This training manual is addressed to law students, learning English for professional purposes.

The book consists of two parts:

Part 1 – Legal Listening

The main aim of the materials of the 1st part is teaching students listening to texts on legal topics in English. The materials are supplied with the recording of texts to practice in-class listening (on CD), they also contain communicative tasks and key answers as well as scripts. The texts cover the following themes: The Practice of Law, Company Law, Contract Law and Employment Law.

Part 2 - Legal Reading is directed to teaching students different kinds of reading based on authentic legal texts.

The texts of all the sections cover the following topics: Company Law, Contract Law, Family Law.

Both parts of the manual envisage exercises for both  inclass  and out-of- class work, including the use of the Internet.

The book includes Progress tests with answers.

This study examined perfectionism as a multidimensional personality factor which influences foreign language learning and classroom anxiety. Hierarchical regression analyses confirmed that the two dimensions of perfectionism, adaptive and maladaptive, relate to Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA) differently. After controlling for the effects of general anxiety, perceptions of academic performance, and self-reported English fluency, perfectionistic discrepancy (maladaptive aspect) was a significant predictor of FLCA; perfectionistic standards (adaptive aspect) was not. Results indicated that this multidimensional nature of perfectionism affects Russian students in the context of foreign language classroom anxiety. Implications regarding the prevention and intervention of maladaptive perfectionism among students are discussed, as well as directions for future studies. These findings are important for teachers, students, and experts who may interact with FLCA and perfectionism as well as those who may personally experience it. The possible strategies to reduce anxiety could include discussing unrealistic beliefs and expectations with reference to foreign language learning, accepting mistakes as an integral part of foreign language learning as well as coaching.

The two most important processes influencing new cultural trends in today’s Russia are the state’s annexation of transgression and the transformation of social norms. In Russia’s public space, speakers representing different official or semi- official institutions make aggressive statements and defy accepted norms of public communication. They behave as if they perform the roles of “official holy fools”. Thus, the state “annexes” the right of mediatized public transgression characteristic of contemporary art. State actors are described in the article as “active conform- ists” embodying the expectations and desires of TV-watching “passive conformists”. Accordingly, strategies of heroic resistance in art and literature cease to be relevant for shaping the new wave of Russia’s aesthetic nonconformism. The article discusses alternative scenarios and discourses emerging in contemporary art and literature as formative for the new type of nonconformity.

This article presents a review of a conference Debt: 5000 Years and Counting that took place at the University of Birmingham (Birmingham Research Institute for History and Cultures) on June 8–9, 2018. The conference was based on the recent influential book Debt: The First Five Thousand Years by David Graeber. The conference gathered representatives from all social sciences to discuss the understudied topic of history and ideology of debt. The review contains references to several papers discussed at the conference to give an idea of the approaches used in one way or another in many of the papers. The papers discussed in the review were devoted to the boost of micro-credit in Latvia after the 2008 global financial crisis, the ideology of trapped equity that led to this crisis, the attempt to resolve confusion between the view that debts are to be repaid and the view that profiting from lending is evil, credit in the Islamic Caliphate in the 7th to 10th centuries, the long durée of public debt since the Middle Ages to Early Modern times, and the royal debts in England in the middle of the 16th century. The conference was interesting not only because of the importance of the subject but also because of the originality of the format which helped make the event less hierarchical and less dominated by the academic elite. In addition, one of the aims of the conference was to combine academic and activist approaches. Among the participants there were a few activists. This experience is also described in the review.

The paper explores how traditional storytelling adapts to the digital environment andadopts/assimilates it.  This study is based on a corpus of fourteen semi-structured in-depth interviews of researchers and performers with an expertise in seven differentstorytelling   traditions.   Therefore,   we   present   a   new   typology   of   traditional storytellers and depict their Internet/New Media usage specifics.

Claiming that that the history of the London-based Strand Magazine started with Russian literature would be understandably far-fetched but not extravagantly misleading: the episode with the notorious short novel The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy infamously led to the rift between the enfant terrible W.T. Stead and the future founder of the Strand George Newnes. The deal-breaking disapproval of Tolstoy’s scandalous opus did not, however, result in Newnes’ utter rejection of Russian literature. His new magazine, established shortly after the conflict, was neither straightforwardly Russophile nor openly or implicitly Russophobic unlike many of the periodicals enchafed by the turbulent “Tournament of Shadows”. At the early stages of its existence, the newly founded magazine demonstrated an explicit predilection towards translated rather than domestic fiction, with translations from Russian occupying an important niche among other national literatures. While favouring the renowned, canon-approved authors, such as Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, the early Strand also displayed a tendency to select the works which could be read as adventure or “healthfully” sensational stories thus conforming to the magazine’s genre policies (predominantly gothic Queen of Spades, multigenred Belkin Tales, nocturne-flavoured Tamagne from A Hero of Our Time). The texts were prefaced by introductory notes, enticing yet unconcerned with factual accuracy (e.g., Lermontov was described as a “fair-haired” man with “large blue eyes”). The notes attempted to both “domesticate” the selected authors and retain the international couleur locale while finding suitable English counterparts for the writers of choice (“Russian Othello”, “Byron of North”). The paper will trace the ever-evolving role of Russian fiction in the magazine’s history, from the aforementioned early instances to the peculiar Edwardian and post-Edwardian cases when the translations became more eclectic in nature, ranging from Ivan Turgenev’s ghost story and Tolstoy’s moralistic pieces to the middlebrow stories by Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko and a modernist oeuvre by Leonid(as) Andreev. The paper intends to outline the strategies of selecting the “Russian material” for the lower middle class readers not only in the context of the Strand’s editorial policies but also as a part of the “middlebrow” Anglo-Russian cultural transfer mechanisms.

 

To what extent does science in authoritarian societies initiate practices of democracy and freedom? This article provides an overview of the issue of academic rights and freedoms as an integral part of the academic ethos in the USSR and the Russian Federation and concludes that there has been a paradoxical shift in the relative extent of rights and freedoms in wider society vs. the academic world. In this author’s opinion, academic proto-freedom existed in the USSR as a component of the privileged position held by a segment of the academic community and that, therefore, the latter experienced a degree of freedom that was greater than that afforded by Soviet society in general. The situation evened out in the late 80's and early 90's and finally, with the attack of authoritarianism against the remaining academic autonomy of Russian universities in the 2000s, resulted in fewer freedoms within academia compared to society as a whole.

This is a study of the development of video culture in Russia in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet eras through in-depth interviewing. There has been a cult audience in Russia, although without the discursive framework which has shaped Western cult cinema (i.e. participants didn’t self-identify as cultists): a phenomenon this article terms ‘analytical cult’. Not all movies that achieved cult status outside Russia have become cult in this national context, and vice versa: there are movies treated as cult in Russia that have never been positioned as such outside the country. Some forms of cultism in Russia also have no direct analogues in their Western cult counterparts due to nationally specific means of access to cinematic distribution and production, namely video parlours and authored voiceovers. These have developed into cult forms in their own right. Therefore, although cult cinema can possess a transnational currency, it can also be reshaped in cross-cultural transitions. This kind of transnational cult demonstrates that its participatory practices may not be self-reflexively positioned as ‘cult’ by audiences/marketers/film-makers.

This article attempts to show that two Chinese tales composed in the ninth century belong to tale type ATU 410. They do not only share main plot elements of ATU 410, but some very specific motifs, too. The authors spent many years in Sichuan which is historically a border region of China. This provided them with the opportunity to come into contact with foreigners and to read texts influenced by Western culture. Later the story was more and more adapted to conform to local traditional texts about the revival of ghostly brides and therefore lost the characteristic features of the tale type.

The present study is aimed at the research of the set of the Venetian lettere ducali of the fourteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries and the preparation of their full-text publication. Due to their diplomatic and paleographic characteristics, the lettere ducali stored in St. Petersburg are an example of a fairly well-developed chancery production, despite the chancery still being in the process of institutionalization at that point. At the same time, the lettere ducali are among the most widespread varieties of the documents issued by the Venetian Doges at that time. In this regard, the clarification of the criteria of authenticity and attributive features of these letters is the most urgent purpose of the project, given that the systematic publication and sequential study of the lettere ducali of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries are yet to be done in the future. As regards the medieval and early modern chancery activity in the Venetian Republic, only the period up to the thirteenth century has been studied well enough; as for the later times, only minor sets of the authentic lettere ducali have been published. The documents in question from the manuscript collection of N.P. Likhachev (1862-1936), Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, have never been published, and went almost unnoticed in the scholarly discourse. The publication of these documents will allow the medievalists the study of the previously unknown sources. The extensive study of the diplomatic and paleographic peculiarities of the letters, their description and visualization, their attribution and the transcription of the notes of the scribes will provide the researchers of the given period with the tools of the historical criticism of this variety of documents. The preliminary outcomes of the research and the deep analysis of certain case studies found in the manuscripts are to be presented as scholarly articles in double-blind peer-reviewed journals, as well as in conference proceedings.

The present study is devoted to the research into a set of the Venetian lettere ducali to the Marquises d’Este of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries collected by N.P. Likhachev (1862-1936), Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, stored in the Western European section of the Saint Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the preparation of their full-text critical publication. The lettere ducali are an excellent source to study the Serenissima and its continental and overseas domains. The source material of the Venetian lettere ducali have long and not without reason been considered and actively investigated by researchers as one of the most important sources on the economic, social, political, legal, environmental, cultural, and ethnic history of Venice. In addition, Venetian sources often provide researchers with important material on the history of other states of the Italian Peninsula, including, in our case, the domains of d’Este. This explains the exceptional importance of studying lettere ducali as the most important source on the history of the Western European Middle Ages and early modern times. This study revealed historical material on the specific cities and regions of Italy (Venice, Treviso, Ferrara, Verona, Padua, the Po Delta), as well as the Venetian colonies in the Mediterranean (Crete, Cyprus) and the Adriatic (Shkodra, Dalmatian Coast), history of international relations, history of economic relations, history of everyday life, history of state institutions and international law, history of a medieval document, history of Latin writing.