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Cosplay is considered as a modern mass practice of copying and public demonstration of the costume, image and behavior of famous heroes in the mass culture: heroes of movies, cartoons, comics, video games within the framework of festivals, processions, activities of clubs of the corresponding subject. The empirical material for the study was observations, publications in specialized mass media, recordings of Russian and foreign electronic broadcasts of cosplay events, interviews with Russian cosplayers. The article provides a cultural and historical analysis of cosplay, on the basis of which it is concluded that the archaic cultural forms of totemic primitive holidays, medieval carnival, and the first forms of theater are reproduced in cosplay. Traditional cultural forms in cosplay are endowed with new cultural meanings, among which are the game principal development in culture, the implementation of special mechanisms of young people socialization through individual and collective forms of identification and imitation of famous characters, creative development of screen culture characters. In cosplay, there is a partial revitalization of archaic cultural forms, such as zoo-mystery, carnival, the first forms of theater. The conclusion is made about the role of cosplay in the development of the visual language of modernity, «de-virtualization» of the mass culture images and the development of the «instinct of theatricality» in a modern person. Cosplay in Russia demonstrates a wider thematic repertoire than cosplay in the USA and Japan: it includes not only images of American films, video games, comics, Japanese manga and anime, but also images of Soviet animation, which paradoxically are capable of direct competition with modern products of mass culture and art.

This article describes the experience of supplementing conventional Learning Management Systems (LMS) with Social Networking Service (SNS) aiming at analysis of historical memory of the Soviet past using the method of Oral History by Paul Thompson (1935). Opportunities of the Russian social network, VKontakte, were used for execution of research and education project: Family Memory of the Soviet Past (2014-2020) for students specializing in Culturology at Russian State Social University on the basis of Memory Studies and Oral History theories. This article presents the main educational and scientific results of the project. Using the SNS, the practical component of humanitarian education was implemented; the VKontakte project activity allowed involving student groups in researching; transcripts and photos were collected in digital archive, analysis and discussion were performed. The VKontakte network group demonstrated opportunities of international student research in post-Soviet countries, allowed students to master practical skills of acquisition and analysis of empirical data, as well as became an identification factor of a student group as a part of scientific community.

Reverse processes in the public socio-cultural life of modern Russia are associated with the revival of a number of contradictory past values: the Soviet society ideals (the social experiment of building socialism ended twenty years ago, and before that it lasted more than 70 years); religious Orthodox revival (focused on the values of pre-revolutionary Russia before 1917); the development of traditional folk culture (transferring the value horizon into pre-Christian Slavic culture). The purpose of the article is to show how historical memory “lives” in the collective consciousness of modern Russians, how the archaization processes of historical memory and memorial practices are implemented at various social levels – from individual families (family memory), lower social cells (the level of municipalities, local clubs, schools), to federal school textbooks and national holidays. And turning to the analysis of Russian reality through the approaches of “memory studies” can have serious heuristic potential.