The Brothers Grimm 'watched the people in the mouth' and faithfully wrote down what the fairytale woman said. This is how many people imagine fairy tales to be. It wasn't like that. The Grimms often intervened radically in the texts, smoothed them out, rebuilt them and expanded them.

This book examines film and media representations of the social, political, and economic issue of human trafficking, one of the most dramatic challenges of today’s globalized world. Hashamova productively combines fieldwork in NGOs in southeastern Europe, social science data, and the analysis of Western and East European anti-trafficking films and media and their reception in the United States...

‘RUtopia’ explores the embodied utopia, which, according to the author, stands behind all fundamental socio-cultural transformations. However, if the embodiment of utopia is incomplete, it inevitably develops into its anti-utopian opposite. The book analyzes historical examples of such embodiment (USA, USSR, Third Reich) and new possibilities for embodiment in the conditions of the postmodern...

The seminal work of the French Sociologist Roger Caillois, a translation of Les jeux et les hommes (1958). It is an influential book on the sociology of play and games, or rather in Caillois' terms sociology derived from play. Caillois sees many of the structures in society as elaborate forms of games and many behaviours as forms of play.

The author of many books, a famous collector of legends and myths about St. Petersburg, Naum Aleksandrovich Sindalovsky, presents a unique collection of St. Petersburg folklore, which, like a magic mirror, reflected 300 years of the reign of the Romanov dynasty. It began with the curse of Marina Mniszech. But this long journey was not only marked by tragedies; many sparkling witticisms, funny...

Culture as a factor of the state security. The author is a professor and the Moscow State University, vice-president of Academy of the Russian Literature.

Russians at the first sight. What is appropriate and not appropriate among Russians. Advanced reader will help students have better understanding of the Russian character.

Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the XX century.

This book is a large-scale study of successful Russian films that have worked for several decades to strengthen the ideology of the Putin regime. You have probably seen many of them and even loved them. But what values do these films convey? How do they teach us to look at the past and what myths do they create? Why are Danila Bagrov and Sasha Bely national heroes in Russia? And why are...

Despite the huge number of books and articles devoted to the civilization of Ancient Egypt, it retains its mysterious appeal in the eyes of modern man. Its colossal monuments, its centuries-old power structure, its literature, which describes in detail and dispassionately the complex relationships between the living and the dead, gods and people - all this interests not only specialists, but...

Jeans infested with lice, larvae under the skin of an African guest, a portrait of Mao Zedong showing through at night on a Chinese carpet, swastikas hidden in the construction of houses, chewing gum with crushed glass - this is an incomplete list of Soviet urban legends about dangerous things. The book by well-known folklorists and anthropologists A. Arkhipova (RANEPA, Russian State University...