Vol 31, No 1 (2026)

A little-known case in the history of Russian journalism and censorship in the first half of the 19th century is examined. It concerns an attempt to ban the May 1825 issue of the Novosti Literatury. The ban was proposed by Metropolitan Serafim due to the article by A.F. Voeykov titled Memories of the village of Savinskoe and its virtuous owner. The article tells about the life of I.V. Lopukhin and his estate. The article examines in detail the content of “Memoirs”, its style and genre, historical and cultural background, as well as the portrayal and evaluation of Lopukhin’s personality. The author of the article studied archival documents from the Russian State Historical Archive to describe how the official authorities responded to the publication. The reasons for the ban are analyzed, along with correspondence between the Ministry of National Education and the Ministry of Internal Affairs regarding the confiscation of the journal and the methods of its implementation. The work demonstrates how publishers and authors were vulnerable to pressure from influential officials and the church, even if they were officially permission to publish materials. It also reveals the peculiarities of the functioning of the Russian press under such conditions.

The story Chemodanov (1916) is considered as a parody version of a hagiography (anti-life), as well as a version of the collision ‘Man - Fate’ developed in the work of Leonid Andreev. The first part provides an analysis of the existing context: some features of the writer’s artistic world are identified, including clarifying the nature of the comic in Andreev’s work. These observations relate both to the image of the philistine hero and to the genre game. At the same time, the appeal to genre transformation seems typical for the turn of the 19th-20th centuries and it is found not only in Andreev’s work, but also in the works of other contemporary authors. The second part offers the experience of reading the novel Chemodanov as a ‘twisted’ hagiography. The narration is built on a hagiographic model: the description of the hero’s life is presented from the moment of birth to death, the events are miraculous in nature, the hero occupies a special position, the narrator acts as an impartial chronicler, the presentation is not rhetorical, but historical and documentary in nature. At the level of content, the author, creating a generalized image of a modern person, debunks the ability of the average person to act as a martyr, which is emphasized by the ironic tone of the narrative. The story of the ordeal of Yegor Yegorovich Chemodanov is a parodic version of the conflict ‘Man - Fate’, which was previously developed in The Life of Vasily Fiveysky. Unlike the story, the conflict in the novella is presented in an ironic modality and is not recognized by the hero as a struggle. The variability of the depiction of the same collision allows us to question the thesis of Leonid Andreev’s totally pessimistic worldview, and the rethinking of the hagiography genre anticipates the turn to hagiography in the literature of the 20th century.

The article examines the features of the representation of the progenitors supertext in Daria Dotsuk’s novella The Voice. The goal is to identify the system of codes (archetypal, linguosemiotic and axiological) that form the basis of the supertext in question, as well as the stable plot-compositional and subject-image components that allow us to talk about the integration of the story into the primordial supertext, the core of which is the conceptual word-image of grandmother and grandfather, the successor. It is noted that an important structuring element of the ancestral text in D. Dotsuk’s novella is also the image of the successor - granddaughter Sasha, who is the narrator and whose development is intensively influenced by the system of analysed codes that ensure the integrity and reproducibility of the supertext. The system of characters in the novella, which fits into the paradigm of ‘grandchildren - progenitors’, allows us to talk about the value-semantic dominant of the work - memory. Analysing one of the key functions of the progenitors - the preservation of the family and historical memory - the authors consistently show that in the novella The Voice it is realised through the demonstration of the mechanisms of unifying post-memory, while describing in detail various practices of memory translation in the story: communicative (Sasha - grandmother Nadezhda Yemelyanovna), traumatic memory of ‘silence’ (Sergeant Ryzhov), commemorative (Stas). It is worth noting that the role of progenitors in the novella, which aims to demonstrate the teenage heroine’s fundamental transformation in the process of searching for the meaning of life and her place in it, is not limited to the formation of an ancestral identity. Retaining the archetypal role of a mentor on the way to finding one’s own understanding of the world, grandmother Nadya acts as a substitute for her mother, taking care of her granddaughter when she is ‘delirious’. The representation of the progenitor’s text in the story is necessary for the characters to find their voices, capable of translating the problems of the past, realizing their connection to the present and understanding their purpose for the future. In D. Dotsuk’s novella The Voice, the progenitors supertext, built as an integral multilevel and multifunctional system, plays an important role in understanding the meaning of the work.

The aim of this article is to research some similar features in the representation of the teenage characters in the novels by three American authors: C. McCullers, J.D. Salinger and T. Capote. The novels that we are to analyse feature some characters that start with misunderstanding the people around them and the motivation of their acts. But for some reasons they start feeling that their perception of a problem is too radicalised and the better way for dealing with others is trying to find some kind of a compromise. It may be a psychological compromise, as a matter of accepting the other’s freedom of self-determination, or a social compromise in a manner of finding the way of social interaction. But each time finding a compromise is depicted as an act that takes a certain effort, leading to inner transformation of a character. For achieving the goals of our research, we are using a combination of motif analysis, comparative method and hermeneutical method of text interpretation. The characters of their novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) by Carson McCullers, The Catcher in the Rye (1945-1946) by Jerome David Salinger and Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) by Truman Capote have a certain degree of similarity that goes far beyond their teen age.

This article seeks to examine the notion of “Othering” in Layli Long Soldier’s renowned poem “38”. It examines the way in which “38” functions as a moving and emotional reflection on the historical and cultural experiences of Indigenous people, chiefly in relation to the Wounded Knee Massacre and its lasting influence on Native American identity. It clarifies how identity is created and represented through poetic manifestation. The present study employs Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of “Othering” to be the methodological tool for examining Layli Long Soldier’s poem “38”. Spivak, as a substantial postcolonial theorist, expresses how dominant narratives often create downgraded identities as “Others” and deprive them of agency and voice. Throughout the study of Layli Long Soldier’s renowned poem “38” in the light of Spivak’s notion of “Othering”, the findings demonstrate that she uses language, imagery, and structure in order to confront the procedures of “Othering” that have relegated Indigenous voices within dominant narratives. Her poetry depicts the real experiences of Indigenous people struggling with exclusion and cultural displacement effects which reflect Spivak’s examination of the mental and social impacts of “Othering”. To conclude, by foregrounding the complications of identity, memory, and resistance, Long Soldier’s poetry not only condemns the mechanisms of “Othering” but also encourages recuperation and agency in the face of historical trauma. This article is significant because it will lead to a more comprehensive discourse on Indigenous literature and identity by underlining the implication of Long Soldier’s poetic voice in defying predominant representations and raising a profounder recognition of the Indigenous experience.

The article presents the results of a study conducted at the Higher School of Economics in 2025, which aimed to examine the media coverage of three world leaders in the global online information space: Russian President V.V. Putin and the two US Presidents, D.J. Trump and J.R. Biden, during 2024 and early 2025. The study utilized the Factiva information and analytical system to conduct frequency and sentiment analysis on a large dataset of approximately 120 million English-language texts from online resources in over 100 countries, including major global media outlets and analytical websites. The findings show that the three leaders consistently ranked among the most frequently mentioned figures in the English-language global information space throughout 2024 and Q1 2025. Indian Prime Minister N. Modi also exhibited a high mention frequency. All four figures remained in the top five most mentioned persons since 2022-2023, with their rankings shifting annually. From the perspective of agenda-setting theory, this indicates their high significance to the global community. Mentions of the leaders occurred most frequently in neutral-toned texts. The proportion of positive-toned texts was lower than that of negative-toned texts, resulting in a negative sentiment balance for all four cases, which was more pronounced for the two American presidents.

The phenomenon of digital social photography is explored as a product of contemporary social media practices. It analyses the transformation of the role of photography in the digital age, where it functions not merely as a tool for recording reality, but also as an active agent in the process of meaning-making. The study relies on the methodologies of digital, post-digital, and embodied semiotics, which allow to identify the specific characteristics of digital social photography in today’s communicative environment. Digital social photography is defined as a post-digital sign shaped by two opposing trends: the activity of the audience (producers) who interpret and represent meanings; and technological systems that influence these processes. The continuous flow of digital images establishes connections between online and offline spaces; social practices and their individual interpretations. In social media, photography serves as a universal means of communication, fulfilling the functions of visualisation; self-presentation and emotional expression. At the same time, photography is losing its former documentary authenticity. The boundaries between fiction and reality are becoming blurred, partly due to the development of modern technologies that not only allow modifying the form and content of real photographs, but also enable generating images using artificial intelligence. The study concludes that the digital social photograph functions as a hybrid sign, whose meaning is negotiated between user agency and algorithmic influence, fundamentally challenging traditional notions of photographic indexicality.

Since December 2022, Russian politicians and government organizations have been required to provide feedback to the public through the social media platforms VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. Over the past two years, these social media platforms have not only seen an increase in the number of ac-counts and content posted, but also an increase in the volume of feedback exchanged between politicians and citizens in the form of questions, complaints, and responses. Russian researchers agree that social media can contribute to the political participation of citizens and the implementation of deliberative practices. Analyzing the content of official government accounts, media outlets, and political opinion leaders, along with comments from subscribers, has become a common approach to studying deliberative practices on social media. However, researchers have noted a growing discrepancy between the potential for consensus in deliberative processes and the actual dissonance that is reflected in communication between authorities and citizens. Also, with the increasing volume of messages, it becomes important to automate the process of data collection and processing. This study is based on an analysis of the content and comments posted by the governors of 89 Russian regions on the social network VKontakte for December 2024 and January-February 2025 (17 490 posts and 550 000 comments). A formula for calculating the media rating of the governors has been proposed.

This comparative study investigates the representation of women in online advertising by private medical clinics across Russia, India, and South Africa, framing the analysis within the ‘mirror’ vs. ‘mold’ paradigms. The empirical material includes 781 human characters from 729 units of visual advertising content collected from the websites of 38 private clinics: 20 clinics in St. Petersburg (Russia), 10 in Delhi (India), and 8 in Cape Town (South Africa). Through a quantitative content analysis, we assess how these representations align with employment statistics and how they are influenced by market competition and content strategy (original vs. stock imagery). The results show a dual dynamic of reflection and shaping. Women were significantly underrepresented as doctors in India (-27 pp) and Russia (-20 pp) compared to real-world data, yet overrepresented in South Africa (+18 pp). This under/overrepresentation correlates with levels of market competition. Furthermore, in South Africa, the predominant portrayal of Black doctors signals a conscious shaping of post-colonial norms. While patient portrayals were more gender-balanced, especially in stock imagery, a bias towards male patients persisted in testimonials from India and South Africa. The study concludes that the level of market competition is a significant economic determinant in whether clinics’ advertising reflects or shapes professional and social roles, with the shaping influence being most pronounced in original content.

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The era of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in media presents philosophical and conceptual challenges for researchers and practitioners in the field of creative processes algorithmizing. The established discourse, which reduces the AI role to the dichotomy of “tool or threat”, loses theoretical coherence when attempting to describe the complex, ambivalent nature of the relationship between the journalist/media practitioner and the algorithm. In this article, the author consistently “shakes” the dualistic approach, confirming the need for a more syncretic view and the introduction of a new discursive apparatus. As its foundation, the metaphorical conceptual triad of “slave-overlord-colleague” is proposed and developed. This model captures the dynamic and paradoxical nature of AI, which in media practice functions simultaneously as a controlled performer, as a rule-setting “super-author”, and as a quasi-subject-co-creator, redefining the traditional boundaries of co-authorship. The purpose of this article is to outline a vector for studying the machine-human media alliance and to initiate an interdisciplinary discussion about the concepts of creativity and authorship in media, as well as about the boundaries of professional ethics in the transitive conditions of the research agenda of media communication studies.

An analytical review of contemporary international research applying computational linguistics methods to the study of mass communication is presented. Particular focus is placed on sentiment analysis methodology as a key tool for measuring communicative influence. Based on a representative corpus of publications from the last five years, four key thematic areas are systematized: the analysis of reactions to global events (pandemics, military conflicts), the study of media effects mechanisms, research on hate speech and discrimination, and the measurement of suggestive influence in political and social communication. Special attention is paid to the comparative analysis of methods - from traditional lexicon-based approaches (VADER, LIWC) to modern transformer-based architectures (BERT). The conducted analysis reveals a persistent methodological gap between the technical sophistication of the algorithms and the depth of their socio-humanitarian interpretation. Current challenges in the field are discussed, including systemic biases in language models and the limitations of automated analysis for studying complex forms of communicative influence. Prospects for developing an interdisciplinary approach that integrates computational linguistics with media and communication theories are outlined.

New book by N.M. Malygina, which focuses on analyzing the similarities between A. Platonov’s works and those of F. Dostoevsky, A. Voronsky, V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, S. Yesenin, and O. Mandelstam, is examined. The review highlights the novelty of the work’s findings and conclusions, as well as the effectiveness of the methodology proposed by the author for studying the writer’s legacy in a broader literary context.