The article aims to identify stable strategies for representing success in the Russian segment of social media and the value narratives associated with them. The study focuses on digital self-presentations in which users showcase achievements, recognition, or overcoming hardship. The empirical basis comprises a corpus of over two million posts and comments collected from open sources using the Brand Analytics platform. The methodology combines quantitative techniques (LDA topic modeling, clustering) with qualitative content analysis. The theoretical framework draws on Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical model, as well as the concepts of digital self-presentation and micro-celebrity. The analysis reveals dominant themes in the discourse of success, including displays of consumption, recognition of effort and social benefit, and narratives of perseverance. Both visual and verbal strategies are examined, particularly the use of ironic distance to mitigate the societal pressure to appear successful. Special attention is paid to the interplay between individualistic and collectivist conceptions of success. The findings suggest the emergence of a stable visual and rhetorical canon of success within Russian online discourse, reinforcing social norms through everyday digital performances.
This study examines the dramaturgical innovations and philosophical provocations embedded in Harold Pinter’s early and mid-career work, particularly in The Homecoming (1965) as a paradigmatic articulation of his theatrical aesthetics. The paper explores how Pinter departs from conventions of psychological realism and Aristotelian structure, crafting instead a dramatic mode rooted in opacity, linguistic subversion, and performative silence. Through detailed textual analysis, informed by theories of the absurd (Esslin), performativity (Butler), and postdramatic theatre (Lehmann), the research aims to elucidate how Pinter’s plays resist interpretive closure and dramatize the failure - not merely the absence - of meaning. Particular emphasis is placed on the way The Homecoming constructs gendered power through ritualized dialogue, domestic space, and erotic economy, positioning Ruth not as a passive object of male desire, but as a sovereign agent who reconfigures the symbolic order through strategic ambiguity. Employing a qualitative methodology grounded in close reading and supported by interdisciplinary frameworks, including gender theory, poststructuralist philosophy, and performance studies, the study shows how Pinter’s plays generate phenomenological intensity and epistemological instability. The results highlight a consistent dramaturgical logic wherein characters operate as performative surfaces enacting ideological scripts rather than coherent psychological entities. In The Homecoming, the absence of moral or narrative resolution foregrounds the raw mechanics of power, silence, and ritualized presence. Ultimately, this study concludes that Pinter’s contribution to modern drama lies in his transformation of theatre into a site of ontological disturbance, where the failure to communicate becomes the primary event, and the unknown - rather than its resolution - is staged as the play’s enduring truth.
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.
This article examines Russia’s image in Quan doi nhan dan and Dan tri during the National Day of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam celebrations reveals a multi-layered media landscape, reflecting both the characteristics of a state-oriented media system and the evolution of modern public journalism. Quan doi nhan dan positioned Russia within a security-defense and friendship-diplomacy frame, emphasizing a legacy of strategic cooperation, military discipline, and symbolic strength. Its formal, standardized language reflected its role as an instrument of political communication and foreign policy. In contrast, Dan tri employed a human-interest and emotional frame, constructing an image of Russia as an approachable and friendly nation, thereby fostering public sympathy and cultural connection. The comparative analysis demonstrates that the portrayal of a strategic partner is not monolithic but is diversified according to the target audience and institutional logic of each media outlet. This complementary framing strategy serves to reinforce positive perceptions of Russia at both the official and public levels in Vietnam. The main limitation of this study is its limited sample size; future research could benefit from a larger corpus and a more longitudinal design to trace the evolution of media images. Despite this, the study offers a valuable snapshot into the mechanisms of international image-building within a non-Western media context, highlighting the need for further nuanced analysis of media framing in Global South countries.
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.
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.
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.
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 offers a comprehensive analysis of I.A. Shatrov’s waltz On the Hills of Manchuria (1906) in the poetic version by S.G. Petrov (Skitalets), interpreting it as a representative example of the ‘Manchurian text’, a unique cultural phenomenon in the Russian Far East of the early twentieth century. The study focuses on the profound and organic synthesis of musical and verbal semiotics, which reveals how the traumatic historical experience of the Russo-Japanese War is transformed into a nostalgic myth of a lost homeland. The intermedial analysis identifies structural and semantic correspondences between the triple meter of the waltz and the rhythmic organization of the poetic text, as well as between melodic figures and a system of leitmotifs (nostalgia, sacrifice, nature, memory) that shape the work’s mythopoetic structure. Of particular scholarly significance is the revealed isomorphism between descending melodic lines and the motif of tears, along with the analysis of the use of the minor mode, which together demonstrate the depth of the interpenetration of musical and verbal components. The findings substantially enrich current understanding of the genesis of cultural identity under frontier conditions and open new perspectives for interdisciplinary studies of the artistic texts of the Russian Far Eastern diaspora, particularly in relation to the acoustic landscapes of border territories.
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.
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.
This study explores the role of mangroves as agents of memory in Leila S. Chudori’s The Sea Speaks His Name (Laut Bercerita) through a phytocritical lens. It argues that Chudori frames coastal flora not as passive scenery but as witnesses to Indonesia’s 1998 political violence. Drawing on theories of plant-thinking and ecological memory, the analysis reveals how mangroves function as a vegetal archive. Their tangled roots embody suppressed histories, their cyclical regeneration resists erasure, and their medicinal qualities echo cultural survival in the face of trauma. Through close reading and ethnobotanical contextualization, the study demonstrates how the novel embeds trauma in ecological forms, challenging anthropocentric narratives of history. The analysis also connects botanical imagery in the text with Indigenous epistemologies, where plants serve as custodians of ancestral memory. By tracing motifs such as roots, sap, and scars, the analysis identifies a multispecies structure of remembrance that operates alongside and beyond human testimony. This reading contributes to Southeast Asian ecocriticism by showing how literature transforms local ecologies into sites of postcolonial resistance and mnemonic resilience.
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.
This article examines the transformation of communication strategies employed by Russian lobbying structures (industry and business associations) in 2022 in the context of the start of the Special Military Operation and severe sanctions pressure. The empirical foundation is a verified registry of 400 associations, compiled according to the methodology of the Russian Public Relations Association (RASO) and the Public Relations Development Company (KROS). The research methodology involved multi-stage data retrieval, filtering, segmentation into 44 industries, and a quantitative content analysis of a large dataset (over 897 thousand mentions). The results reveal a key trend: alongside a minor increase in overall mentions, a redistribution of media activity occurred - a decline in federal media coupled with a rise in regional outlets. The share of high-media-profile associations grew to over one-third, with cross-industry associations emerging as the leaders in media activity. The analysis demonstrated a clear division of roles: industry associations addressed tactical tasks, while cross-industry associations shaped the strategy for a new economic architecture. A response matrix to the key challenges of 2022 was developed based on the findings. The identified behavioural patterns continue to define the landscape of business-state relations in contemporary Russia.
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 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 structure of the heroine’s image and its significance for the problems of Chekhov’s comedy are analyzed. One of the conditions for an adequate understanding of the image of Arkadina is recognized as her projection onto the great Italian actress Eleonora Duse. The concept of ‘Duse’s text’ is defined. It is understood as a structural-semantic construct that reflects the ideal and model of a dramatic actor at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. It is characterized by phenomenology in the Kantian sense, since it is accessible to recipients not directly, but only through other people’s interpretations. The author of the article proves that the image of Arkadina was constructed by Chekhov with an orientation towards three real actresses. On the one hand, there are Duse and Sarah Bernhardt, and on the other, there is Lydia Yavorskaya. If Chekhov saw Bernard and Duse only on stage, he was well acquainted with Yavorskaya personally. Duse, from the point of view of the author of the comedy, is an unattainable standard for Yavorskaya, while Sarah Bernhardt served as a more accessible role model for her. All these features of real actresses were reflected in the image of Arkadina. Despite the title of the comedy, she is recognized as its main character. The Seagull is a play, first of all, about the theatre and its people. Arkadina sees the people around her through the prism of theatrical roles, thereby turning reality into a kind of stage. Metatheatrical quality is inherent in all episodes in which Arkadina participates. Participants in a dialogue with an actress most often do not recognize the source of her behavior, since they are outside the zone of influence of the theatrical or literary context that dominates her consciousness.
This article examines the peculiarities of analysing the conflict of generations in migration literature on the material of H. Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia is one of the key works of postcolonial prose. The aim is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the generational conflict in the novel. The purpose is not only to relate the characters of the work under study to the wave of migration (first/second generation of migrants), but also to determine their place in the historical process and their belonging to a certain generation, in accordance with the sociological theory. For this purpose, the nature and causes of conflict interaction between first- and second-generation migrants were analyzed. The dominant life and behavioural strategies inherent in migrants’ characters belonging to different generational cycles are fixed in the form of oppositions. The result of the research is the disclosure of the analysis specificity of generational conflict in the novel The Buddha of Suburbia. Relevant conclusions are drawn, which indicate the crisis of patriarchal-traditional institutions and the destructive nature of values dominating in British society.
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.
