Articles de revues sur le sujet « Authors, kenyan – 20th century – biography »

The scientific biography and the role of Professor Sukhodolsky Gennady Vladimirovich in forming and developing Leningrad School of Ergonomics and Engineering Psychology in the 80s of the 20th century are considered. The circle of authors who formed the core of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) scientific school of engineering psychology and ergonomics is outlined.

The article contains information about the monographic studies, which investigate the biography of the outstanding singer and film actress of the first half of the 20th century - Maria Cebotari. This subject constituted a field of research both for the authors of monographs contemporary to the prima donna and those of our days - representatives of different countries and specializations. In this context, the most important of their works (books, brochures, articles), which have scientific value are described and analyzed. Although M. Cebotari`s biography is widely presented, it can be supplemented with new investigations, thanks to the immense artistic heritage of the diva.

The authors of naturalism and the avant-garde in Spain attach great importance to illness and especially mental illness and mad houses. The vision of the mental asylum is presented in the literary mirrors of three authors - with very different biography - who wrote in the first decades of the 20th century, in their writings the presentation of the asylum, considered successively as punishment, as experience and as liberation, is changing. Antonio Hoyos y Vinent, Alfonso Vidal y Planas and Andrés Valentín Álvarez y Álvarez are mainly studied.

The aim : to consider the application of prosopographic approaches in the study of biographies of authors of peasant memoirs in order to identify common features that laid the conditions for the emergence of memoir practices among the peasants of the Southern Ukraine in the 20th century; to analyze the potential of prosopography for researching general processes. The article considers the application of the prosopographic method to the study of biographies of authors of peasant memoirs in order to identify common features that created conditions for the emergence of memoir practices among the peasants of southern Ukraine in the twentieth century. Modern historical science suggests that individuals having their own little life stories are present behind all processes and events. New directions and principles of historical research are becoming increasingly important. The prosopographic method is one of them. Under prosopography we understand the scientific method of studying individual biographies of authors of historical sources in order to create a “collective biography” of a certain social group on their basis. Methods: analytical, historical, comparative, system-structural. The article author uses methods of specific scientific activity, empirical research and general logic. Practical meaning: recommended for use by scholars for historical research; provides opportunities for the use of this issue in theoretical and methodological and source studies. Originality: research, in particular on the choice of research source base and methodology of its analysis. Scientific novelty: creation of a collective portrait of a peasant author of a memoir source. Conclusions: on the basis of the analysis with the involvement of prosopographic research methods we have the opportunity to create a conditional collective portrait of a peasant of the Southern Ukraine of the twentieth century, the author of the memoir. When creating a “biography” of a peasant author, the following features are distinguished: common social origin, primary education, teaching and educational skills, psychological characteristics, propensity for creative activity, external influences. The materials collected by the researchers from the Zaporizhzhia branch of the NASU Institute of Ukrainian Archaeography and Source Studies named after M. S. Hrushevsky and the History Faculty of the Zaporizhzhia National University and published as a part of collections titled “Sources on the History of the Southern Ukraine”, “Antiquities of the Southern Ukraine” and “Ascension Antiquities”, are used as sources in the analysis. The purpose of the current investigation is to identify the causes and conditions that prompted particular peasants of the Southern Ukraine to create their own historical narrative – memoirs. Another goal is to create a “collective portrait” of an average author using prosopographic methods. The article investigates through the analysis of biographies the background of peasant authors, which singled them out from the general mass of peasants. It also highlights an “average author” as a “historical figure” and analyzes his attribution to a particular era, place, social group and culture. The use of prosopographic methods in the study of biographies of Southern Ukrainian peasants, who distinguished themselves by creating their own memoirs, allows to determine those aspects of the era and the position of the little man who chose to create their own historical excursions contrary to general trends and understanding the risks of totalitarian system. The creation of prosopographical (collective biographies) portraits of peasant authors is a very important component of the reproduction of general processes that created the conditions for the emergence of peasant narrative sources. The author tries to highlight the modern era in all its aspects through the prism of individual biographies and works of peasant authors. Type of article: scientific and theoretical.

Despite the conception of the author’s death that was prevalent in the second half of the 20th century, the author’s biography always intervenes indirectly in the canonisation process, either a priori, as an additional argument for canonisation (e.g. participation in the national movement), or a posteriori, when the canonised author acquires, according to Yuri Lotman, the right to a biography. Moreover, biography becomes a significant factor in cases of revising and rewriting the canon, especially when it is related to political changes in society, e.g. in forming a Socialist Realist canon or the case of its radical deconstruction. The focus on biographical texts and authors’ biographies increases significantly in the 21st century, when literature itself tries to erase boundaries between fictional and biographical, and literary scholars discuss whether it is possible to separate the author from his or her work in the contexts of the historical memory and cancel culture. In this theoretical and historical framework, I discuss the role of the biography in the canonisation and decanonisation of a writer, and consider how these processes and the shift in the cultural paradigm influence interpretations of writers’ biographies.

At the present stage, historians are actively discussing the problems of relationships and mutual influences of history and biography. In our opinion, this is explained by noticeable changes in historical science, which have caused significant reorientations of research interests, the discovery of new subjects and topics of biographical research, as well as new directions and methods. Taking these factors into account, this article attempts to consider some of the most frequently discussed theoretical and methodological problems, including the modern ideas of historians about biography, its goals and objectives, the role and significance of biographical research for historical science. If you look closely at the history of the twentieth century, the Kazakh intelligentsia has given birth to many outstanding, bright personalities, and one of them is Khairetdin Bolganbaev. In this regard, in the article, based on the biographical method, the authors identified the place and role of Kh. Bolganbaev in the reconstruction and development of Kazakh society at the beginning of the 20th century.

Biographies and Pen-Sketches are two separate branches and lots of these two are available in Urdu Literature as well as writings about these two categories but this article is an effort to find sketches of personalities related to the authors of biographies without whom the author's personality cant be revealed fully. These people may be the author's relatives, friends, peers, observers and other persons who has been with him/her at various stages of author's life. Amongst them may be their parents, children, spouse and other relatives as well as other in the same profession. A good biographer takes are of all the aspects, requirements and dimensions from start to end of an autobiography. A person is central to an autobiography can't be highlighted completely unless different aspects of his/her life are described with reference to other related people. This article focuses on the personalities around the central-to-a-biograpgy person and describes them in the light of various biographies in which he/she is talked about. To support this argument, examples are also taken from the biographies written after the selected biography so that it can be proved that biographers can also tell the importance of presented sketches of other personalities. Although these sketches are not written with any such plan, as compared to formal pen sketches, even then these can be considered important and complete to some extent and are comparable to pen sketches.

he concept of „Deaf/Forest Germans” developed on the basis of cultural processes taking place in the Carpathian Foothills in the period from the 14th to the 19th/20th century. The purpose of the article is to reconstruct the biography of this concept and to conduct its etymological analysis based on its oldest known records, mainly from Old Polish manuscripts and old prints. Above all, the authors focus on the source by the 18th-century encyclopedist Benedykt Chmielowski who formulated four definitions of this term. Based on it and other records, and some analogies from the territory of Poland and Slovakia as well, the authors try to answer the question about the nature of the settlement processes taking place in the Carpathian Foothills. Finally, they look at the concept through the prism of its German substitutes (Taubdeutsche and Walddeutsche).

The article presents the assessment of P. N. Milyukov for Russian historical science of the 20th century through the biographies of its iconic representatives A. A. Kizevetter, S. F. Platonov and M. N. Pokrovsky. The source base was made up of articles and obituaries written by Milyukov and dedicated to the deceased scholars. The specifics of the historiographic Milyukov’ discourse consists of 1) the structural features of the narrative, which includes, the author’s own biography along with the biography of historians; 2) in the criteria for assessing the scientific contribution and prospects for the development of historical scholarship from the point of view of fitting into Moscow or St. Petersburg historical schools. In conclusion of the article the authors named features of the corporate memory of emigrant scientist.

The article deals with the biography and scholarly achievements of the outstanding Georgian scholar of Iran Dzhemshid Giunashvili (d. 2017). The authors have placed the life of Dzh. Giunashvili into the broad context of the Oriental Studies as scholarly subject in the former Soviet Union and the post-Soviet Georgia. Being a Georgian by birth Dzh. Giunashvili also belonged to the culture of Iran; Persian was hismother tongue. This fact contributed to the outstanding position, which he took evenamong the Great Soviet specialists and scholars of Iran in the 20th century. Later in life,Dzh. Giunashvili became the first Georgian Ambassador to Iran.

The article introduces readers to the life and creative biography of the outstanding Siberian architect Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sokolovsky on the threshold of his 150th anniversary. The authors describe surviving buildings of the architect in Krasnoyarsk and show the influence of his architecture on the formation of Siberian modern and eclecticism. The article features the role of the architect in the formation and development of the architectural environment of Krasnoyarsk in the first half of the 20th century. It describes the history of two buildings of wooden and stone architecture related to Sokolovsky both as an architect and as a restorer.

В статье поднимается вопрос о функционировании имени Пушкина как прецедентного феномена в русской песенной поэзии от второй трети ХХ века до первой четверти XXI века. Отмечается, что прецедентность самого имени органично сочетается с использованием цитат пушкинских текстов, отсылками к биографии поэта и культурному контексту как Пушкинской, так и современной эпохи. В связи с этим авторы приходят к выводу, что потенциал прецедентности таких имен, как Пушкин, не снижается, а, скорее, наоборот, нарастает по мере изменения и раскрепощения текстовой песенной культуры современного русскоязычного пространства. The article raises the question of the functioning of the name Pushkin as a precedent phenomenon in Russian song poetry from the second third of the 20th century to the first quarter of the 21st century. It is noted that the precedent nature of the name itself is organically combined with the use of quotations from Pushkin’s texts, references to the poet’s biography and the cultural context of both Pushkin and the modern era. In this regard, the authors come to the conclusion that the precedent potential of such names as Pushkin does not decrease, but rather, on the contrary, increases as the textual song culture of the modern Russian-speaking space changes and becomes emancipated.

The article deals with studying the creative work of little-known Russian artists on the example of a brief biography and creative path of Moscow landscape painter Mikhail Germashev (1867–1930). The late 19th - early 20th century period, in which Germashev showed himself most clearly, is covered. The authors analyse why this or that artist came to the periphery of the attention of culture lovers and art historians, highlighting the merits of the artistic manner of one of the forgotten Russian masters. The article describes the distinctive features of Germashev's creative style, his strong artistic connection with the Moscow region and the capital. Separately, it is said about the attempt of regional researchers to introduce unknown names into the scientific context and the forthcoming publication of a book about artist Germashev.

Dom Arnoldus Smits (1914-2005). Historian of the break up of the Low Countries and biographer of Modest Van AsscheArnold Smits, who had a Dutch Pan-Netherlandic background, became a Flemish nationalist Benedictine monk at the abbey of Saint Peter of Steenbrugge near Bruges. He was also a historian, renowned for his four-part study 1830 and the break up of the Low Countries and for his biography of the Flemish nationalist abbot Dom Modestus Van Assche.Romain Vanlandschoot describes the chequered life and career of Smits and also takes this opportunity to depict the abbey: it was not only scientifically renowned for editing Corpus Christianorum, the study of the authentic texts by early Christian authors, but it was also a location where during a significant part of the 20th century the different tendencies within Flemish nationalism confronted each other.

The article is devoted to the biography of professor Rafail Boyko, Doctor of medical sciences, histologist, endocrinologist, Learner of Professor Boris Alyoshin, who made a significant contribution to the teaching of histology, embryology and cytology in soviet medical schools in the second half of the 20th century. He headed the Department of Histology and Embryology of the Izhevsk State Medical Institute (1972-1977), the Department of Histology and Embryology of the Kursk State Medical Institute (1977-1980), the Department of Physiology of the Kherson State University (1981-1995). Professor Rafail Boyko had a significant impact on the development of scientific morphological research and the formation of the scientific community in Russia and Ukraine. The purpose of the study is to restore the history of the formation of Russian science and the scientific morphological school of the outstanding Russian histologists Boris Lavrentiev - Boris Alyoshin, analysis of the scientific works of Professor Rafail Boyko, determination of his contribution to the development of the scientific community of morphologists and endocrinologists in Russia and Ukraine and to the system of higher medical education. The subject of the research in the article was the scientific biography of the scientist, histologist, physiologist and endocrinologist Rafail Boyko, one of the representatives of the famous scientific morphological school of histology. The object of the study was the scientific work of Rafail Boyko in 60th - 70th of 20th century. The research methods are based on comparative-historical, biographical, historical-scientific and documentary-retrospective research methods. The authors of the article prove the contribution of Professor Rafail Boyko in the development of the scientific community of morphologists and endocrinologists in Russia and Ukraine, in the structure and function of the hypothalamic-pituitary system and peripheral endocrine glands, in the development of histochemical and immunochemical research methods. He became one of the first researchers who stained and described the structure of adenohypophysis cells synthesizing adrenocorticotropic hormone. Authors show the contribution of Rafail Boyko in the development of the system of higher medical education in Russia and research centers in Ukraine and that the results of published scientific research by Professor Rafail Boyko are relevant at the present time.

This review focuses on the problematics, structure, and key points of A.L. Litvin and I.Kh. Urilov’s major monograph on the history of the life and work of Julius Osipovich Martov (1873–1923), the prominent Russian revolutionary and the leader of the Mensheviks. It reads as a historical biography in the context of the political events that occurred in Russia during the early 20th century. Of special interest is the specific approach employed by the authors: in order to build a psychological portrait of the main character, they refer to a variety of diverse sources, emphasize the pivotal moments in his life, and hunt for the driving force behind his actions. The analysis of Ju. Martov’s fate lifts the curtain on the history of the social democratic movement in Russia as a choice made between an authoritarian and democratic model of political order. The authors reflect on the importance of adhering to moral principles in politics. The monograph is highly relevant and useful for reconstructing the development of socialist ideas and their influence on the world order.

In 2022, Russia celebrated the 160th anniversary birthday of the famous Khakass scholar, Turkologist, teacher, traveler and educator Nikolaj Fedorovich Katanov (18621922), who played a significant role in the study of the language and culture of the Tuvan people. Katanovs biography and research works allow us to study the origins and the contemporary state of development of the humanities. The biography and legacy of N.F. Katanov are of academic and especially scientific, educational, and humanistic interest. They reflect important trends in Oriental studies both in Russia and abroad, especially in Turkology. N.F. Katanovs doctoral dissertation A Study of the Uriankhai language laid the foundation for the scientific study of the Tuvan language, and his handwritten diaries and materials from the period of travel in Tuva, Khakassia, Xinjiang and Eastern Turkestan, entered the golden fund of Russian and European Turkology. His comprehensive studies of Turkic peoples of Eurasia at the turn of the century remain relevant and valuable at present. The article presents the research work on the heritage of N.F. Katanov scattered in archival centers of Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg and several foreign institutions. For the most part, the written materials (diaries, letters, unfinished manuscripts, etc.) of N.F. Katanov, revealed by the authors, bear the stamp of the era of the late 19th first decades of the 20th cc. and its socio-political life. Introduction into scientific circulation of N.F. Katanovs manuscripts allows us to identify the directions and features of his research work and to form an objective basis for the preparation of an academic biography of the classic of Russian Turkology.

The article is devoted to the study of the publications of biographical direction of the “Bibliotekovedenie” — Russian Journal of Library Science in 1952—2021. The most attention is paid to the analysis of the materials published in the 20th century. It reconstructs the history of the development of biographical materials on the pages of the periodical edition, defines the stages and characteristic features of each of them, presents the forms of biographical publications, reveals the circle of persons engaged in studying biographies of outstanding librarians, as well as the persons who became the objects of the authors’ and editors’ attention. The scientific discipline of humanitarian cycle, biography, is discussed. The authors cite the opinions of scholars (Yu.N. Stolyarov, V.S. Kreydenko, A.N. Vaneev, I.L. Belenkiy, G.G. Silnitskii, etc.) which emphasizes the necessity and significance of studying history through biographical studies. In the 21st century the library and book community has entered with a very developed direction of historical research on biography. While before 1970 there were sporadic publications on people of the library profession, by the end of the 20th century the number of biographical materials had increased significantly. Books and monographs dedicated to librarians appeared, name conferences began to be organized, autobiographical genre began to form, memoirs “in the first person” were published. Various factual and biographical materials have been collected in the journal.During the 15-year period of publication of the collection (bulletin) “Libraries of the USSR. Work Experience” (1952—1966) it published four articles of biographical genre: on the bibliographer A.P. Sokolov; on V.I. Lenin’s elder brother A.I. Ulyanov; the writer V.G. Korolenko and his library; the librarian A.A. Pokrovsky. During the six years (1967—1972), when the collection was published under the title “Libraries of the USSR”, nine articles dedicated to individual outstanding people were published in it. In 1973 the collection was transformed into the scientific and practical journal “Soviet Bibliotekovedenie” (Soviet Library Science). During the twenty years between 1973 and 1992, 128 biographical materials were published, and 96 persons were the subject of attention. Since 1993 the journal has been published under the title “Bibliotekovedenie” (Russian Journal of Library Science). From 1993 to 2000, 59 biographical materials were published in it. Articles of autobiographical genre appeared. For the first time, the interview genre was used. Between 2001 and 2021, 298 biographical materials were published in the journal, and more than 200 persons received attention. Of these, material on 165 persons appeared for the first time.Between 1952 and 2021, a total of over 280 authors published articles of biographical genre. The librarians about whom the greatest number of materials has been published: O.S. Chubarian, N.I. Tyulina, Yu.V. Grigoriev, N.S. Kartashov, K.I. Abramov, A.A. Pokrovsky, M.Ya. Dvorkina, N.A. Rubakin, Yu.N. Stolyarov, L.B. Khavkina, etc.The materials presented in the journal may serve as a basis for further research. The article may be useful for library professionals to intensify research activities in the field of library history through the study of biographies of prominent people.

The article analyzes the possibilities of personal and professional adaptation of a “man of the revolution” to the dynamic and changing conditions of the Soviet society during the first half of the 20th century. The authors reconstruct the biography of a resident of the province - Boris Antonovich Yankovsky (1903-1964), whose life path incorporated the features both typical of the era and unique. The methodological basis of the study was the anthropological approach and the synthesis of macro- and micro-history; historical-biographical and comparative-historical methods were also used in the work. The sources for the research were unpublished ego-documents (questionnaire, autobiographies and memoirs) permanently stored in the Historical Archive of Omsk Oblast and in the Archive of the Federal Security Service of Russia in Omsk Oblast. The presence of such a significant and informative array of sources about a former employee of the Soviet special services is infrequent. This circumstance, as a result, made it possible to reconstruct Yankovsky's biography in as much detail as possible and to characterize his inner world. A feature of Yankovsky's biography is that in the conditions of social cataclysms he showed professional mobility, skillfully found himself and his vocation realizing his creative writer and publicist talents, he also served in the army, in state security agencies, and worked as a journalist. Yankovsky did not hold high positions, apparently burdened by the manager post, and preferred individual activities. Wars had an undoubted influence on Yankovsky. As evidenced by the study, he was an ideological person, devoted to the Soviet system, persistent, fearless, enterprising, emotional, direct and ready for sacrifice. At the same time, even though he was twice oppressed along the party line, he was able to safely avoid repression. In conclusion, the authors emphasize that the fate of Boris Yankovsky can be called a typical example of a “grassroots” person who was able to successfully take advantage of the conditions of the Russian Revolution, which created social elevators for talented people.

Commendation as a historical text – the biography of Bohdan Zahaykevych The authors present a source rarely used in historical research: a commendation of a person delivered on the occasion of their jubilee. By courtesy of the family, an unknown historical source has been edited, concerned with Bohdan Zahaykevycz, one of the major figures in interwar Przemyśl: secondary school teacher, museologist, organizer of cultural activities, brother of Volodymyr Zahaykevych (Deputy Speaker of the Sejm of the Second Republic of Poland and lawyer). After emigrating from Przemyśl, Zahaykevycz was one of the key figures in the life of the Ukrainian diaspora in the USA. This text is supposed to honor his services as a sort of liaison between the past world for American Ukrainians and their postwar reality overseas. It says a lot about what and how was remembered and maintained in the collective memory of the generations living in new reality after 1945, focusing above all on Ukrainian life in Przemyśl in the first half of the 20th century.

The article contains the notes pro memoria about A. P. Kazhdan’s studies of manuscripts, his achievements and losses in this field. The first case is the episode of the describing by young A. Kazhdan the collection of Greek manuscripts in the former Lenin State Library, now – Russian State Library. The next point is connected with manuscript copy-book by N. Novosadsky, that contained texts of many literary works of Eustathius of Thessalonice, Michael Rhetor (“of Thessalonice”) and other Byzantine authors, copied in El Escorial. They were used by A. Kazhdan himself and by his students in their studies. The last episode con-cerns the case of prohibit for A. Kazhdan to visit Athos and research some manuscripts, even while he visited Grece with a group of colleagues. Those three cases contribute to our un-derstanding of not only the biography of A. P. Kazhdan, but also of the history of Byzantine studies in the USSR and the Russian historiography of the second half of the 20th century in general.

The paper presents the collection and analysis of the folklore adaptations of Maria Zubova's sentimental romance “I am going away into the desert” in the 19th and 20th centuries. The transformation of the author's work in folk song and theatre culture demonstrates a complex interaction between folklore and book poetry. The biography of the author, a representative of the artistic milieu and one of the few female poets of the late 18th century, is reflected in some journal sources (“Materials for the History of Russian Female Authors” by M. N. Makarov) and fiction sources (“Russian Women of New Times” by D. L. Mordovtsev) which confirm possible authorship of the poetess. The study highlights stylistic features of love, spiritual and prison lyrics, as well as the work of folk theatre, which uses the text under study. Women's love songs, including choral songs, vary the motif of infidelity, transform the spiritual meaning of the image of the desert into a symbol of conjugal loneliness. In an Old Believer environment, the work was included in spiritual songs developing a motif of renunciation of the secular life in the wilderness. Researcher P. A. Bessonov discusses the devastating impact of “pseudo-folk” song on Russian spiritual culture. Echoes of the sentimental romance may also be found in the prison lyrics of the 20th century collected from the Siberian narrator I. K. Beketov. The final part of the study deals with the folk drama “King Maximilian”, where the cited text appears as a precedent for the Russian culture, which is proved later by its active use in numerous works of fiction.

На основе материалов рукописных мечетных книг юрт Комаровских Бухарской волости Тобольской губернии рассматривается социокультурный облик сибирских бухарцев в XIX – начале XX в. Мусульманские метрические (мечетные) книги «на записку родившихся, о браках, разводах и смерти» транслитерированы и переведены авторами на русский язык. Транслитерация и перевод старотатарских текстов позволяют ввести в научный оборот новый источниковедческий материал. Показано, что в метрических книгах содержится уникальная информация, которая в совокупности с другими источниками дает возможность детально и комплексно рассмотреть вопросы социально-исторического и лингвистического характера мусульманского населения Западной Сибири. Выявлено, что структура этих документов унифицирована и соответствует общепринятым стандартам изучаемого исторического периода. Составителями мусульманских метрических записей являлись имамы, которые вели службу в местных мечетях, что просматривается по записям, сделанным в книгах о браках и разводах. В мусульманских метрических книгах Комаровской мечети сохранились сведения за 27 лет, охватывающие с 1835 г. по 1852 г. и с 1854 г. по 1862 г. В течение всего этого периода имамом в мечети юрт Комаровских служил бухарец Суюджбаки б. Габдельгазиз. Авторами представлены некоторые факты биографии указного имама и составлена его родословная. Выявлено, что как книги о рождении, так и о браках позволяют определить этническую и сословную структуру изучаемого населения в XIX в. В мечетных книгах юрт Комаровских обозначены эти категории, к которым относились служилые, ясачные татары, бухарцы и др. В рассматриваемых рукописных документах для обозначения бухарского населения характерно в качестве равнозначных использование лексем бухартин и сарт. Отмечается, что в передаче фонетических особенностей произношения личных имен в графическом оформлении слова (оглушение) и лексике (диалектизмы) прослеживаются некоторые элементы регионального наречия. This article analyzes the socio-cultural peculiarities of the Siberian Bukharans in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The analysis is based on the material of handwritten mosque books of Komarovsky yurts in Bukhara Volost, Tobolsk province. The authors transliterated and translated the Muslim metrical (mosque) books “On a Note to the Born, on Marriages, Divorce, and Deaths” into Russian. The transliteration and translation of the old Tatar texts bring new source material into scholarly circulation. It is shown that the metrical books contain unique information. This information and some other sources allow one to consider in detail and comprehensively the socio-historical and linguistic nature of the Muslim population of Western Siberia. It turns out that the structure of these documents is uniform and corresponds to the generally accepted standards of the historical period under study. The authors of the Muslim metrical records were imams serving in local mosques. This is evident from the records in the books of marriages and divorces. The Muslim metrical books of the Komarovskaya Mosque preserved information for 27 years, from 1835 to 1852 and 1854 to 1862, during which Suyujbaki b. Gabdelgaziz was the imam of the Komarovsky Yurts. The authors present some facts about the biography of the decreed Imam and compile his genealogy. It turned out that the two books on births and marriages allow us to determine the ethnic and class structure of the studied population in the 19th century. These categories are given in the mosque books of the Komarovsky Yurts and include soldiers, Yazak Tatars, Bukharians. It is typical of the designation of the population of Bukhara that in these handwritten documents, the lexemes bukhartin (бухартин) and sart (старт) are used as equivalents. The authors note that some elements of the regional dialect are recognizable in the transfer of phonetic features of pronunciation of personal names in the graphic design of the word (devoicing) and vocabulary (dialectisms).

The article is devoted to the Russian historiography of the credit and financial system of the Russian Empire of the second half of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century. Its purpose is to study the main methodological approaches to research of the credit and financial system of the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century in pre-revolutionary, Soviet and modern historiography by identifying the main approaches and characteristic features of research on this topic in different historiographic periods, identifying the most prominent representatives and the most popular problematic issues of Russian historiography, identifying key research methods at different stages. The relevance of the article is determined by the coverage of different points of view on the problems of the development of the credit and financial system of the Russian Empire of the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries, concerning the financing of large infrastructure projects, modernization, the use of new financial instruments to increase government revenues, stabilize adverse macroeconomic problems context. This information can be used to solve modern strategic tasks of the state and rational use of financial resources. The novelty of the research is determined by the fact that to study the historiography of the credit and financial system of the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries was first applied to institutional evolutionary theory. The publication identifies the main features of pre-revolutionary historiography (empiricism, a reflection of the ideology of its social group, pluralism of opinions, deep erudition of the authors), Soviet (conducting research in the framework of the formation approach, officially approved methodological principles, criticism and repression of dissidents), modern (rejection of the formation approach, the use of information technologies, the use of economic research methods, the study of the object in the context of new directions). The author covers research methods (general scientific, historical, economic), characteristic for different periods of Russian historiography, the most popular problems, and areas of study of the credit and financial system (gender history, biography, everyday history, etc.). The article shows the pluralism of opinions of pre-revolutionary researchers, the results of the application of the formation approach by Soviet researchers, expressed in the harsh criticism of predecessors, one-sided coverage of events, the use of various research methods by modern researchers, and the development of new directions.

This publication is an analytical review of the controversial and complex fate of Ivan Ivanovich Alifanov - a provincial Russian intellectual, social democrat, cadet, Bolshevik, officer of the Russian Imperial Army, White Guard, Soviet employee, victim of mass political repressions in the USSR. The purpose of study is to represent in the context of the military- anthropological vision of the scenario of adaptation of the "ordinary intellectual" to the conditions of social cataclysms of the first half of the 20th century. The methodological concept of the study, based on the characteristics of its genre, is represented by the simultaneous application of the anthropological approach, the theory of social mobility, biographical and comparative historical methods. The basis for the preparation of the article was a complex of previously unpublished sources from the funds of the Historical Archive, the Omsk Region, the State Archive of the Novosibirsk Region, and the archive of the Office of the Federal Security Service of Russia in the Omsk Region. The most informative sources are Soviet questionnaires, autobiographies of I.I. Alifanov, materials of the archival criminal case initiated against him. Some of these documents were in closed storage for a long period. In conclusion, the authors emphasize that the biography of I.I. Alifanov is an example of how the conditions of the military revolutionary era subjugate and, ultimately, break the life of a provincial Russian intellectual who did not fit into their realities. The biography studied is typical and raises the question of the need to study the conditions and possibilities for the adaptation of former white officers to the Soviet society. The work is addressed to a wide range of readers, including specialists in political and social history, researchers of the revolutionary movement, Russian (Imperial), white and Red armies, mass political repressions in the USSR.

The article refers to the famous economist Friedrich Hayek, whose 120-th birthday anniversary year before last was barely noticed. It should be mentioned that in the 1990-s, when liberal ideas were popular, he was considered to be one of the most outstanding economists of the 20th century. But nowadays the ideas of Hayek are presented more likely for exhibiting extreme liberal approaches rather than for their relevant practical application. The research gives an insight into his biography, which includes the description of similar highs and lows in his popularity during his lifetime. In 1944 after the book «The Road to Serfdom» was published, as well as in 1974 after winning the Nobel Prize, he was at the highest of his fame unlike the period of the1950-s and 1960-s when his views were barely demanded. There is a number of other strange issues in his personal biography as well as in the development of his ideas. As the representative of fourth generation of the Austrian School, he witnessed how this scientific school completely emigrated from Austria. Although he is regarded to be a distinguished economist, political analysts and philosophers refer to his ideas almost more frequently than economists. The authors of the present article proposed a problem-based approach to be used for understanding Hayek’s biography and his ideas. This included not only identifying the oddities in evolution of Hayek’s ideas and of the Austrian School as a whole, but also providing the rationale for them, which was based on highlighting the relationship between development of doctrinal economic ideas and «the spirit of the age». Special emphasis in the research was placed on explaining the historical background of the most famous work of Friedrich Hayek «The Road to Serfdom». The article was produced by the editors of joint monograph «The Road to Hayek» (Moscow: KNORUS, 2021. — 224 p., which is being published), who were influenced by reflection on variety of approaches to Hayek’s ideas and their significance.

Abstract While a narratological reading of the Gospels is relatively well accepted, their characterisation as parts of the genre of ancient biography was much antagonised in former times. Although things have changed thanks to seminal monographs on the problem from the second half of the 20th century and to continuing work, some questions remain open. Therefore, a narratological comparison of Gospels with concrete representatives of the ancient bios could possibly help to clarify the relations between both. In what follows, the oldest Gospel is read simultaneously with Plutarch’s Biography of the Younger Cato. Three observations are made: a) The structures of the narratives of Cato and of Jesus match to a high degree. Both protagonists carry out certain duties while operating in public. In most instances, they achieve great successes. From a certain point on, however, they irrevocably approach failure and ruin. This structure of story seems to form the basis both of the Gospel and of the biography of Cato, written ca. three decades later. b) Obviously, both works narrate the life of a man, his exceptional character, his extraordinary operations in public and his non-natural violent dead. In Plutarch’s version, the Younger Cato fails in the end. At first sight, also Mark’s Jesus fails to accomplish his mission. By God’s action he is turned into the saviour of the faithful however. This claimed unsurpassed relevance of the story is contrasted with the laconism of the narration. c) Both narrations are composed out of both factual and fictional elements. Thus, readers cannot separate both elements precisely in every instance. Both stories are imagined worlds designed for the in narratology so called game of fiction. As can be learned in Plutarch, authors of stories like the Life of Cato or the Gospel of Mark guarantee a certain sense of responsibility in their work. Summed up, the narratological comparison has illustrated both the close affinity and the individual specifications of both narratives. It thus helps to clarify the position- fixing of the Early Christian literature within its Graeco-Roman context.

The paper analyzes investigations on the public, military, and state-making activities of Dmytro Vitovskyi (1887–1919) in the Ukrainian historiography of the interwar period of the 20th century. As noted, the first steps in analyzing the biography of the famous and reputable member of the Sich Rifleman, the State Secretary of Military Affairs of ZUNR were made in the 1920–1930s. It was during this period that scientists, social and political figures, and military associates distinguished the main thematic blocks of D. Vitovskyi's life path: 1) family environment, education; 2) participation in the USS Legion on the fronts of World War I; 3) cultural and educational work in Volyn and Podillia in 1916–1918; 4) organization and implementation of the November Uprising of 1918; 5) work as the State Secretary of Military Affairs of ZUNR (ZOUNR); 6) participation in Ukrainian delegation of the UNR at the Paris Peace Conference (May 1919–July 1919). The author characterizes the first article that started studies on the military and socio-political activities of D. Vitovskyi, written by an unknown author (probably an editor of the newspaper «Ukrainian Flag» Stepan Baran) titled «On August 4, 1919, died with a tragic death, by falling from an aircraft broken by the Polish border guard near Ratibor in Prussian Silesia, one of the leaders of the Halychyna-Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, Colonel Dmytro Vitovskyi». The contribution to the research of Dmytro Vitovskyi's life of Mykhailo Lozynskyi, Vasyl Kuchabskyi, Ivan Krypiakevych, Myron Zaklynskyi, Osyp Dumin, authors of numerous memorists – Sich Riflemen members – is clarified. As investigated, the most fully military and public activities of D. Vitovskyi covered his friend from the USS Legion M. Zaklynskyi, while other authors focused on particular periods of his biography. Much attention from scientists and memorists was devoted to the moral and psychological traits of D. Vitovskyi in various military and everyday situations, and his ability to unite the team. Keywords Dmytro Vitovskyi, USS Legion, ZUNR, historiography.

В статье представлена реконструкция научной биографии выдающегося мыслителя ХХ века М. М. Бахтина, влияние которого на развитие гуманитарных наук в России и за ее пределами не просто сохраняется в XXI веке, но становится более заметным. Понимание того, как формируется и эволюционирует мысль М. М. Бахтина на протяжении 1910–1970-х годов, какие влияния она испытывает и в диалоге с какими школами и течениями получает завершение, — одна из важнейших целей бахтиноведения как междисциплинарного направления гуманитаристики последних десятилетий. Особое значение в этом контексте приобретают Собрание сочинений М. М. Бахтина, издание которого завершилось в 2012 году, исследования В. Л. Махлина, Н. И. Николаева, Н. А. Панькова, Н. Д. Тамарченко, Л. А. Гоготишвили, М. Холквиста, Г. С. Морсона, К. Эмерсон, Г. Тиханова, К. Брендиста, статьи и очерки С. Г. Бочарова, В. В. Кожинова, В. Н. Турбина и др. С опорой на междисциплинарный подход, приемы микроистории и идею «малого времени» авторами дано комплексное описание жизни и творчества М. М. Бахтина на основе новейших разысканий отечественного и зарубежного бахтиноведения, собственных исследований 1990–2010-х годов, предложена периодизация научной биографии ученого, охарактеризованы основные достижения, прослежена эволюция философско-эстетических взглядов и исследовательской методологии, обозначены научный и социокультурный контексты работ невельско-витебского периода, «Проблем творчества Достоевского», исследований о романе, рукописи о Рабле, поздних текстов и фрагментов. В первой части статьи предлагается реконструкция жизни и творчества ученого с раннего периода до публикации «Проблем творчества Достоевского» и вынесения приговора по делу «Воскресения». The article reconstructs a scholarly biography of M. M. Bakhtin, an outstanding philosopher of the 20th century, whose influence on the development of humanities in Russia and abroad can hardy be overestimated and remains strong even in the 21st century. One of the most important goals of Bakhtin studies as an interdisciplinary humanitarian research of recent decades is the investigation of M. M. Bakhtin’s philosophy and its evolution during the 1910s–1970s as well as the study of external factors, philosophical schools and trends that influenced Bakhtin’s philosophy. M. M. Bakhtin’s collected works (published in 2012), research works conducted by V. L. Makhlin, N. I. Nikolayev, N. A. Pankov, N. D. Tamarchenko, L. A. Gogotisjvili, M. Kholkvist, G. S. Morson, K. Emerson, G. Tikhanov, K. Brendist, articles and essays written by S. G. Bocharov, V. V. Kozhinov, B. N. Turbin, and other works gain special significance in the present context. The authors of the article describe M. M. Bakhtin’s life and work through the prism of an interdisciplinary approach, employ the methods of microhistory and the idea of little time, rely on the investigations of Russian and foreign scholars working in the field of Bakhtin studies and their own research conduced in the 1990s-2010s. The article focuses on some landmarks of the philosopher’s scholarly biography, characterizes his major achievements, investigates the evolution of his philosophical and aesthetical views and his research methodology, characterizes the scholarly and socio-cultural contexts of Bakhtin’s work in Newel and Vitebsk, analyzes Bakhtin’s “Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics”, investigates his manuscript about Rabelais and his late works. The first part of the article attempts to reconstruct the philosopher’s life and work starting with the early period and finishing with the “Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics” and the exile caused by the Voskresenie case.

The main content of the monograph by O.E. Puchnina (Sorokopudova) «Political Outlook of V.V. Rozanov» which makes up the main and largest section of the book «Russian socio-political thought in the 19th and early 20th century: V.V. Rozanov» is examined in detail. It is noted that the authors of the serial edition and above all the author-compiler of its monographic section, O.E. Puchnina, managed to bring out in a detailed study of the work of one of the most original Russian thinkers of culture in the Silver Age a whole layer of conceptually related socio-political ideas giving them the status of a political worldview. The methodological basis of the review rests on the methods of analysis and evaluation of the results of the research conducted by the author that are typical of this type of scientific criticism. The assessment of the quality and completeness of the bibliographic description of the sources used in the monograph rests on the resut of the analysis. The degree of influence of biographical themes taken from the biography of V.V. Rozanov on the character of his ideological formation is presented. The features of Rozanov's creative style and method of analysis of socio-political reality highlighted by the author of the monograph are considered and critically evaluated. The political processes and phenomena in relation to which the philosopher formulated his original political ideas are listed. The role and place of V.V. Rozanov's political outlook in the Russian historiography and the history of the Russian socio-political tradition are shown. The argument of the thesis about the typicality of Rozanov's unique creativity for the Russian consciousness in the late 19th‒ early 20th century is partially supported. It is concluded that despite the critical remarks that were expressed in the article, O.E. Puchnina's innovative experiment of an ideological reconstruction of Rozanov’s socio-political ideas should be recognized as very successful.

In the article the image of P. A. Stolypin is analyzed on the material of The Red Wheel, Diary R-17, memoires and essays by A. I. Solzhenitsyn. The authors trace the course the writer took while working on the artistic presentation of the image of one of the most prominent Russian state figures of the 20th century; they show Solzhenitsyn’s artistry in endeavoring to reveal to the reader all the “prominence”, “expressiveness” of this great person, as well as the significance of Stolypin’s destiny for the future of Russia. The authors of the research observe how in The Red Wheel Stolypin’s destiny is linked to that of Russia, following Solzhenitsyn in comprehending Stolypin as a “doer” responsible to Russia. In the course of the research Stolypin’s chapter with reviews in August 1914, has been analyzed in detail. This enabled the authors to grasp Stolypin’s image as the focal one in The Red Wheel, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, as Solzhenitsyn’s favourite character, conveyed realistically, and, at the same time, personally, compassionately, through “the dialectic of the soul”. The reader perceives a straightforward, strong-willed, dynamic, determined and ethically wholesome politician. The storylines of Guchkov, Bogrov, Nikolas II are essential to understanding Stolypin’s image. Focusing on these characters, the authors of the article show Stolypin’s role in their destinies. In The Red Wheel the artistic image of Stolypin is created by complex forms of inner monologues, quotes, free indirect discourse, the alternation of scenes and reports (summaries of events), by the abundance of the author’s “insertions”, by the multiple functions of irony. In the process of research the texts of P. A. Stolypin’s speeches were drawn upon, his children’s reminiscences, his biography, historians’ opinions. The chosen historical context provided a valuable insight into Solzhenitsyn’s historical method and the writer’s historiosophic reasoning.

The history of the perception of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent in the first half of the 20th century is divided into two large, qualitatively different periods: the Silver Age and the 1920s–1940s. The peculiarity of the first one is the discovery of Dostoevsky as a philosopher and religious thinker, while the second the awareness of him as an original artist. Therefore, in the first period, “ideological” and “spiritual” interpretations of The Adolescent prevailed, in the second – scientific studies of his poetics and especially of the manuscript corpus. The main areas of study of The Adolescent in the 1920s and 1940s were biography, psychoanalysis, and poetics, together with a continuous religious and philosophical understanding of the novel. The reviewed material is considered in chronological order. There is no clear distinction between Soviet and emigrant researchers, although there is a difference in the conditions in which they worked. Among the authors who wrote about The Adolescent in the 1900s and 1910s, symbolist and religious-philosophical interpretations predominate (D.S. Merezhkovsky, A.A. Blok, V.V. Rozanov, A.S. Glinka-Volzhsky, N.A. Berdyaev), judgments from the positions of naturalism, positivism, and Marxism are less common (A.I. Vvedensky, V.V. Veresaev, V.F. Pereverzev). If in the USSR of the 1920s–1940s references to The Adolescent in a religious and philosophical way are rare (N.O. Lossky), then in emigration they are quite numerous (metropolitan Antony Khrapovitsky, N.A. Berdyaev, A.Z. Steinberg, E.Yu. Kuzmina-Karavaeva, N.O. Lossky). In Dostoevsky’s biographies of the 1920s–1940s, the myth of the writer’s gloomy childhood prevails, as if depicted in the plot of Arkady Dolgoruky, the hero of The Adolescent (L.P. Grossman, I.D. Ermakov, K.V. Mochulsky), but in the same years, there is confidence in the evidence of Dostoevsky’s happy childhood (O. von Schultz, G.I. Chulkov). Psychoanalysis, authoritative in the 1920s, considered the family conflict of The Adolescent in the light of the Oedipus complex and the teachings of Z. Freud on the structure of the human personality (A.A. Kashina-Evreinova, B.A. Griftsov, I.D. Ermakov, P.S. Popov).

The history of the perception of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent in the first half of the 20th century is divided into two large, qualitatively different periods: the Silver Age and the 1920s–1940s. The peculiarity of the first one is the discovery of Dostoevsky as a philosopher and religious thinker, while the second the awareness of him as an original artist. Therefore, in the first period, “ideological” and “spiritual” interpretations of The Adolescent prevailed, in the second – scientific studies of his poetics and especially of the manuscript corpus. The main areas of study of The Adolescent in the 1920s and 1940s were biography, psychoanalysis, and poetics, together with a continuous religious and philosophical understanding of the novel. The reviewed material is considered in chronological order. There is no clear distinction between Soviet and emigrant researchers, although there is a difference in the conditions in which they worked. Among the authors who wrote about The Adolescent in the 1900s and 1910s, symbolist and religious-philosophical interpretations predominate (D.S. Merezhkovsky, A.A. Blok, V.V. Rozanov, A.S. Glinka-Volzhsky, N.A. Berdyaev), judgments from the positions of naturalism, positivism, and Marxism are less common (A.I. Vvedensky, V.V. Veresaev, V.F. Pereverzev). If in the USSR of the 1920s–1940s references to The Adolescent in a religious and philosophical way are rare (N.O. Lossky), then in emigration they are quite numerous (metropolitan Antony Khrapovitsky, N.A. Berdyaev, A.Z. Steinberg, E.Yu. Kuzmina-Karavaeva, N.O. Lossky). In Dostoevsky’s biographies of the 1920s–1940s, the myth of the writer’s gloomy childhood prevails, as if depicted in the plot of Arkady Dolgoruky, the hero of The Adolescent (L.P. Grossman, I.D. Ermakov, K.V. Mochulsky), but in the same years, there is confidence in the evidence of Dostoevsky’s happy childhood (O. von Schultz, G.I. Chulkov). Psychoanalysis, authoritative in the 1920s, considered the family conflict of The Adolescent in the light of the Oedipus complex and the teachings of Z. Freud on the structure of the human personality (A.A. Kashina-Evreinova, B.A. Griftsov, I.D. Ermakov, P.S. Popov).

Wojciech Piotrowicz (born in 1940) is a Vilnius poet, prose writer, translator, journalist, social and cultural activist. He is the author of several poetry collections and volumes of memoirs. Research on which this paper is based consists of two main parts: we present the writer’s biography, which introduces a representative of the Polish intelligentsia in Lithuania, and an analysis of his lexis from his collection of short stories Moja czasoprzestrzeń (My Space-Time) (2015). The aim of the research is to investigate the lexical layers in the idiolect of the writer. Piotrowicz’s idiolect is the domain where the erudite vocabulary of the standard language blends in with the dialectical vocabulary of the Švenčionys district, in which words of rural life are frequent. In the vocabulary of his idiolect, we distinguish the following groups of lexemes: words from family language, archaisms, dialect words, and postwar Russian borrowings, referred to as “Soviet words”. The multi-layer nature of Piotrowicz’s idio­lect is a result of a complicated reality on the border between cultures, languages, times, and evidence of changes in social stratification. To summarize the research results, it can be stated that the analysis of 179 words (phrases) from the writer’s individual language shows a world of concepts, thoughts, and values that are characteristic of representatives of the intelligentsia of peasant origin, born in the 1940s. The authors of the paper consider that this study is only a contribution toward determining the peculiarities of the Polish language spoken by the intelligentsia in Lithuania in the 20th century, and that this article does not exhaust all issues of Wojciech Piotrowicz’s idiolect.

Problem. Professor of Zoology and Botany D. O. Baikov worked at several educational institutions in Odesa: Odesa (Novorossiysk) University (1865-1866), Richelieu Lyceum (1850-1865), Odesa Institute of Noble Maidens (1854-1868), Gymnasium of Richelieu Lyceum (1850-1854), 2nd Municipal Girls' School (1854-1868). His life and activities have been covered in many biographical articles, but the information provided is either inaccurate or conflicting. As an example, none of the authors provide the dates and places of his birth, death or burial. Objective. The aim of our study was to clarify the basic biographical data and the results of the scientific-pedagogical activity of Professor D. O. Baikov. Main results. Based on the study of archival and official printed documents of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the main dates of the life and activity of Professor Dmytro Oleksandrovych Baikov, who headed the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy of Odesa (Novorossiysk) University, were established. His role in the development and formation of higher and women's education in Odesa in the second half of the 19th century is shown. Conclusions. For the first time, the main dates of the life and scientific-pedagogical activity of Professor D. O. Baikov were documented – 25(13).10.1818 – 22(10).09.1884; for the first time, 12 units of storage of three state archives and 9 printed documents that were previously unknown to the scientist's biographers and specialists in the field of biography were introduced into scientific circulation; arguments were provided for reconsidering some conclusions regarding the activities of Professor D. O. Baikov in educational institutions of various types.

The article deals with mentions of the name of Gavriil Derzhavin in Russian poetry in 1790-2023. In the poems, the singer of Felitsa appears not only as an outstanding original poet, but also as a lover of truth, a statesman, a representative of the Catherine the Great era, and finally, a friend and acquaintance of his peers and the idol of the young Pushkin and Delwig. In later texts, the image of the real Derzhavin, as we know him from sources, including autobiographical Notes, becomes more and more blurred. Some hypostases of Derzhavin attract poets more often (poet and statesman), others are much less common (a friend of some of his contemporaries), some are not mentioned at all (literary theorist or the author of the mentioned Notes). Such a choice also influences the formation of the image of the poet among the general readers (for example, in the 20th century, one of the favorite plots is the description of the meeting between Derzhavin and Pushkin at the Lyceum, which is clearly related to the importance of this episode in Pushkin’s biography, but not in that of “old Derzhavin”), and among other poets. Avant-garde poets represent Derzhavin in their texts in their own way. Very few poets pay attention to the formal features of Derzhavin’s poems. Sometimes voluminous quotes from his work are included in poems by later authors (for example, by K. Ryleev and K. Simonov). A new poem by German Lukomnikov, lines from which are included in the title of this work, is considered separately: Derzhavin’s name is not mentioned in the text, the poet’s unspoken surname is encrypted in a compound rhyme.

В исследовании выявляются особенности театральной жизни Донского региона в период Серебряного века и анализируется значение деятельности провинциальной творческой интеллигенции для развития сценического искусства. Основными источниками послужили материалы региональной периодической печати и мемуары театральных деятелей. Рассмотрена практика режиссеров и антрепренеров в театрах Ростова-на-Дону, Таганрога и Новочеркасска, проанализирован их вклад в эволюцию культурной жизни Области Войска Донского. Раскрыта роль ростовских театральных критиков в совершенствовании сценического репертуара. Установлено, что провинциальная театральная жизнь донского региона не была полностью вторичной, копирующей достижения столиц. Помимо особой роли провинциальной интеллигенции, ее особенностями в исследуемый период являлись приверженность к реализму, материальная зависимость репертуара от вкусов публики и наличие театрального симбиоза (сочетание драмы, оперы и оперетты), не характерного для столиц. The study reveals the specific features of the theatrical life of the Don region during the Silver Age of Russian culture and analyzes the role of the provincial creative intelligentsia in the processes that accompanied the evolution of performing arts in the cities of the Don Army Region. The main source the authors used is periodicals, which published reviews of plays and characterized their public perception; memoirs of theater workers who worked in the region were also important. The methodology is based on a historical-systemic approach; diachronic and comparative-historical methods were used to identify the specifics of provincial theatrical life and clarify the contribution of specific persons to the development of Don theaters. The professional activities of the director and entrepreneur Nikolai Sinelnikov, who managed the Don theaters at the end of the twentieth century, are considered. Sinelnikov’s progressive influence on changes in the theatrical repertoire, expressed in the production of plays by outstanding Russian and foreign playwrights, is reflected. The contribution of Nikolai Sobolshchikov-Samarin in reforming the Rostov theater scene is analyzed; his creative method is described, and the main directorial works are considered. The facts relating to the Rostov period of the biography of director Konstantin Mardzhanov, who in his works sought to search for new forms of expressiveness, are studied. The role of Rostov theater critics (Pyotr Hertso-Vinogradsky, Marietta Shaginyan, Ivan Pechkovsky, Alexander Tumansky, Alexander Karagichev) in improving the stage repertoire is revealed, and the thematic focus of the reviews published by them in local media is revealed. The study established that the provincial theatrical life of the Don region was not completely secondary, copying the achievements of the capital cities. The authors conclude that the theater intelligentsia played one of the key roles in the cultural life of the Don region. In the conditions of the province, each theater figure was a source of original ideas aimed at revitalizing and updating the regional stage process. Among the specific features of the provincial theater are: (1) the special role of the provincial intelligentsia in cultural life, with its smaller share than in the capitals; (2) commitment to realism, a less pronounced search for new forms in art; (3) significant material dependence of the repertoire on the tastes of the public; (4) the phenomenon of theatrical symbiosis (a combination of drama, opera and operetta on one stage), not typical for the capital cities.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the Buddhist monastic history in Northwest China, described in the treatise of the Buryat scholar Kensur Nawang Nima “The lamp of collected quotations from classical works of the Buddhist history”. This work is an example of Buddhist historical thought, which was developed in the traditional culture of the Buryats in the pre-revolutionary period. The authors of the article claim that “The lamp of collected quotations” has a specificity of presentation, determined by the author’s personality, historical and cultural circumstances. This specificity is related to the post-classical period of the history of Tibetan scholasticism, within which the work was written. Buddhist historical thought tried to understand the results of the most important stages of the Buddhist history in the vast region based on the works of previous generations. The treatise can be described as a scholastic work and Nawang Nima as an outstanding scholar and theorist of his time. Analysis of the structure of the work has showed that the author focused primarily on the history of the Geluk School, which he belonged to. Due to this specificity, most of the text is devoted to the biography of the founder of the school Je Tsongkhapa. The volume of work directly related to the history of Buddhist monasteries in northwestern China is extremely small. Nawang Nima describes the Genesis of the Geluk Buddhist monasteries: Chacung (bya khyung), Kumbum (sku ‘bum byams pa gling), Gonlung (dgon lung byams pa gling), Ganden (lga ldan dam chos gling), Rongwo (rong bo dgon chen), Labrang (bla brang bkra shis ‘khyil), Chone (сone dgon chen), etc. This fragment of the work “The lamp of collected quotations from classical works of the Buddhist history” is a fundamental historical description of the most important religious and cultural processes in the territories of Inner Asia in the period from the 19th up to the 20th century. Keywords: Buddhism, history, monastery, Buryatia, Tibet, Northwest China, Nawang Nima

The article, based on the material of the Siberian Diary (1909), as well as the travelogues “Adam and Eve” (1909) and “The Black Arab” (1910), examines the features of the images of the Kazakh steppe in Mikhail Prishvin’s early works. All these texts are based on the materials of one journey, which the writer made from May to December 1909. The article attempts to understand the place of Prishvin’s steppe narrative in the discourse of Russian Orientalism in the late imperial period, when the attitude towards residents of the Asian outskirts in Russian literature underwent certain changes. The main question is whether Prishvin preserved the strategies of Russian Orientalism of the 19th century in his descriptions of the steppe and its nomadic and sedentary inhabitants, or he developed new principles for describing and inventing the inner East of Russia. Speaking about Russian Orientalism, the authors of the article proceed from the idea that this discourse is a product of an imperial culture that seeks to “discover the world” under the conditions of an imaginary division of the world into the colonizing West, the colonized East, and Russia, which is both the subject and object of colonization. Analyzing Kazakh travelogues in the context of Prishvin’s biography and works, as well as the cultural context of the colonial policy of the Russian Empire, the authors come to the conclusion that the writer does not create a special discourse about the East but continues the traditions of classical Russian literature of the 19th century. Describing the inhabitants of the steppe (Russian colonists, the imperial administration, as well as the nomadic and sedentary Turkic population), Prishvin bases on the fundamental oppositions of Russian Orientalism, which help to raise questions about Russia, the Russian character, the goals and means of the Russian expansion to the East: Russian/Asian, wild/civilized, real/imaginary. The specificity of Prishvin’s travelogues also lies in the fact that they were created at the intersection of many - scientific, journalistic, artistic, and administrative - discourses that make up Russian Orientalism. For this reason, a complex and largely contradictory position of the author is formed in the travelogues. Prishvin performs many contradictory roles: he is a humanist philosopher who sympathizes with the patriarchal world of the Kazakhs and the desire for freedom of the Russian people; he is an ethnographer scrupulously recording everything that he sees along the way; he is a romantic ready to dress up in oriental clothes and imagine the magical land of the East, which does not exist; he is an enlightened writer who observes the primitive culture and cruel customs of the Kazakhs and the Russian colonists. Prishvin made a great contribution to the design of a new evolutionary round of Russian Orientalism in the late empire: thanks to his essays of the Kazakh world, the imaginary literary map of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century received a new impetus for a detailed and multifaceted cultural development of the steppe frontier, without which a Russian person trying to determine their place in a world divided into the West and the East is already unthinkable.

Восьмидесятилетний юбилей Ю. П. Кузнецова (1941–2003), одного из наиболее масштабных русских поэтов-философов XX века, побудил авторов проанализировать предпринятые за последние полтора десятилетия исследовательские усилия, направленные на научное освоение его наследия. Использованы материалы научно-просветительских конференций, прошедших за этот период в Москве и Краснодаре. Введены в научный оборот новые находки рукописей и документов, относящихся к раннему периоду творческой биографии поэта. Рассмотрены наиболее важные материалы XV международной научно-практической конференции, тема которой – «Между миром и Богом» – позволила глубже раскрыть вершинный этап становления художественного мира Ю. Кузнецова. Подчеркивается важность использования информационных технологий для популяризации творчества поэта. Сделан вывод о высокой результативности кузнецовских форумов, ежегодно организуемых Институтом мировой литературы, Литературным институтом им. А. М. Горького и Союзом писателей России. The eightieth anniversary of Yuri Polikarpovich Kuznetsov (1941–2003), one of the most ambitious Russian poets and philosophers of the 20th century, prompted the authors to analyze the research efforts undertaken over the past decade and a half aimed at the scientific development of his heritage. Having become a prominent figure in the literary process in the 1970s, the poet subsequently impressed with the power of thought, originality and depth of images. The materials of academic conferences held in Moscow and Krasnodar from 2006 till 2021 were used. Newly discovered manuscripts and documents related to the early stage of the poet’s creative biography are introduced into scholarly discourse. The study comprehensively uses the methods of literary, religious and philosophical, historical and factual, statistical and cultural analysis. The study contributes to the understanding of the factors that favor or hinder the creation of conditions for assessing the creativity of a genius in modern society. It is emphasized that Kuznetsov left a poetic heritage that is relevant and valuable for the self-knowledge of compatriots. The most important events that stimulated the study and popularization of his work after his death are identified. The content of the reports that made up the center of controversy at the 15th International Conference (Moscow) held in 2021 is described in detail. Its theme (“Between the World and God”) allowed revealing the summit – the most difficult to understand – stage of the formation of Kuznetsov’s artistic world. The authors point out the difficulties that hinder the full implementation of the idea of the Kuznetsov Readings in the poet’s homeland, in Krasnodar Krai. The authors come to the conclusion that it is necessary to revive the holding of such conferences in the original form, which involves the organization of an academic forum, as well as a series of meetings of researchers, literary critics, active popularizers of the poet’s work with young people, school teachers and teachers of higher educational institutions, employees of cultural and educational institutions. The importance of using information technologies to popularize the poet’s work is noted. The authors conclude that the annual conferences held in Moscow on the basis of the Gorky Institute of World Literature, the Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature and Creative Writing, and the Writers’ Union of Russia in 2007–2021 are highly effective.

This article is devoted to the imagery problem of the decadence-literature (as a general phenomenon that periodically repeats itself) and of the literature of the decadency (as an oeuvre of crisis developments in art of the late 19th and early 20th century). The decadence-literatureis a manifestation of the irreducibility. It is proposed to analyze the imagery based on the context of the modernist interpretation of the image / icon. Before the image was considered together with its mimetic foundation – as an imitation of the external world. But here the image is freed from its mimetism, and it turns into a kind of "immediate ontology" (it is the Gaston Bachelard’s term). The classical structure of the image (plot, storyline, composition) ceases to play a leading role, and gives way to a writing. The decadence-literature image lets visual elements into literature. Therefore,there is a displacement from the ontology of the image to the image as an ontology in the research of imagery. It is also important to use the methodology proposed by Georges Didi-Huberman and Paul Virilio: the combination of the hermeneutic approach in the philosophy of image with elements of psychoanalysis, and the method of dromology, which is the connection of special aspects of the physics, mathematics and philosophy. The methodology of the School of Sociology of Imagination is also appropriate. The image of the decadence-literature is marked by symbolism, imaginism (it isalso known the same direction in literature – with the same name). There is also the "genres-werewolves" when a work is called, for example, poetry in prose. A personality of the writer-author plays a great role here: the decadence-literature is saturated with a psychology and a biography that is turned insideout. It is the expression of the world of unforgiven, restless personalities, which is explained by the principle of creation from an absence, emptiness, depressive and melancholic states (nostalgia, fatigue, sweet melancholy). It's interesting that decadent moods contribute to creation here. Distinctive features of the authors of decadence-literature: soreness, tenderness, hypersensitivity, a difficult life path and an unstable world. The imagery that is generated by creativity of these individuals is marked by a special attitude to time and space, it is also directed to the past in an attempt to find a lost paradise - that existed before the crash.

In the new issue, our scientific journal offers you thirteen scientific articles. As always, we try to offer a wide variety of topics and areas and follow current trends in the history of science and technology. In the article by Olha Chumachenko, оn the basis of a wide base of sources, the article highlights and analyzes the development of research work of aircraft engine companies in Zaporizhzhia during the 1970s. The existence of a single system of functioning of the Zaporizhzhia production association “Motorobudivnyk” (now the Public Joint Stock Company “Motor Sich”) and the Zaporizhzhia Machine-Building Design Bureau “Progress” (now the State Enterprise “Ivchenko – Progress”) has been taken into account. Leonid Griffen and Nadiia Ryzheva present their vision of the essence of technology as a socio-historical phenomenon. The article reveals the authors' vision of the essence of the technology as a sociohistorical phenomenon. It is based on the idea that technology is not only a set of technical devices but a segment of the general system – a society – located between a social medium and its natural surroundings in the form of a peculiar social technosphere, which simultaneously separates and connects them. Definitely the article by Denis Kislov, which examines the period from the end of the XVII century to the beginning of the XIX century, is also of interest, when on the basis of deep philosophical concepts, a new vision of the development of statehood and human values raised. At this time, a certain re-thinking of the management and communication ideas of Antiquity and the Renaissance took place, which outlined the main promising trends in the statehood evolution, which to one degree or another were embodied in practice in the 19th and 20th centuries. A systematic approach and a comparative analysis of the causes and consequences of those years’ achievements for the present and the immediate future of the 21st century served as the methodological basis for a comprehensive review of the studies of that period. The article by Serhii Paliienko is devoted to an exploration of archaeological theory issues at the Institute of archaeology AS UkrSSR in the 1960s. This period is one of the worst studied in the history of Soviet archaeology. But it was the time when in the USSR archaeological researches reached the summit, quantitative methods and methods of natural sciences were applied and interest in theoretical issues had grown in archaeology. Now there are a lot of publications dedicated to theoretical discussions between archaeologists from Leningrad but the same researches about Kyiv scholars are still unknown The legacy of St. Luke in medical science, authors from Greece - this study aims to highlight key elements of the life of Valentyn Feliksovych Voino-Yasenetskyi and his scientific contribution to medicine. Among the scientists of European greatness, who at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries showed interest to the folklore of Galicia (Halychyna) and Galician Ukrainians, contributed to their national and cultural revival, one of the leading places is occupied by the outstanding Ukrainian scientist Ivan Verkhratskyi. He was both naturalist and philologist, as well as folklorist and ethnographer, organizer of scientific work, publisher and popularizer of Ukrainian literature, translator, publicist and famous public figure. I. H. Verkhratskyi was also an outstanding researcher of plants and animals of Eastern Galicia, a connoisseur of insects, especially butterflies, the author of the first school textbooks on natural science written in Ukrainian. A new emerging field that has seen the application of the drone technology is the healthcare sector. Over the years, the health sector has increasingly relied on the device for timely transportation of essential articles across the globe. Since its introduction in health, scholars have attempted to address the impact of drones on healthcare across Africa and the world at large. Among other things, it has been reported by scholars that the device has the ability to overcome the menace of weather constraints, inadequate personnel and inaccessible roads within the healthcare sector. This notwithstanding, data on drones and drone application in Ghana and her healthcare sector in particular appears to be little within the drone literature. Also, little attempt has been made by scholars to highlight the use of drones in African countries. By using a narrative review approach, the current study attempts to address the gap above. By this approach, a thorough literature search was performed to locate and assess scientific materials involving the application of drones in the military field and in the medical systems of Africans and Ghanaians in particular. The paper by Artemii Bernatskyi and Vladyslav Khaskin is devoted to the analysis of the history of the laser creation as one of the greatest technical inventions of the 20th century. This paper focuses on establishing a relation between the periodization of the stages of creation and implementation of certain types of lasers, with their influence on the invention of certain types of equipment and industrial technologies for processing the materials, the development of certain branches of the economy, and scientific-technological progress as a whole. The paper discusses the stages of: invention of the first laser; creation of the first commercial lasers; development of the first applications of lasers in industrial technologies for processing the materials. Special attention is paid to the “patent wars” that accompanied different stages of the creation of lasers. A comparative analysis of the market development for laser technology from the stage of creation to the present has been carried out. Nineteenth-century world exhibitions were platforms to demonstrate technical and technological changes that witnessed the modernization and industrialization of the world. World exhibitions have contributed to the promotion of new inventions and the popularization of already known, as well as the emergence of art objects of world importance. One of the most important world events at the turn of the century was the 1900 World's Fair in Paris. Thus, the author has tried to analyze the participation of representatives of the sugar industry in the World's Fair in 1900 and to define the role of exhibitions as indicators of economic development, to show the importance and influence of private entrepreneurs, especially from Ukraine, on the sugar industry and international contacts. The article by Viktor Verhunov highlights the life and creative path of the outstanding domestic scientist, theorist, methodologist and practitioner of agricultural engineering K. G. Schindler, associated with the formation of agricultural mechanics in Ukraine. The methodological foundation of the research is the principles of historicism, scientific nature and objectivity in reproducing the phenomena of the past based on the complex use of general scientific, special, interdisciplinary methods. For the first time a number of documents from Russian and Ukrainian archives, which reflect some facts of the professional biography of the scientist, were introduced into scientific circulation. The authors from Kremenchuk National University named after Mykhailo Ostrohradskyi presented a fascinating study of a bayonet fragment with severe damages of metal found in the city Kremenchuk (Ukraine) in one of the canals on the outskirts of the city, near the Dnipro River. Theoretical research to study blade weapons of the World War I period and the typology of the bayonets of that period, which made it possible to put forward an assumption about the possible identification of the object as a modified bayonet to the Mauser rifle has been carried out. Metal science expert examination was based on X-ray fluorescence spectrometry to determine the concentration of elements in the sample from the cleaned part of the blade. In the article by Mykola Ruban and Vadym Ponomarenko on the basis of the complex analysis of sources and scientific literature the attempt to investigate historical circumstances of development and construction of shunting electric locomotives at the Dnipropetrovsk electric locomotive plant has been made. The next scientific article continues the series of publications devoted to the assessment of activities of the heads of the Ministry of Railways of the Russian Empire. In this article, the authors have attempted to systematize and analyze historical data on the activities of Klavdii Semyonovych Nemeshaev as the Minister of Railways of the Russian Empire. The article also assesses the development and construction of railway network in the Russian Empire during Nemeshaev's office, in particular, of the Amur Line and Moscow Encircle Railway, as well as the increase in the capacity of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The article discusses K. S. Nemeshaev's contribution to the development of technology and the introduction of a new type of freight steam locomotive for state-owned railways. We hope that everyone will find interesting useful information in the new issue. And, of course, we welcome your new submissions.

Dear readers, We are pleased to present to you Issue 4, 2022, of the scientific and analytical journal Burganov House. The Space of Culture. Upon the recommendation of the Expert Council of the Higher Attestation Commission, the journal is included in the List of Leading Peer-reviewed Scientific Journals and Publications in which the main scientific results of theses for the academic degrees of doctor and candidate of science must be published. The journal publishes scientific articles by leading specialists in various humanitarian fields, doctoral students, and graduate students. Research areas concern topical problems in multiple areas of culture, art, philology, and linguistics. This versatility of the review reveals the main specificity of the journal, which represents the current state of the cultural space. The journal opens with articles by Chinese researchers devoted to the art of Ancient China. In the article "The Heaven-and-Man Oneness Concept and the Style of Funerary Plastic Art During the Han Dynasty", Xiang Wu analyses the idea of heaven-and-man oneness, which was important for the art of this period. It was based on the Confucian view, the rituals of a strict social hierarchy and Taoist metaphysics. Qiu Mubing’s scientific research topic is “Objects of the Funerary Cult in the Han Dynasty. Gold and Silver Items. Aesthetics of Gold and Silver in the Han Dynasty”. Examining archaeological sources, the author concludes the high achievements of Chinese artisans during the Han Dynasty on examples of works of arts and crafts made of precious metals. In the article “Aesthetics of the Song Dynasty. The Origins of the New Style of Furniture Design in China", N.Kazakova and Qiu Qi analyse the vector of development of the furniture industry through the prism of the industrial design evolution. The reasons for the emergence of the New style in furniture design in China are studied. They are analysed in detail against the background of changing economic, political and cultural realities. The issues of the influence of Ancient China aesthetics on the formation and development of a new language in furniture design are touched upon. In the article "Problems of Colour Harmonisation of Composition and Development of Associative and Imaginative Thinking in the Environmental Design", N.Bogatova reveals the potential of colouristic graphic two-dimensional modelling in artistic and imaginative thematic compositions. On the example of the compositional laws of colouristics, the author traces the path of ascent from the concrete to the abstract, pictorial to the expressive, and emotional to the figurative. P.Dobrolyubov presents the text “Sculptor Alexander Matveev’s School and His Students”, which includes many archival documents and photographs. The author describes the process of learning from teacher and sculptor A.Matveev, names the main dates in his creative work, reveals the details of the sculptural craft, talks about the variety of moves in the master’s plasticity, analyses the methods and principles of work in sculpture, shows the attitude of students to their teacher, and highlights the entire course of historical milestones in the sculptor’s creative biography. In the article "The Golden Age of PRC History Painting (1949–1966): Origins, Searches, Achievements”, K.Gavrilin and L.Xiaonan consider the issues of the formation of the modern Chinese art school. Its foundation was laid in the framework of the creative and educational dialogue between China and the Soviet Union at the beginning of the second half of the 20th century. The authors believe that the characteristic features of the golden age of Chinese historical painting were, on the one hand, the popularisation of painting as an art form and, on the other hand, the predominance of the dominant position of realism over the traditional styles of Chinese painting. It is noted that during this period, two main plots became widespread: scenes of socialist construction and historical events of the revolution. S.Zubarev considers theoretical and practical aspects of the activities of military musicians in the article "Academic Music in the Practice of Russian Military Bands of the 19th - early 21st Centuries". In the process of studying military bands, special attention is paid to the study of the features of military band service development in the 19th and 20th centuries. Factors revealing the role of Russian composers in the history of military musical culture are highlighted, and several works of academic music performed by military bands are analysed. In conclusion, the author notes that in the national culture, unique conditions for the development of military musicians’ arranging activity were created. They made it possible to preserve the traditions of the military band service and form the value principles of academic art. The publication is addressed to professionals specialising in the theory and practice of the fine arts and philology and all those interested in the arts and culture.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Hanswalter Giesekus, his personality and biography shall be given attention within the commemorative publication "100 Years of Giesekus". Who was the scientist as a human being? What motivation drove his research? What were his interests and meaning in life? The authors, two of the six children of the scientist, show their father to be a multifaceted person, whose ideal was the "universal scholar" of the beginning 20th century. Besides his passion for rheology, he was deeply interested in other areas of physics -- especially astronomy -- as well as theology, literature, history, music and art.

Michel (Mikhaпl) Kikoпne (1892-1968) is one of the artists of the School of Paris, the school, represented by the great number of names of Jewish emigration from Russia. The creative manner of Kikoпne formed in Paris under the influence of P. Cezanne’s and P. Bonnard’s painting. Kikoпne is most often mentioned (in the past and actually) as one of the famous Parisian trio of artists issued from Vilna school of drawing and painting of I. P. Trutnev: Ch. Soutine, P. Krйmиgne, M. Kikoпne. Krйmиgne and Kikoпne for many years rested in the shadow of the creativity of Soutine, and only in the last decade, the interest to them, referred to the second row of the famous representatives of the School of Paris, has increased significantly. Early biographies of all members of this trio reveal a great deal of similarities and notable parallels. In reference biographical articles of European publications they often called “Litvak”, call them the “French painters of the Lithuanian origin” (more correctly, “Litvak-born French painters”). “Litvak”, as it is well known, is the name of a territorial and linguistic subgroup of Ashkenazi Jews widespread on the territory of the provinces of the Russian Empire, actually parts of modern Lithuania, Latvia and Belarus. The information about the birth of M. Kikoпne in various publications is quite confused and contains a lot of contradictions. The testimony of the artist himself and of the members of his family could be estimated critically. Among the authors of his biographies there is no consensus about his origin, and it convinces of the importance of archival research. In an early biography of Kikoпne, in reports of his family tree is constantly mentioned the town of Rezekne. A statement of a genealogical problem, a more detailed study of early biography of the artist involves many questions about his connection with Rezekne. In view of insufficient level of study of the archive’s material, author attempts in the present article only to plan some questions those arise during the reading of the Michel Kikoпne’s biography. The experience of biographical studies of other well-known Jewish artists affirmed themselves in the European art centers at the beginning of the 20th century, such as M. Chagall, O. Zadkine, and Ch. Soutine, shows and proves that clarification and documental proof of whole the complex of biographical data of the artist is necessary. Trying to gain a foothold in the Paris artistic beau monde, the natives from the Russian Jewish shtetl of the Pale often “altered” their biographies, creating the improved versions, in seeking to raise their social status. In certain cases, the documents of birth, issued by local community rabbis, were forged. Often, the year of birth was changed in order to avoid the conscription. Thus, in the case of the biography of Michel Kikoпne, as, indeed, of many other immigrants, residents of Paris’ “The Hive” (“La Ruche”), to be confirmed at least the most important, basic biographical facts. The article examines the disputable questions about the date and place of birth of Michel Kikoпne, about the origin and professional activities of his father, about relations of the artist with the town of Rezekne.

Introduction: Our current obsession with the lives of others “Biography—that is to say, our creative and non-fictional output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives—has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years,” writes Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History (1). Ian Donaldson agrees that biography is back in fashion: “Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure” (23). For over a decade now, commentators having been making similar observations about our obsession with the intimacies of individual people’s lives. In a lecture in 1994, Justin Kaplan asserted the West was “a culture of biography” (qtd. in Salwak 1) and more recent research findings by John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge affirm that “the undiminished human curiosity about other peoples lives is clearly reflected in the popularity of autobiographies and biographies” (218). At least in relation to television, this assertion seems valid. In Australia, as in the USA and the UK, reality and other biographically based television shows have taken over from drama in both the numbers of shows produced and the viewers these shows attract, and these forms are also popular in Canada (see, for instance, Morreale on The Osbournes). In 2007, the program Biography celebrated its twentieth anniversary season to become one of the longest running documentary series on American television; so successful that in 1999 it was spun off into its own eponymous channel (Rak; Dempsey). Premiered in May 1996, Australian Story—which aims to utilise a “personal approach” to biographical storytelling—has won a significant viewership, critical acclaim and professional recognition (ABC). It can also be posited that the real home movies viewers submit to such programs as Australia’s Favourite Home Videos, and “chat” or “confessional” television are further reflections of a general mania for biographical detail (see Douglas), no matter how fragmented, sensationalized, or even inane and cruel. A recent example of the latter, the USA-produced The Moment of Truth, has contestants answering personal questions under polygraph examination and then again in front of an audience including close relatives and friends—the more “truthful” their answers (and often, the more humiliated and/or distressed contestants are willing to be), the more money they can win. Away from television, but offering further evidence of this interest are the growing readerships for personally oriented weblogs and networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (Grossman), individual profiles and interviews in periodical publications, and the recently widely revived newspaper obituary column (Starck). Adult and community education organisations run short courses on researching and writing auto/biographical forms and, across Western countries, the family history/genealogy sections of many local, state, and national libraries have been upgraded to meet the increasing demand for these services. Academically, journals and e-mail discussion lists have been established on the topics of biography and autobiography, and North American, British, and Australian universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in life writing. The commonly aired wisdom is that published life writing in its many text-based forms (biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, and collections of personal letters) is enjoying unprecedented popularity. It is our purpose to examine this proposition. Methodological problems There are a number of problems involved in investigating genre popularity, growth, and decline in publishing. Firstly, it is not easy to gain access to detailed statistics, which are usually only available within the industry. Secondly, it is difficult to ascertain how publishing statistics are gathered and what they report (Eliot). There is the question of whether bestselling booklists reflect actual book sales or are manipulated marketing tools (Miller), although the move from surveys of booksellers to electronic reporting at point of sale in new publishing lists such as BookScan will hopefully obviate this problem. Thirdly, some publishing lists categorise by subject and form, some by subject only, and some do not categorise at all. This means that in any analysis of these statistics, a decision has to be made whether to use the publishing list’s system or impose a different mode. If the publishing list is taken at face value, the question arises of whether to use categorisation by form or by subject. Fourthly, there is the bedeviling issue of terminology. Traditionally, there reigned a simple dualism in the terminology applied to forms of telling the true story of an actual life: biography and autobiography. Publishing lists that categorise their books, such as BookScan, have retained it. But with postmodern recognition of the presence of the biographer in a biography and of the presence of other subjects in an autobiography, the dichotomy proves false. There is the further problem of how to categorise memoirs, diaries, and letters. In the academic arena, the term “life writing” has emerged to describe the field as a whole. Within the genre of life writing, there are, however, still recognised sub-genres. Academic definitions vary, but generally a biography is understood to be a scholarly study of a subject who is not the writer; an autobiography is the story of a entire life written by its subject; while a memoir is a segment or particular focus of that life told, again, by its own subject. These terms are, however, often used interchangeably even by significant institutions such the USA Library of Congress, which utilises the term “biography” for all. Different commentators also use differing definitions. Hamilton uses the term “biography” to include all forms of life writing. Donaldson discusses how the term has been co-opted to include biographies of place such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) and of things such as Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Biography (2005). This reflects, of course, a writing/publishing world in which non-fiction stories of places, creatures, and even foodstuffs are called biographies, presumably in the belief that this will make them more saleable. The situation is further complicated by the emergence of hybrid publishing forms such as, for instance, the “memoir-with-recipes” or “food memoir” (Brien, Rutherford and Williamson). Are such books to be classified as autobiography or put in the “cookery/food & drink” category? We mention in passing the further confusion caused by novels with a subtitle of The Biography such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The fifth methodological problem that needs to be mentioned is the increasing globalisation of the publishing industry, which raises questions about the validity of the majority of studies available (including those cited herein) which are nationally based. Whether book sales reflect what is actually read (and by whom), raises of course another set of questions altogether. Methodology In our exploration, we were fundamentally concerned with two questions. Is life writing as popular as claimed? And, if it is, is this a new phenomenon? To answer these questions, we examined a range of available sources. We began with the non-fiction bestseller lists in Publishers Weekly (a respected American trade magazine aimed at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents that claims to be international in scope) from their inception in 1912 to the present time. We hoped that this data could provide a longitudinal perspective. The term bestseller was coined by Publishers Weekly when it began publishing its lists in 1912; although the first list of popular American books actually appeared in The Bookman (New York) in 1895, based itself on lists appearing in London’s The Bookman since 1891 (Bassett and Walter 206). The Publishers Weekly lists are the best source of longitudinal information as the currently widely cited New York Times listings did not appear till 1942, with the Wall Street Journal a late entry into the field in 1994. We then examined a number of sources of more recent statistics. We looked at the bestseller lists from the USA-based Amazon.com online bookseller; recent research on bestsellers in Britain; and lists from Nielsen BookScan Australia, which claims to tally some 85% or more of books sold in Australia, wherever they are published. In addition to the reservations expressed above, caveats must be aired in relation to these sources. While Publishers Weekly claims to be an international publication, it largely reflects the North American publishing scene and especially that of the USA. Although available internationally, Amazon.com also has its own national sites—such as Amazon.co.uk—not considered here. It also caters to a “specific computer-literate, credit-able clientele” (Gutjahr: 219) and has an unashamedly commercial focus, within which all the information generated must be considered. In our analysis of the material studied, we will use “life writing” as a genre term. When it comes to analysis of the lists, we have broken down the genre of life writing into biography and autobiography, incorporating memoir, letters, and diaries under autobiography. This is consistent with the use of the terminology in BookScan. Although we have broken down the genre in this way, it is the overall picture with regard to life writing that is our concern. It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed analysis of whether, within life writing, further distinctions should be drawn. Publishers Weekly: 1912 to 2006 1912 saw the first list of the 10 bestselling non-fiction titles in Publishers Weekly. It featured two life writing texts, being headed by an autobiography, The Promised Land by Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, and concluding with Albert Bigelow Paine’s six-volume biography, Mark Twain. The Publishers Weekly lists do not categorise non-fiction titles by either form or subject, so the classifications below are our own with memoir classified as autobiography. In a decade-by-decade tally of these listings, there were 3 biographies and 20 autobiographies in the lists between 1912 and 1919; 24 biographies and 21 autobiographies in the 1920s; 13 biographies and 40 autobiographies in the 1930s; 8 biographies and 46 biographies in the 1940s; 4 biographies and 14 autobiographies in the 1950s; 11 biographies and 13 autobiographies in the 1960s; 6 biographies and 11 autobiographies in the 1970s; 3 biographies and 19 autobiographies in the 1980s; 5 biographies and 17 autobiographies in the 1990s; and 2 biographies and 7 autobiographies from 2000 up until the end of 2006. See Appendix 1 for the relevant titles and authors. Breaking down the most recent figures for 1990–2006, we find a not radically different range of figures and trends across years in the contemporary environment. The validity of looking only at the top ten books sold in any year is, of course, questionable, as are all the issues regarding sources discussed above. But one thing is certain in terms of our inquiry. There is no upwards curve obvious here. If anything, the decade break-down suggests that sales are trending downwards. This is in keeping with the findings of Michael Korda, in his history of twentieth-century bestsellers. He suggests a consistent longitudinal picture across all genres: In every decade, from 1900 to the end of the twentieth century, people have been reliably attracted to the same kind of books […] Certain kinds of popular fiction always do well, as do diet books […] self-help books, celebrity memoirs, sensationalist scientific or religious speculation, stories about pets, medical advice (particularly on the subjects of sex, longevity, and child rearing), folksy wisdom and/or humour, and the American Civil War (xvii). Amazon.com since 2000 The USA-based Amazon.com online bookselling site provides listings of its own top 50 bestsellers since 2000, although only the top 14 bestsellers are recorded for 2001. As fiction and non-fiction are not separated out on these lists and no genre categories are specified, we have again made our own decisions about what books fall into the category of life writing. Generally, we erred on the side of inclusion. (See Appendix 2.) However, when it came to books dealing with political events, we excluded books dealing with specific aspects of political practice/policy. This meant excluding books on, for instance, George Bush’s so-called ‘war on terror,’ of which there were a number of bestsellers listed. In summary, these listings reveal that of the top 364 books sold by Amazon from 2000 to 2007, 46 (or some 12.6%) were, according to our judgment, either biographical or autobiographical texts. This is not far from the 10% of the 1912 Publishers Weekly listing, although, as above, the proportion of bestsellers that can be classified as life writing varied dramatically from year to year, with no discernible pattern of peaks and troughs. This proportion tallied to 4% auto/biographies in 2000, 14% in 2001, 10% in 2002, 18% in 2003 and 2004, 4% in 2005, 14% in 2006 and 20% in 2007. This could suggest a rising trend, although it does not offer any consistent trend data to suggest sales figures may either continue to grow, or fall again, in 2008 or afterwards. Looking at the particular texts in these lists (see Appendix 2) also suggests that there is no general trend in the popularity of life writing in relation to other genres. For instance, in these listings in Amazon.com, life writing texts only rarely figure in the top 10 books sold in any year. So rarely indeed, that from 2001 there were only five in this category. In 2001, John Adams by David McCullough was the best selling book of the year; in 2003, Hillary Clinton’s autobiographical Living History was 7th; in 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton reached number 1; in 2006, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman was 9th; and in 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8th. Apart from McCulloch’s biography of Adams, all the above are autobiographical texts, while the focus on leading political figures is notable. Britain: Feather and Woodbridge With regard to the British situation, we did not have actual lists and relied on recent analysis. John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge find considerably higher levels for life writing in Britain than above with, from 1998 to 2005, 28% of British published non-fiction comprising autobiography, while 8% of hardback and 5% of paperback non-fiction was biography (2007). Furthermore, although Feather and Woodbridge agree with commentators that life writing is currently popular, they do not agree that this is a growth state, finding the popularity of life writing “essentially unchanged” since their previous study, which covered 1979 to the early 1990s (Feather and Reid). Australia: Nielsen BookScan 2006 and 2007 In the Australian publishing industry, where producing books remains an ‘expensive, risky endeavour which is increasingly market driven’ (Galligan 36) and ‘an inherently complex activity’ (Carter and Galligan 4), the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures reveal that the total numbers of books sold in Australia has remained relatively static over the past decade (130.6 million in the financial year 1995–96 and 128.8 million in 2003–04) (ABS). During this time, however, sales volumes of non-fiction publications have grown markedly, with a trend towards “non-fiction, mass market and predictable” books (Corporall 41) resulting in general non-fiction sales in 2003–2004 outselling general fiction by factors as high as ten depending on the format—hard- or paperback, and trade or mass market paperback (ABS 2005). However, while non-fiction has increased in popularity in Australia, the same does not seem to hold true for life writing. Here, in utilising data for the top 5,000 selling non-fiction books in both 2006 and 2007, we are relying on Nielsen BookScan’s categorisation of texts as either biography or autobiography. In 2006, no works of life writing made the top 10 books sold in Australia. In looking at the top 100 books sold for 2006, in some cases the subjects of these works vary markedly from those extracted from the Amazon.com listings. In Australia in 2006, life writing makes its first appearance at number 14 with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby’s My Story. This is followed by another My Story at 25, this time by retired Australian army chief, Peter Cosgrove. Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones comes in at 34 for the Australian broadcaster’s biographer Chris Masters; the biography, The Innocent Man by John Grisham at 38 and Li Cunxin’s autobiographical Mao’s Last Dancer at 45. Australian Susan Duncan’s memoir of coping with personal loss, Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life makes 50; bestselling USA travel writer Bill Bryson’s autobiographical memoir of his childhood The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 69; Mandela: The Authorised Portrait by Rosalind Coward, 79; and Joanne Lees’s memoir of dealing with her kidnapping, the murder of her partner and the justice system in Australia’s Northern Territory, No Turning Back, 89. These books reveal a market preference for autobiographical writing, and an almost even split between Australian and overseas subjects in 2006. 2007 similarly saw no life writing in the top 10. The books in the top 100 sales reveal a downward trend, with fewer titles making this band overall. In 2007, Terri Irwin’s memoir of life with her famous husband, wildlife warrior Steve Irwin, My Steve, came in at number 26; musician Andrew Johns’s memoir of mental illness, The Two of Me, at 37; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography Infidel at 39; John Grogan’s biography/memoir, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, at 42; Sally Collings’s biography of the inspirational young survivor Sophie Delezio, Sophie’s Journey, at 51; and Elizabeth Gilbert’s hybrid food, self-help and travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything at 82. Mao’s Last Dancer, published the year before, remained in the top 100 in 2007 at 87. When moving to a consideration of the top 5,000 books sold in Australia in 2006, BookScan reveals only 62 books categorised as life writing in the top 1,000, and only 222 in the top 5,000 (with 34 titles between 1,000 and 1,999, 45 between 2,000 and 2,999, 48 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 33 between 4,000 and 5,000). 2007 shows a similar total of 235 life writing texts in the top 5,000 bestselling books (75 titles in the first 1,000, 27 between 1,000 and 1,999, 51 between 2,000 and 2,999, 39 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 43 between 4,000 and 5,000). In both years, 2006 and 2007, life writing thus not only constituted only some 4% of the bestselling 5,000 titles in Australia, it also showed only minimal change between these years and, therefore, no significant growth. Conclusions Our investigation using various instruments that claim to reflect levels of book sales reveals that Western readers’ willingness to purchase published life writing has not changed significantly over the past century. We find no evidence of either a short, or longer, term growth or boom in sales in such books. Instead, it appears that what has been widely heralded as a new golden age of life writing may well be more the result of an expanded understanding of what is included in the genre than an increased interest in it by either book readers or publishers. What recent years do appear to have seen, however, is a significantly increased interest by public commentators, critics, and academics in this genre of writing. We have also discovered that the issue of our current obsession with the lives of others tends to be discussed in academic as well as popular fora as if what applies to one sub-genre or production form applies to another: if biography is popular, then autobiography will also be, and vice versa. If reality television programming is attracting viewers, then readers will be flocking to life writing as well. Our investigation reveals that such propositions are questionable, and that there is significant research to be completed in mapping such audiences against each other. This work has also highlighted the difficulty of separating out the categories of written texts in publishing studies, firstly in terms of determining what falls within the category of life writing as distinct from other forms of non-fiction (the hybrid problem) and, secondly, in terms of separating out the categories within life writing. Although we have continued to use the terms biography and autobiography as sub-genres, we are aware that they are less useful as descriptors than they are often assumed to be. In order to obtain a more complete and accurate picture, publishing categories may need to be agreed upon, redefined and utilised across the publishing industry and within academia. This is of particular importance in the light of the suggestions (from total sales volumes) that the audiences for books are limited, and therefore the rise of one sub-genre may be directly responsible for the fall of another. Bair argues, for example, that in the 1980s and 1990s, the popularity of what she categorises as memoir had direct repercussions on the numbers of birth-to-death biographies that were commissioned, contracted, and published as “sales and marketing staffs conclude[d] that readers don’t want a full-scale life any more” (17). Finally, although we have highlighted the difficulty of using publishing statistics when there is no common understanding as to what such data is reporting, we hope this study shows that the utilisation of such material does add a depth to such enquiries, especially in interrogating the anecdotal evidence that is often quoted as data in publishing and other studies. Appendix 1 Publishers Weekly listings 1990–1999 1990 included two autobiographies, Bo Knows Bo by professional athlete Bo Jackson (with Dick Schaap) and Ronald Reagan’s An America Life: An Autobiography. In 1991, there were further examples of life writing with unimaginative titles, Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, and Under Fire: An American Story by Oliver North with William Novak; as indeed there were again in 1992 with It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of Norman Schwarzkopf, Sam Walton: Made in America, the autobiography of the founder of Wal-Mart, Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, Every Living Thing, yet another veterinary outpouring from James Herriot, and Truman by David McCullough. In 1993, radio shock-jock Howard Stern was successful with the autobiographical Private Parts, as was Betty Eadie with her detailed recounting of her alleged near-death experience, Embraced by the Light. Eadie’s book remained on the list in 1994 next to Don’t Stand too Close to a Naked Man, comedian Tim Allen’s autobiography. Flag-waving titles continue in 1995 with Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and Miss America, Howard Stern’s follow-up to Private Parts. 1996 saw two autobiographical works, basketball superstar Dennis Rodman’s Bad as I Wanna Be and figure-skater, Ekaterina Gordeeva’s (with EM Swift) My Sergei: A Love Story. In 1997, Diana: Her True Story returns to the top 10, joining Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and prolific biographer Kitty Kelly’s The Royals, while in 1998, there is only the part-autobiography, part travel-writing A Pirate Looks at Fifty, by musician Jimmy Buffet. There is no biography or autobiography included in either the 1999 or 2000 top 10 lists in Publishers Weekly, nor in that for 2005. In 2001, David McCullough’s biography John Adams and Jack Welch’s business memoir Jack: Straight from the Gut featured. In 2002, Let’s Roll! Lisa Beamer’s tribute to her husband, one of the heroes of 9/11, written with Ken Abraham, joined Rudolph Giuliani’s autobiography, Leadership. 2003 saw Hillary Clinton’s autobiography Living History and Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Princess Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty, on the list. In 2004, it was Bill Clinton’s turn with My Life. In 2006, we find John Grisham’s true crime (arguably a biography), The Innocent Man, at the top, Grogan’s Marley and Me at number three, and the autobiographical The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama in fourth place. Appendix 2 Amazon.com listings since 2000 In 2000, there were only two auto/biographies in the top Amazon 50 bestsellers with Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life about his battle with cancer at 20, and Dave Eggers’s self-consciously fictionalised memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at 32. In 2001, only the top 14 bestsellers were recorded. At number 1 is John Adams by David McCullough and, at 11, Jack: Straight from the Gut by USA golfer Jack Welch. In 2002, Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani was at 12; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro at 29; Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper by Patricia Cornwell at 42; Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock at 48; and Louis Gerstner’s autobiographical Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround at 50. In 2003, Living History by Hillary Clinton was 7th; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson 14th; Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How President Bill Clinton Endangered America’s Long-Term National Security by Robert Patterson 20th; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer 32nd; Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life by Queen Noor of Jordan 33rd; Kate Remembered, Scott Berg’s biography of Katharine Hepburn, 37th; Who’s your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great and Reprobates of Golf by Rick Reilly 39th; The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship about a winning baseball team by David Halberstam 42nd; and Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong 49th. In 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton was the best selling book of the year; American Soldier by General Tommy Franks was 16th; Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush 18th; Timothy Russert’s Big Russ and Me: Father and Son. Lessons of Life 20th; Tony Hendra’s Father Joe: The Man who Saved my Soul 23rd; Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton 27th; Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation 31st; Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty 42nd; and Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan was 43rd. In 2005, auto/biographical texts were well down the list with only The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion at 45 and The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls at 49. In 2006, there was a resurgence of life writing with Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman at 9; Grisham’s The Innocent Man at 12; Bill Buford’s food memoir Heat: an Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany at 23; more food writing with Julia Child’s My Life in France at 29; Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust at 30; CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival at 43; and Isabella Hatkoff’s Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship (between a baby hippo and a giant tortoise) at 44. In 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe 13; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography of her life in Muslim society, Infidel, 18; The Reagan Diaries 25; Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 29; Mother Teresa: Come be my Light 36; Clapton: The Autobiography 40; Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles 45; Tony Dungy’s Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life 47; and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant at 49. Acknowledgements A sincere thank you to Michael Webster at RMIT for assistance with access to Nielsen BookScan statistics, and to the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). “About Us.” Australian Story 2008. 1 June 2008. ‹http://www.abc.net.au/austory/aboutus.htm>. 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