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This paper introduces a thematic cluster derived from the conference 'A Culture of (Dis)Continuity? Russian Cultural Debates in Historical Perspective', held at the University of Central Lancashire, England, in May 2016. It maps the place of this vast, diverse, and increasingly relevant topic in current debates by situating it within the polemics of a broader nature – of the existing methodological approaches to studying cultures and their evolutions. It then elucidates the contribution of this '(dis)continuity' cluster to the existing research, with a focus on Russian literary discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars in various fields have started to embrace the digital humanities, but there has been a delay in involving undergraduates. Challenges such as unfamiliarity with applications, lack of understanding about the overall purpose of projects, and insufficient resources all contribute to creating a barrier between the digital humanities and students. However, collaboration between scholars and library staff can create new learning opportunities for students that allow them to see the value in digital approaches to pedagogy and view the humanities through new perspectives. This article outlines a collaborative effort between the University of Virginia's Slavic Department and Library's Scholars' Lab to implement a digital humanities project in a pre-existing semester-long undergraduate culture course. In this project, students were asked to print and present to one another 3D objects representing Russia and then curate an exhibition of these objects. At the semester's end, the students reflected on the appropriateness of their objects as symbols of Russia, given their increased knowledge of Russian culture. We draw on research in cultural pedagogy and digital scholarship to offer a new way of interpreting and teaching cultural understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Audiences of low-brow literature are strongly differentiated along categorical lines. • Gender and age, not religion or ethnicity, differentiate low-brow tastes. • High-brow tastes tend to be less gender-specific, than low-brow. • High-brow tastes tend to be less cohort-specific, than low-brow. • Age correlates negatively with the brow-level of the preferred literature. In his paper establishing the foundations of omnivorousness theory, Richard Peterson suggested that the system of tastes is organised as a pyramid "with one elite taste at the top and more and more alternative forms at about the same level as one moves down the pyramid toward its base", with tastes at the bottom "mark[ing] the status boundaries between taste groups defined by age, gender, race, region, religion, lifestyle" (1992, p.254). Whereas high-status individuals are likely to consume a few genres at all levels of the taste pyramid, low-status ones tend to patronise only one genre situated at the bottom. One of the predictions following from this model concerning the omnivorounsness of privileged groups has been tested in numerous studies, but the thesis of low-brow tastes having stronger structural embeddedness has been researched much less extensively. If Peterson is correct, we should find that the consumption of high-brow objects strongly correlates with status characteristics such as education where the consumption of low- and middle-brow does not; by the same token, the consumption of low-brow objects would correlate with gender, age, ethnicity, or other groupings where the consumption of high-brow objects does not. In this paper, we use a dataset from a St Petersburg public library system to analyse 1 300 000 book choices of over 100 000 readers to find out whether these predictions hold. We find that there is indeed a strong negative correlation between the attractiveness of authors for predominantly educated readers and the gender and age specificity of their audience. We discuss three possible theoretical explanations of this finding which can be discerned from the literature: (1) "group" and (2) "grid" interpretations, using the terms from Mary Douglas's cultural theory, and (3) the opposition between relaxational and self-cultivating usages of culture. We argue that the particular differentiation pattern speaks against the "group interpretation" prevalent in other literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • There exists repeated survey data on arts participation in Russia during the 1990s economic crisis. • High-brow culture is much less income elastic than lowbrow culture. • Economic decline of a group does not affect the prestige of its lifestyle. • Change of class structure does not affect cultural classification. • Increase in social mobility rates does not lead to increase in cultural mobility. Abstract What happens to cultural capital comprised of "prestigious cultural resources" when the whole system of economic inequality changes, and the group regarded as the major possessor and guardian of traditional status culture finds itself at the bottom of the new income distribution? The answer to this question may shed some light on two widely debated issues: (1) Is cultural capital essentially an instrument of exclusion adopted by economic-based classes, with the status dimension of social stratification being an epiphenomenon of class structure? (2) Is cultural participation governed by strategic status-seeking? This paper argues that possible combinations of answers to these questions suggest three different scenarios of reactions to the loosening of links between distribution of cultural and economic capital: "meltdown" (the failure of high culture to mark boundaries of an economically privileged group results in a considerable decline in cultural participation, particularly among younger individuals (DiMaggio & Mukhtar, 2004), "transfer" (status culture being taken over by the descendants of the new economically advantaged groups), and "permanence" (no significant change occurs). In this paper, we analyse a unique database which allows tracing arts participation rates by major categories of consumers in Saint Petersburg, Russia, between 1991 and 2017—the period of the emergence of capitalism, also widely regarded as the time of economic decline of the traditional Soviet intelligentsia. We argue that the evidence supports the permanence scenario, thus demonstrating the existence of an autonomous status hierarchy that can reproduce in generations irrespective of processes of re-distribution of wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] We conduct semantic analysis of four culturally salient Russian social category terms svoj ‘one's own’, čužoj ‘alien/stranger/foreigner’, naš ‘ours’ and ne naš ‘not ours’. [•] We demonstrate a relationship between these terms and selected Russian communicative styles. [•] We apply Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) in the semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The legacy of experiment in Russian cultural history can be analysed in a variety of ways. This introductory essay delineates some of the most significant milestones of this history stretching from the invention of the Slavic alphabet to the radical Modernism of the Avant-Garde. How does the “experimentality” of Russian radical aesthetics of the twentieth century correspond to the preceding cultural strata of the nationʼs history? Theoretical groundwork is outlined with respect to the possibility of conducting analytical research of various forms and guises of experiment. What makes the “Russian experiment” so unique? What endows Russian experimental culture with its unprecedented features? It is to these questions that the introductory essay rendered below is devoted. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

While the absence of a Renaissance in Russia has been taken for granted, the implications of this fact have not been exploited in seeking to understand the general trajectory of Russia''s literary development. “Literary-Historical Consequences of the Russian Non-Renaissance in a Comparative Context” adopts a pan-Slavic and European perspective that refracts it in the light of a key concomitant, the absence of a rationalizing theology, and concludes with a semiotic characterization of the three main modes of representation – iconic, deictic, and symbolic – that seeks to explain the special features of Russian literary production. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]