The work also reveals the socio-cultural aspect of the history of the medieval Russian North in XIII-XVII centuries: individual and collective practices of charity, feasts and brochings, as well as oral and written, urban and rural principles in the daily functioning of book culture and literacy.

In the book of G. Pomerantz collected his works of recent years. The author introduces the concept of subglobal civilization as a historical stop on the way to a global dialogue of cultures. The methodological difficulties created by the polysemy of the word civilization are investigated. The emergence of subglobal civilizations is associated with the emergence of superethnic religions that...

American historian David Hoffmann does not agree with historians who view the USSR as an anomaly of historical development. The book represents the history of the Soviet state in the context of ideas and practices peculiar to many states of the modern period. The study shows that it is impossible to attribute all aspects of Soviet intervention in the life of society to the account of the...

The book examines the process of forming literature as a cultural institution in Western Europe in the 19th century and reveals the relationship between two seemingly distant phenomena of cultural life: the 'bourgeois century' and the 'literature age'. The focus of the study is the figure of the bourgeois reader, who turned out to be paradoxically involved in both market-exchange and aesthetic...

The book examines the non-artistic works of Leo Tolstoy: diaries, correspondence, Confession, autobiographical excerpts and the treatise So what do we do?. This is an analysis of how throughout life Tolstoy tried to describe and define his creating a story adequate in structure to the very process of being - not literature, but a kind of book of life.

With a deep semantic unity, the prose of Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) is distinguished by an amazing poetic variety. In the early 1960s, this was felt by the readers of the first published stories of an unexpectedly great, truly new writer: One Day by Ivan Denisovich was followed by strongly dissimilar with him The Case at Kochetovka Station and Matryonin Dvor. Every time new artistic...

In Bonk, the best-selling author of Stiff turns her outrageous curiosity and insight on the most alluring scientific subject of all: sex. Can a person think herself to orgasm? Why doesn't Viagra help women-or, for that matter, pandas? Can a dead man get an erection? Is vaginal orgasm a myth? Mary Roach shows us how and why sexual arousal and orgasm-two of the most complex, delightful, and...