The nature of musical understanding is currently being intensively investigated in both analytic and continental philosophy. Many authors point out that such understanding has an important intellectual component. This article studies the question of spatial components of musical understanding. B. Wharf drew attention to the fact that we often carry out spatial objectification in the mind. A. Bergson wrote about the same. Music has a motive, musical phrases, often a melody, and all that can be represented in the form of a drawing. To understand music means to understand the logic of the unfolding of the melody, and “unfolding” is a spatial phenomenon. Husserl writes of a temporal horizon when listening to music, but the horizon is also a spatial phenomenon. Furthermore, Husserl points out that the fluid meaning of music remains “the same”, and in order to see it, one must step out of the flow of time to some fixed point. Such an exit is virtual, but possible. However, those are not ordinary spatial representations. The term “quasi-space” is used for them, reminiscent of Husserl’s double intentionality. In that quasi-space the pattern or gestalt of music is formed. At the same time, there is a certain transcendental point, a limit to which our exit from the flow of time tends.

The article deals with the reconstruction of the history for the “The Justification of good” – the main work by V. Solovyov in the third period of his creative activity. According to the concept of E.N. Trubetskoy, V. Solovyov radically revised his philosophical system in the 1890s, which is why the writings of that period cannot be perceived as a continuation of early philosophical works. According to E.L. Radlov, there was no radical change in the views of V. Solovyov and thereby “The Justification of good” should be considered a development of those ideas of V. Solovyov that were expressed in two of his dissertations. Based on a systematic analysis of V. Solovyov’s articles for 1894, the author proves that in a certain sense both researchers are right. V. Solovyov began the year 1894 with the publication of selected chapters of his “Aesthetics”, still thinking of his new philosophical system as a development of the earlier – of “free theosophy”. However, at the end of the same year, he comes to the conclusion that a more convincing introduction to his system would be an autonomous ethics based on a systematic analysis of the idea of good. A certain turning point in the philosopher’s views in the early 1890s can therefore really be fixed.

The article deals with an issue of the labor collectives’ names in Soviet society. The fact that collectives have names indicates that the people of that society regarded them as personalities, because only a person can have a name.

The ideas of the philosophy of myth and the philosophy of the name created by AF Losev are used as a theoretical and methodological basis. According to AF Losev, socialism is a society where material production is absolutized. Under socialism, a person is understood only as part of a labor collective, which is a collective personality and it is precisely the entity which gives the status of the personality to an individual. Through the name of the collective, the latter is integrated into social reality, communicates with other collectives and the state. The article classifies the names of collectives, suggests that such a phenomenon represented the secularization of the tradition of naming churches in Russian Orthodoxy.

The article deals with a little-known text by L.P. Karsavin published in the journal “Baltic Almanac” in May 1928. Despite its apparent brevity, L.P. Karsavin’s text “On the Actor and the Theatre” absorbed many biographical circumstances of the author’s biography, public discussions that determined Karsavin’s views and assessments of spectacular art, literature, and radical changes in contemporary culture. The study of those largely details and connections, direct and hidden hints given in the article, allows us to better understand the author’s philosophical views and the peculiarities of his personality.

The appendix contains a commented republication of the Karsavinian article.

The article analyzes the early stages of the theory of the French garden style forerunning the world-famous treatise “Theory and Practice of Gardening” (1709). It considers the process of transitioning from practical instructions to the theory of good proportions and new elements of the garden (Charles Etienne, “Agriculture and the rural house”, 1564), as well as the creation of the image of an exemplary “French” garden (Olivier de Serres, “Theater of agriculture and field care”, 1600). The most important stage in the development of the theory was the “Treatise on gardening, in accordance with the rules of nature and art» by the caretaker of the royal gardens, Jacques Jacques Boysseau de la Barodrie (1638). The expressive means of French garden art were formulated here, such as the garden parterre, the forms of its ornamental filling, green architecture, elongated proportions of the garden and the dynamics of impressions. The author’s strict requirements for the education of a gardener were likely to affect the career of Andre Lenotre, who graduated from the Academy of Arts and embodied the principles of the “Treatise” in his works.

The focus of the study is on the dynamics of vase forms characteristic of the early phase of the Vincennes-Sèvres porcelain manufactory (or Royal manufactory). The article shows that the porcelain vases produced by that manufacturer in the first fifteen years of production are a vivid illustration of the late French Rococo, its subsequent transformation and transition to Neoclassicism. The emphasis of the research is based on the analysis of the evolution in the form and color characteristic of the early vase art of Vincennes-Sèvres (1749–1764). The research is conducted in a broad cultural background: the movement of style from the late Rococo through the so-called “Greek taste” (goût grec) to Neoclassicism, correlating with the development of scientific art history, as well as with political events, such as the Seven Years’ War, that shaped the history of France. The outcome of the study is the following conclusion. The first vases of Vincennes-Sèvres – low-functional, complex and supercomplex forms, carrying more artistic than utilitarian value, in the middle of the 18th century not only had the status of a cultural icon, but were nothing less than art objects. The fascination with such vases may be characterized as vasomania, a special kind of fashion, characteristic of the whole 18th century.

In 1924 the artist Yuri Rozhkov created a series of illustrations for Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem To the workers of Kursk who mined the first ore, dedicated to the discovery of iron ore in the area of the Kursk magnetic anomaly. Rozhkov’s illustrations, made using the technique of photomontage, are among the earliest examples of turning to such technique, which played a key role in the development of avant-garde art in the 1920s. However, they did not become widely known, unlike, for example, the works of Klutsis and especially Rodchenko, whose photomontages for Mayakovsky’s poem About That (1923) served as the source and prototype of Rozhkov’s photomontages. But Workers of Kursk is an original and and yet characteristic of its time work, in which the key ideas of the Soviet avant-garde were embodied. The main one is a polemic against the restoration tendencies, expressed in support of traditional types and genres of art, in particular the sculptural monument. Rozhkov, following Mayakovsky, contrasts it with the idea of a “temporary monument”, not separated from the process of socialist construction. The idea corresponds to the image of a split, kaleidoscopic world, in creating which the artist uses some principles of the early avant-garde, including the technique of “words in freedom” by Marinetti. Unlike Rodchenko, he includes the full text of the poem in his illustrations, thereby blurring the boundaries between word and image.

The article analyzes the film “Variations on a Pomegranate” (1975) by Spanish film director and a pioneer of media art J. Val del Omar. It is shown how film images are created using augmented reality technology based on projections (with help of analog-mechanical tools without computer technologies). The film director projected anthropomorphic images onto pomegranate fruits and increased the dramatic impact of the film with lighting effects. Thereby he created a critical mass of historical and mythological associations connected with the city of Granada, and also visualized the folklore character “duende”. It is substantiated that the specific mystical materialism of images in the film by J. Val del Omar is due to the film director’s use of visual and conceptual dominants of the artistic tradition in the still life genre of the Spanish Golden Age.

Y. Lanthimos’s Poor Things combines a thriller about a mad scientist and a palliata-inspired comedy of swaps. It is proved that apart from the general biopunk aesthetics, the assembly of the movie is carried out for the first time by this director through the introduction of the retcon (retroactive continuity) principle. At each new turn of the plot we encounter figurative thinking, varying the teachings of psychoanalysis about the afterwardsness (Nachträglichkeit), sustainability. Comic motifs are embedded in a situation of substituted consciousness, where the sea is realized as enclosed and the house as an open space. The heroine’s corporeality in the Parisian episodes turns out to be the most universal figure of her being; she has already learned to lock and unlock her own body, thanks to which she can restart all the plots, realizing the retroactivity of her very being. The heroine acts as an ideal magical guest, reorganizing also the posthumous existence of her creator. Lanthimos creates a new type of thriller as a philosophy of hospitality, exposed through the retroactive application of comedic techniques.

The new retro-futuristic fantasy by Yorgas Lanthimos can be perceived as an involuntary film adaptation of N.G. Chernyshevsky’s novel “What is to be done”. The main images, ideological, emotionally utopian and feminist background of the novel may well be the key to revealing the structures and basic images of the film. Besides single cases of convergence of images and conflicts (technologically oriented society and faith in progress, a woman as the center of a new, just society, rejection of the idea of “lifelong monogamy”, liberation from the irrational limitations of a “polite society”), both artworks show much in common in the teleological organization of the narrative. In the film finale the figure of God (both the name and the allusion towards the Creator) is replaced by humans who create their own kind, along with the “Kingdom of God” on earth. It can be assumed that the construction of a narrative within the framework of a retro utopia with a feminist bias will, to a greater or lesser extent, be based on the framework of the canonical novel “What is to be done?”.

The article deals with a review of the presentations of the annual scientific Alyoshin Conference (“Alyoshinskie Chtenya”), focusing on the theme “World, Language, Reality”. More than 80 scientists from different countries (Russia, Kazakhstan, Poland, Australia) and different scientific specialties – philosophers, philologists, religion scholars, cultural scholars – took part in it, as the topic itself already implied interdisciplinary discussion. The plenary session of the conference outlined the most important approaches to the topic consideration. They were developed in the work of the sections: “Phenomenology and <Social> Reality. Languages of Description”, “Sacred and Sacral in Modern Society”, “Russian Philosophy and Platonism. Language and Reality”, “Languages of Description and Discursive Practices”, “Literature, Art Process and Virtual Reality”.

The question of philosophical language – both the language of philosophy in general and the language of a particular philosophical school or even a particular author –became one of the key issues of the conference.