication to his interests. Boissière's motto provides an opportunity to trace the gradual transformation of the topos, from the original model which was formed in Italy in the 16th century and which celebrated female rulership, to the 1630s, when Richelieu creates at Palais-Royal the Galerie des Hommes Illustres, where the cardinal' purple assumes a different symbolic and political meaning. During the same decade the topos of ‘the discovery of purple' was used by two Dutch artists, Theodor van Lohn and Rubens, and in both cases it served to glorify the Spanish crown.

The subject of this article is a set of engravings from the end of the 17th century known as “fashion prints”. This definition is based on the modern consumer understanding of fashion, where fashion is defined as something that can be accessed primarily through the acquisition of certain goods and services. In the last third of the 17th century, a group of engravers and publishers from rue Saint Jacques created a large number of engravings in which great attention was paid to the detailed representation of the costume and hairstyle. However, in the engravings themselves, the ways of constructing the ‘fashionable' were far more varied, and not linked only to the status of certain products. The article analyzes the visual and linguistic strategies used to represent fashion, as well as their interaction. Unlike later fashion magazines, where the principle of novelty comes to the fore, and with each new issue, what was previously presented as fashionable, ceased to be so, in fashion engraving each new imprint added to the existing picture, making it more and more complex and less understandable. For an outside observer (and first of all the buyer of such engravings), fashionable status was open to imitation and yet fundamentally unattainable, not only because of the association of fashion with the closed society of the court, but also because an individual engraving and even a collection of engravings did not present a complete full picture. As Molière's satire shows, a man who copied only some of the elements of fashionable style only made himself a laughingstock.

A review of: Freeman, M., Gambarato, R. R. (Eds.) (2019). The Routledge companion to transmedia studies. New York: Routledge. 491 p