It is beyond dispute that Russian aggression against Ukraine is also discernible at the linguistic level. In the context of military operations, any state engaged in aggressive behaviour will seek to disseminate propaganda that expresses hatred towards the target state. In the aforementioned case, it employs a moderate form of this type of discourse at the official level. Concurrently, a society that is prepared to disseminate hate speech reproduces in other forms. This article presents a comprehensive evaluation of the manifestation of hatred in Russian state media, with a detailed examination of this phenomenon in the comments of ordinary users. The content of these comments is entirely consistent with the key tenets of Russian propaganda, which have long held a prominent position in the country’s information landscape. The objective of this study is to identify the primary thematic domains and linguistic techniques employed in hate speech in Russian media, with illustrative examples provided.

This paper examines the contemporary phenomenon of Ukrainians writing the word “Russia” with a lowercase letter in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This practice has attracted the attention of Ukrainian researchers, who interpret it as a way of expressing emotions such as neglect. However, scholars tend to describe this phenomenon as self-evident without explaining how a change in letter case can convey emotions. A retrospective analysis reveals the evolving function of capital letters in Latin and Cyrillic scripts – from a utilitarian role in text division to the acquisition of their own semantic significance, particularly in the case of proper names. The paper also proposes an interpretation of the lowercase spelling of “russia” using the myth theory developed by Juri Lotman and Boris Uspensky, founders of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School. The study argues that altering a proper name is not simply a manipulation of ordinary language but an appeal to a special layer of mythological language. What appears from a descriptive perspective to be a mere renaming is, from the perspective of myth, a redefinition of the object itself. One object (“Russia”) disappears, and its place is taken not by a modified version, but by a fundamentally different object (“russia”).

The article is devoted to the analysis of French media discourse. Its aim is to reconstruct the image of Russian classical literature in the face of the war in Ukraine. Using the examples of opinion-forming dailies such as “Le Figaro” and “Le Monde”, the contemporary perception of the works of Russian classics Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy is analyzed. The following analysis indicates the need for a revision of the achievements of Russian culture and a critical approach to Russian literature. The media content analysis conducted as part of this study includes two basic types of data: text and visual, published between February 24, 2022 and October 31, 2024. The first type consists of all genre forms: articles, reports, press releases, etc., while the second type consists of visual content, i.e. photographic documentation. For the purposes of the study, the content of articles downloaded from Internet archives was mined. The articles were selected using the keywords: war in Ukraine (Guerre en Ukraine), Russian-Ukrainian war (Guerre russo-ukrainienne), Russian literature (Littérature russe), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Fyodor Dostoïevski), Leo Tolstoy (Lev Tolstoï). In turn, the content analysis allowed us to illustrate the functioning of specific issues. The following elements of media coverage were considered: number of publications, their positioning and surface area, type of publication divided into informational and journalistic genres, type of illustration. Qualitative analysis of the content of the collected material was conducted taking into account the linguistic, cultural and media perspectives.

In 2003 the Georgian and Abkhaz writers Guram Odisharia and Daur Nachkebia published the literary collection Time to live (Vremia zhit’), which includes eighteen authors from the South Caucasus depicting the late 1980s-1990s armed conflicts in Abkhazia, Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. Most of their works were translated into Russian for the book. This volume tried to promote peace and intercultural dialog within the region. However, in doing so it unintentionally illuminated the Russian language’s role as agent of oppression as well as intermediary. Russophonia (writing in Russian outside the Russian Federation) and problems of postcoloniality are central to the collection’s portrayal of the South Caucasus. The article draws on criticism by Gayatri Spivak, Tamar Koplatadze, Naomi Caffee, and others, as well as research conducted in Georgia in 2018 and 2023.

This article examines the emergence of a new Russian émigré community following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It explores several ways of how this wave of emigration constructs its collective identity through cultural practices and discourse, mostly drawing on parallels with historical emigration waves. The research highlights the discursive construction of émigré self-perception, emphasizing its moral and cultural opposition to the political climate in Russia. This opposition also functions as a strategy for self-legitimization and adaptation in host societies. The study investigates the role of literature, media, and institutional structures within the new émigré community, particularly the emergence of a new “tamizdat”. Key arguments include the instrumentalization of historical analogies, the evolution of émigré discourse, and the interplay between ethical, aesthetic, and political dimensions. The article concludes that this new emigration is not merely a demographic and political phenomenon but also a discursive one, shaping narratives of cultural exile.

This article challenges the widespread intuition that Dostoevsky would have become a leading apologist for the current Russia-Ukraine war, and for contemporary Russian imperialism in general. Without downplaying Dostoevsky’s imperialistic and chauvinistic statements as found both in his literary and journalistic works, this article argues that they should be read in light of the more fundamental ethical idea-feelings from which they were derived. The physiognomy of today’s Russian imperialism and the circumstances of the current war make it highly improbable that Dostoevsky would have arrived at similar imperialistic political conclusions. It is more likely that his idea-feelings would have caused him to adopt a radical anti-war stance.

Modern researchers, analyzing the paradigms of global migration processes, focus on the brilliant creative legacy of Fyodor Stepun, a representative of Russian cultural emigration, a religious philosopher, sociologist and publicist, who reflected in his narratives the migration experience of an entire generation. The reasons for the increased demand for Stepun’s philosophical research lie in the philosophical analysis of the existential crisis of a migrating person, which is consonant with today’s realities. Stepun’s thought configurations from the disciplines accompanying philosophy – political science, anthropology, sociology and psychology – are reliably woven into his literary works, the concepts of which strengthen the platform of historiosophical beliefs. Within the framework of the article, the author brings to the forefront a philosophical analysis of the causes of the existential crisis of migrants, as well as meaningful factors in the predictability of migrants’ behavior in the struggle to preserve their national identity in a foreign world.

Anti-war opposition in today’s Russia is often conveyed by encoded graffiti or billboards – a girl was even arrested for showing a blank piece of paper. Everybody, anyway, perfectly understands what is written on a white sheet. To understand the reason we have to look back at the late-soviet times: “Aesopian language” was then so widespread, that people used to catch allegories even where the author did not have the least intention. This can be clearly observed in the history of the Soviet spy-thriller, where in books by the most loyal of authors it is hard not to catch hidden contestant messages: the case of Vasilii Ardamatskii is emblematic. Was “Aesopian language” really a means to make such messages pass behind the eye of the censor? Or, in other words, did the struggle concern the control of the production of messages or rather that of their reception? Soviet power itself often recurred to allegories (what is now commonly called Newspeak): does it mean that the system itself carried the seeds of its own destruction? The opinion exists, on the other hand, that the situation worked in fact for the system: people did not have to believe in what they said, they just had to be taught to lie. If this is true, “Aesopian language” ultimately works for those in power. “Aesopian language” works, as a matter of fact, rather as art does: its concern is a criticism of language, therefore – of the power’s linguistic practices.

The article examines the ideas of Juri Mikhailovich Lotman about the triple opposition: a thing, its image and its designation by word, and develops Lotman’s ideas on the semiotics of still life. The parallels between a pictorial still life and a verbal utterance are shown in the article using several examples (still lives of different time periods – from the Hermitage painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem to the lithographs of Elena Galerkina; poems by Alexander Pushkin, Sasha Chorny, Joseph Brodsky). The objects depicted in the still life seem to imply constancy, reflecting a frozen, unchanging life. This corresponds to beingness, which is conveyed at the verbal level by nominative syntactic constructions. However, the static nature of the image, as well as the elements of the text, does not exclude the emergence of a hidden narrative, inherent in both pictorial and verbal utterance. The time axis and the “implicit verbality” associated with it are especially important here. The emergence of a plot in a still life can be obvious or “optional”, based only on the imagination and associations of the viewer. Discovering the “coherence of the text” and the emergence of a narrative, we come across one interesting feature. The “story” takes place where people, not depicted but assumed, seem latently to appear in the still life. The relationship between the depicted objects is considered against the background of the linguistic category of text coherence, which is reflected in semantic and grammatical agreement.

The purpose of this article is to analyse and interpret Natalia Klyucharyova’s work Wagon Russia (Россия общий вагон, 2007), in which the writer creates an image of state violence against citizens, especially the most vulnerable, i.e. single mothers, injured veterans, the elderly, people belonging to sexual minorities. The description focuses on forms of economic, structural and symbolic violence. These take the form of, for example, the failure of the state and its subordinate institutions to perform the function of caring for the elderly, the lonely, war veterans; excessive bureaucratisation of life; officials avoiding responsibility for the consequences of their decisions; inappropriate distribution of public funds; infringement of individual autonomy; infiltration of selected social groups; isolation and ridicule of those critical of the system. The authorities use media systems and social institutions for their actions, which impose a specific model of functioning on the citizen, fostering victimisation and consolidation of aggressive patterns in the group, causing fear and an increased sense of powerlessness. Violence is therefore becoming the dominant way in which politicians communicate with the public.