Vol 31, No 3 (2026): POSTMODERNISM: PRO ET CONTRA

The article offers a new interpretation of L. Petrushevskaya’s short story From the Mountain. he structural and thematic emphases previously placed on the text by critics and literary scholars are revised. In particular, the character system and narrative strategies in the story are considered from a new point of view. While earlier critics based their analysis on the characters of ‘He’ and ‘She’, placing their love story at the center of scholarly discourse, this article proposes a different approach. Instead of focusing on these two figures, it examines the narrator-heroine, a witness to the love story of vacationers, as presented by her from a highly subjective perspective. The paper challenges the notion that the author’s position and that of the narrator-heroine are identical, proving that the narrator cannot be considered the author’s alter ego. It is demonstrated that the linguistic and stylistic features of the narrator-observer’s evaluative statements serve as a means of portraying the protagonist, shaping her persona and image. The article concludes that there are multifaceted vectors for expressing the author’s position, highlighting the presence of the “zero degree of writing” (Roland Barthes) in Petrushevskaya’s postmodern narrative.

The article examines the problems of identifying modern Uzbek literature in the context of the “postmodern situation” (J. Lyotard), which has determined a number of conceptual trends in the post-Soviet development of national literatures during the shift of the artistic paradigm in the 1990s. The authors identify the most obvious constants and markers that determined the inclusion of the aesthetic constants of literary postmodernism in the works of the most iconic Uzbek writers of the non-classical artistic paradigm. The purpose of the article is to identify, define, and theoretically substantiate the worldview and aesthetic dominants of postum narrative, which demonstrate the functioning of postmodernism as a type of artistic consciousness, method, and style of the national literary system of Uzbekistan. The scientific novelty of the work lies not only in the systematic analysis of literary works based on the methodology and theory of postmodernism, but also in the development of identification criteria for relating ethno-cultural texts to the worldview, world-modeling, and aesthetic principles of postmodernism. The authors analyze the general constants of the postmodern type of artistic consciousness, but they focus on postum narrative as a strategy for the specific organization of postmodern literary texts and a marker of the “world as a text” model. This type of narrative determines the poetics, methods of world-modeling, and representation of ethno-cultural identity in a number of works by contemporary authors with a pronounced postmodern aesthetic. The research material comprises the Uzbek-language novel To’rt tomon qibla (Four Directions of the World) by Aman Mukhtar and the Russian-language novel Mbobo by Khamid Ismailov, a transcultural author associated with the Uzbek underground and literary diaspora. The methodological framework of the study employs intertextual and narrative analysis, alongside receptive and hermeneutic approaches to the interpretation of cultural codes and ciphers. It has been established that in the contemporary Uzbek literary process, postmodernism functions not as a distinct literary movement, but as a variable manifestation of its principles and trends within individual literary works. These works feature a pronounced metafictional architectonics of the “world as text”, which structures both the stylistic (intertextual and hypertextual levels) and structural principles of text construction (the narrative level).

The purpose of this study is to systematically describe of the transition of the St. Petersburg text from a living literary tradition to a hypertrophied, fragmentary, and self-reflexive mythological code. The question of how political cataclysms (revolutions, blockades, the renaming of the city) and the change of place names transformed the archaic myth had not previously been addressed comprehensively: studies either focused on the classics of the 19th century or identified individual postmodern techniques without connection to the archaic stratum. The scholarly contribution of this work lies in identifying the stable structure of the “archetype of death”, which remains stable across ideological shifts and becomes the core of Russian cultural identity. The article contains sections devoted to the theory of the St. Petersburg text, examination of political upheavals as catalysts for the transformation of the St. Petersburg text, and comparison of key mythemes (of water and death). The research methodology included comparative analysis of the corpus of texts, and semiotic deconstruction of recurring narrative nodes. St. Petersburg in modern literature is not a topos, but an operator of cultural memory; the myth of the city has outlived its referent and turned into an autonomous generator of meanings. The resulting model can serve as a tool for deciphering other “urban texts” of Russian culture.

The relevance of this article is determined by the importance of the role that the poet V.N. Nekrasov played in Russian literature between the 1950s and the 2000s, as well as the need to clarify and add complexity to the picture of Russian unofficial literature of the second half of the 20th century. The purpose of this article is to describe one of the initial stages of Nekrasov’s creative evolution. His acquaintance with and subsequent joining of the in Lianozovo Group in the late autumn of 1959 led to an intensification of the concretist element in his work, which had developed in the mid-1950s. The novelty of the article lies in the definition of Nekrasov’s creative innovations in the poetry of the 1960s as the realization of two types of defamiliarization of the word. The first was historically rooted in the device of lexical repetition and involved immersing the word in numerous consonances, attractions, and contexts. The second one, on the contrary, entailed a minimalistic absorption the word across the space of the book page. Both types of defamiliarization led to the deautomatization of everyday speech and the discovery of a creative principle potentially inherent in every word. At the same time, these approaches not only did not contradict each other, but harmoniously coexisted both in one literary text and in the context of a poetry collection. The result of the research is the identification of the mechanism of Nekrasov’s creative evolution. By the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, the developed types of defamiliarization of the word led to the actualization of the pragmatic aspect and to Nekrasov’s own understanding of the literary text as an act. In addition, the analyzed types of defamiliarization make it possible to identify Nekrasov’s more general aesthetic principles, particularly his belief in the creative potential of every word, which distinguished Nekrasov from some other Moscow unofficial poets.

The article examines the reception of L.N. Tolstoy’s ethical ideas in Kazakh literature of the late 19th - early 20th centuries through the works of Abai Kunanbaev and Shakarim Kudaiberdiev. Special attention is paid to the comparison of the concepts of “moral regeneration” and “conscience” in Tolstoy’s later writings and in Kudaiberdiev’s philosophical treatise Three Truths. Methodologically, the study is based on comparative-historical and hermeneutic approaches, which make it possible to reveal not only typological convergences but also cultural and religious differences in the interpretation of universal ethical categories. The analysis shows that Shakarim, unlike Abai, entered into a more direct and deliberate with Tolstoy, reinterpreting his ideas through the lens of the Kazakh Sufi tradition. The key concept of this reinterpretation is “uzhdan” (Kazakh for “conscience”, Russian: “sovest’”), which in Shakarim’s philosophy acquires the significance of a universal criterion for the immortality of the soul. The article contributes to the study of intercultural literary connections and may be useful for specialists in comparative literary studies, as well as for researchers of Russian-Kazakh literary relations.

This study presents the results of research on the media image of the Chelyabinsk industrial region in the context of dominant themes and stereotypes. The aim is to identify the main topics of the media agenda in regional mass media outlets “74.ru” and “1obl.ru” for 2025 and to systematize the stereotypes that shape the media image of the territory. The choice of research object is motivated by the need to bridge the gap between the actual development of Chelyabinsk and its representation in the media. The thematic structure serves as an indicator of editorial attention, while stereotypes function as a tool for meaning construction. The empirical base consists of 35,575 media texts processed using the API-Monitoring system. Quantitative and qualitative content analysis methods were employed, grounded in agenda-setting theory (at the thematic and attribute levels). The editorial policies of both outlets and the dynamics of positive, negative, and neutral stereotype framing were compared. The results reveal that the leading positions in the media agenda of “74.ru” are occupied by topics related to the social sphere, history, culture, and economic potential, with the outlet demonstrating a predominance of negative tone (54.8%), whereas “1obl.ru” focuses on a neutral-to-positive tone (73.1%). The study establishes that the media space of the Chelyabinsk region exhibits a stable trend of transforming negative stereotypes (“harsh industrial zone”, “black sky conditions”) into positive images of a technologically progressive and socially comfortable territory.

The article examines the annual Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions reports of the Reuters Institute as a specific form of knowledge production about the media industry. The relevance of the study is driven by the widespread use of these reports in both academic and applied research, particularly against the backdrop of a scarcity of theoretical frameworks in journalism studies and a growing demand for rapid, industry-oriented guidance. The aim of the article is to identify the methodological foundations and epistemological limitations of these reports. The empirical basis of the study is a corpus of publications from 2012 to 2026. The methodological approach combines qualitative discourse analysis and comparative analysis to reconstruct the research model, sample composition, and implicit theoretical assumptions. The study demonstrates that the Reuters Institute reports rely on a reproducible yet structurally constrained model of expert surveys, characterized by a bias toward top-level Western media executives and a weak representation of peripheral media systems. In the absence of explicit theoretical reflection, these reports function as carriers of an implicit theory grounded in assumptions of “soft” technological determinism and an industry-centered understanding of journalism. The article argues that these reports do not simply describe the state of the media industry, but actively construct the horizons of its conceivable development, normalizing professional expectations and operating as an instrument of the collective imagination of journalism’s future. The article concludes that such materials should be used critically in academic research and journalism education, with a clear distinction between their status as sources of expert opinion and as tools of empirical foresight.

Globalization and the establishment of a unified information space significantly blur national boundaries. Nevertheless, the geopolitical realities of both the 20th and the 21st centuries demonstrate that it is nationalist ideas that have become the main point of reference for many political movements. These ideas and images, reproduced on a large scale by the mass media and aimed at constructing national identity, are widespread in contemporary society. This article examines the formation of Catalan national identity through the lens of Catalan media of the 19th-21st centuries. Drawing on an analysis of scholarly literature and journalistic sources, the author traces the evolution of the Catalan press from a vehicle for the cultural revival of the Catalan language to an instrument of political mobilization during the 2017 crisis. Special attention is paid to the bilingual nature of the press - one of the key features of Catalan journalism, which directly affects national self-awareness. The author concludes that the region’s media system is distinctly national in orientation and functions as a key institution of socialization, preserving the uniqueness of the language and constructing the image of a “victim nation” in opposition to the Spanish state.

This article examines neurocommenting - a contemporary and insufficiently studied phenomenon emerging in online user environments. The growing popularization of artificial intelligence and the reluctance of most users to communicate with bots necessitate conducting informal “Turing tests” to identify robotic authorship. Such attempts lead to another unusual phenomenon: users trolling chatbots. Based on an analysis of 287 bot comments from ten chats, bot comments and user reactions to them were classified. A brief periodization of neurocommenting development and various objectives of clients commissioning this service are presented. The results demonstrate that a quarter of users tend to ignore bots. The majority (38%) of those who respond to bots wish to know who is a robot and who is human. Every third reaction is emotional and constitutes trolling of the bot; every fifth contains a demand to block the bot. However, only a small minority (7%) are willing to communicate with robots. It is likely that in the near future, if platform owners do not develop effective anti-bot filtering systems, we will arrive at either full-fledged human-bot communication or the loss of interactivity as a crucial component of the modern media system.