The paper analyses the formal features of the characters of Oresteia in Greek tragedy. The protagonists and the minor characters are compared, for which the rhythmical liveliness and variability of the personages’ utterances, the length and number of utterances, and the number of dialogue verses in the metrical repertoire of the corresponding personage are taken into account. The analysis revealed that the data of Sophocles and Euripides are more close to each other both in the respect of general “liveliness” and the “liveliness” of characters’ utterances. Certain differences in the metrics and rhythmics of the main and minor characters’ verses become most obvious when we compare Electra’s part with minor characters (e. g., in Electra’s part there is always the biggest proportion of lyrical parts, more unstandard settlements, more verses with splits than any other character). The index of liveliness of Electra’s part is almost the same in all the authors. Although the same tendencies in Orestes are more schematical, the metrics and rhythmics of his utterances are rather similar to those of Electra. Thus, in respect of the proportion of lyrical verses, he always comes second after Electra; he also has quite many split verses. The parts of minor characters are usually made up entirely of iambic trimesters, the rhythmical variety of their speeches is higher than average, but there are no splits in their parts (except for Aegisthus). However, there are characters which parts have unstandard rhythm, e.g., the pedagogue in Sophocles or Chrysothemis, who is a contrast to Electra by her nature as well as her rhythmics. The contrast with other minor characters is even bigger. Clytaemnestra’s part is both rhythmically and metrically intermediate: inAeschylus her utterances consist entirely of iambic trimeters, but in Sophocles and Euripides she pronounces also a couple of lyrical verses. There are alsosome splits in her verses which usually do not occur in minor persons.

This article attempts to analyse Russian postmodernist poetics, proceeding from the concept of the “trans-semiotic stairs”, as presented by J. Faryno for describing the avant-garde. Examples from various texts are used to demonstrate how postmodernist texts contain divergent processes: the culturally specific and unique dissolves in tautology, meaningful entireties are dispersed into atomized empty particles. The significant teleological model of the avant-garde ceases to function here. A play by J. Brodsky, Marble, is examined on this background, as well as the position of the author that differs from the “postmodernist” context.

Are pictures signs? That pictures are signs is evident in the case of pictures that “represent”, but is not “representation” a synonym of “sign”, and if so, can non-representational paintings be considered signs? Some semioticians have declared that such pictures cannot be signs because they have no referent, and in phenomenology the opinion prevails that they are not signs because they are phenomena sui generis. The present approach follows C. S. Peirce’s semiotics: representational and non-representational pictures and even mental pictures are signs. How and why pictures without a referent can nevertheless be defined as signs is examined on the basis of examples of monochrome paintings and historical maps that show non-existing or imaginary territories. The focus of attention is on their semiotic object and, in the case of non-representational paintings, on their interpretation as genuine icons, not in the sense of signs that represent most accurately, but in the sense of signs that represent nothing but themselves, i.e., self-referential signs.

Diagnostics of a mental disorder completely bases on an estimation of patient’s behaviour, verbal behaviour being the most important. The behaviour, in turn, is ruled by a situation expressed as a system of signs. Perception of a situation could be seen as a function, which depends on the context resulting from the previous situations, structuring personal world. So the world is not given — it is being formed while the person is in action. We argue that distinctive features of behaviour, including its abnormal variants, can be explained not in categories of characters and diseases but in terms of situations taking place in individual worlds. The situation in which a person perceives himself is not simply a site in a three-dimensional space at a certain moment, but a part of the world and an episode of his life. Like a text composed of words, individual world is composed of situations. Each of them needs certain context to cope with ambiguity. This context is induced by the world as a whole. And the world, in turn, is presented as a chain of situations. If the context cannot help to interpret a situation adequately, uncertainty can be eliminated by actions clarifying a situation, which is changed in a predictable way. Thus, purposeful activity, skills to make predictions and corrections of one’s own actions are crucial. Weakness of any of them inevitably leads to the distortion of the presentation of the world, to wrongevaluation of situations and, as a result, to inadequate actions that finally reduce the activity as being ineffective. Thus, the lack of activity becomes the key factor in the development of disorder, being simultaneously its cause and effect. In periods of insufficient activity conditions for violated (and violating) sign processing arise. Possible variants of sign malfunction are: oligosemia (reduction of the number of perceivable signs), hyposemia (decrease of significance of signs), hypersemia (increase of significance of some signs at the expense of others), ambisemia (uncertainty of sign, when situation remains unclear), cryptosemia (recognition of signs not obvious for other observers), and parasemia (perverted interpretation of signs influenced by a false context).

Maria Goltsman. On some graphic regularities of perception in painting and dance: Mnemonic form of dance. The present article handles some problems of the mechanisms of visual perception in painting and classical ballet. It proceeds from the assumption that the interaction between those arts is based on the similarity of their formal languages. The main attention focuses on the questions of how and why does the classical ballet use the code of painting? The interaction between pictorial art and ballet occurs through the theatre, which is considered to be a picture coming alive in European tradition. This principle is taken here as a main method of analysis of ballet art and it is used in two ways. The first handles a problem of composition of a ballet as a theatrical performance. The second analyses the movement itself — the language of the choreography as such. The last part of the article contains the answer to the question — why does the ballet need such aspects of pictorial code as frontal composition of a picture coming alive, memory photo, multiplication of the similar images and repeating movements. Dance is dynamic, picture is stable. To represent a movement, the painting uses the rhythm and visual repeating of lines and contours. It helps to construct an illusion of motion and brings the temporal aspect into a static piece of art. Whereas different stops, poses and fixations in ballet help it to visualize the movement, to capture the space. This is one of the ways for ballet to leave its trace in space as much as in the memory of the spectators, to become fixed in space, to prevent the dispersion of dance in the thin air and to surmount in such a way the ephemera characteristic of it.

The present paper is devoted to the relation between changing historical identity of Russian Formalists in the second half of the 1920s and their individual evolution — as writers, members of society, figures of culture. Formalists with their aggressive inclination to modernity are opposed here to structuralists, the bearers of a conservative, traditional ideology (relating to the idea of Revolution). It could be explained by the specific “romantic” identity of Russian Formalists whose purpose was to appropriate cultural values renamed and renewed by their revolutionary theory. As a revolutionary ideology, formalism was imported from the West. But the Stalinist “Renaissance” made the idea of Revolution both in mind and society senseless at the end of the 1920s. That is why Russian Formalism lost its mainstream positions and began to work out a new, adapted form of intellectual resistance (private life, domestic literature) in the next decade.

The metaphor of parasites or parasitism has dominated literary critical discourse since the 1970s, prominent examples being Michel Serres in France and J. Hillis Miller in America. In their writings the relationship between text and paratext, literature and criticism, is often likened to that between host and parasite, and can be therefore deconstructed. Their writings, along with those by Derrida, Barthes, and Thom, seem to be suggesting the possibility of a semiotics of parasitism. Unfortunately, none of these writers has drawn enough on the biological foundation of parasitism. Curiously, even in biology, parasitism is already a metaphor through which the signified of an ecological phenomenon involving two organisms is expressed by the signifier of “[eating] food at another’s [side] table”. This paper will make some preliminary remarks on semiotics of parasitism, based on the notions of Umwelt (Jakob von Uexküll) and structural coupling (Maturana and Varela). It will look into the phenomenon of co-evolutionary process in community ecology. With reference to empirical history, the project will briefly surveythe literary and medical praxis of the 17th century England where large number of creative writings referred to the phenomenon of parasitism, which was deeply embedded in religious practice (e.g., the Eucharist) and political life (e.g., the courtier ecology in monarchy) of the times. Finally, it will touch upon the possible ‘parasitic’ relationship between language and biology.

At present the theory of Russian Formalism becomes actual once again owing to the rapid development of cognitive science. Aesthetic theories recently put forward within the framework of cognitive science turned out to be consonant with the Formalist’s views on the general principles of artistic activity. In my paper I argue that (1) the theory of Russian Formalism contains a number of methodological assumptions that are close to a cognitive approach; (2) some of the main principles of the Formalist theory (e.g., “elimination of automatism of perception” or “the dominant”) permit the reformulation into cognitive terms; (3) such reformulation is not only possible, but useful because it makes the theory more powerful for explanation of the artistic phenomena. The findings from the new field of cognitive science not only prove some Formalist theses, but deepen and specify them as well.