The article is written in response to the recent publication in the “Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta. Series 8. Istoriya” by A.L. Rastorguev, specialist in medieval art, about Roland Recht’s Lecroire et le voir. L’art des cathédrales. XIIe–XVe siècle and its Russian translation. His “reflections” are the most detailed and scrupulous review of Recht’s book since its publication in 1999. Rastorguev severely criticizes both the book and its Russian translation. He touches upon a whole range of issues in the history of medieval art, including theoretical ones. Since this review, even if belated, questions the scientific character of the book, and at the same time the competence of its author and translator, the latter found it necessary to respond to most of the comments made in the review. Many of them are quite justified. The translation really has inaccuracies, some words are missing in it, and the reviewer carefully collated it with the original text. However, a good part of the remarks is the subject of academic debates and some of them are based on the reviewer’s preferences and taste. They cannot be regarded as the final truth and, therefore, may not serve as an argument for total condemnation of the book and its translation. The reviewer, who himself makes regrettable mistakes, does not offer any positive program, and some of his critical remarks concerning the book and its translation are completely groundless. A whole series of doubts raised by A.L. Rastorguev is related to pain points of art history, and this is precisely what makes Recht’s book an event. The polemic surrounding it speaks for itself. This response offers both an apology of the French book and an attempt at rehabilitating its Russian translation.

Michelangelo di Pietro Membrini (1460–1525) was a painter of the late Quattrocento, who collaborated with Bernardino Pinturicchio in Rome in the 1480s, and worked in Lucca at the turn of the 15th–16th centuries, when he became one of the most prominent figures of the local school of painting. During this period, the Lucchese painting was strongly infl uenced by the Florentine art of the 1470s–1480s: the compositional schemes of Verrocchio and Lorenzo di Credi, the balanced and elegant style of Ghirlandaio, the lyrical manner of the young Filippino Lippi. Lucca appears to demonstrate an amazing mixture of styles of various Florentine artists who left their works to the city. In terms of style, Michelangelo di Pietro is no exception, albeit he is distinguished by a specific interest in the decorative language in the antique taste and which was mastered by him in Rome, while he worked in the workshop of Bernardino Pinturicchio. The antique motifs extensively used by Michelangelo di Pietro in his mature religious paintings amount to a rather “standard” set of elements characteristic of eclectic masters and have a predominantly decorative rather than semantic function: these are architectural elements ornamented in a classical manner, music stands, candelabra and images of fantastic creatures. However, the iconography and phantasmagoric interpretation of these motifs, as well as the variety of their sources indicate that he was a fully-fledged artist in the adaptation of the classical heritage, which he could study in the originals during his sojourn in Rome. Despite the great similarity in the interpretation of the form, it is by no means determined by the influence of the artists who worked in Lucca, the acknowledged masters of all’antica decoration Amico Aspertini and Filippino Lippi. They are more similar to Michelangelo di Pietro in their interest in the Dutch artistic tradition. Neither can it be reduced to the infl uence of the leader of the Lucchese school of painting, Matteo Civitali, who was an ardent classicalist. It rather betrays a fondness for some of the artistic solutions which Michelangelo di Pietro borrowed in his Roman years from the monumental painting of Pinturicchio.

Jules Michelet, whose texts are distinguished by a pronounced authorialism, determined many key milestones in the scientific biography of Roland Barthes, who declared “the death of the author” as a scholarly concept. The analysis of Barthes’s texts gives grounds to find traces of the author’s presence, though in a completely different way than in Michelet’s works. These similarities and diff erences between the French semiotician and the French historian become more evident if we imagine that Barthes made the full circle in his perception of the stylistics of Michelet’s historical works. At the beginning of his career, Barthes enthusiastically welcomed Michelet’s clearly expressed and even deliberately demonstrative authorial position. He saw Michelet not as an academic scholar, but as an author of a passionate and psychologically intense narrative. In Barthes’s thought, this was the manner best suited to the description of the past. The high degree of emotionality and extreme subjectivity of evaluations formed a rich set of interpretations. Barthes regarded this methodology as the most fundamental approach to the historical material. The next step in his perception of Michelet was done after the emergence of the concept of “the death of the author”. He saw Michelet’s views and style as archaic, outmoded and inadequate to the modern discourse. However, this unexpectedly harsh attitude to his former idol is not as straightforward and unequivocal for Barthes as it might seem at first glance. By stating Michelet’s irrelevance, Barthes simultaneously rediscovers him for the era of new humanities knowledge, which is proclaimed within the framework of the structuralist approach in the West. Barthes regards Michelet’s authorialism as one of the possible signifiers interpreting history as a signified. In this case, the richness of historical facts creates virtually limitless space for unlimited semiosis, which was in line with Barthes’s semiology.

The article examines the influence of the Cold War on the general dynamics of the international relations in the second half of the20th and early 21st centuries. It focuses on the reasons of the stability of this form of the conflict interaction between the US and USSR/Russia. Although the historiography extensively deals with the Cold War, the authors emphasizes that a number of issues concerning its fundamental characteristics remain insuffi ciently elucidated. Among them are the criteria for classifying any conflict or event as a manifestation of the Cold War. The article indicates the ways to find answers to some important questions concerning the Cold War, reviews its wide-spread historiographic concepts, and analyzes in its context such fundamental concepts of international relations as “sovereignty” and “security”. The authors offer the reasons for the continuation of the Cold War after the collapse of the USSR and the end of the bloc confrontation. Special attention is paid to the different phases of the Cold War, its transformations and the reasons that led to them. The research also answers the question of what factors influenced the intensity of the Cold War, intensified its heat and at the same time prevented its escalation into a full-scale “hot war” by a wide range of weapons of mass destruction. The authors express their point of view on whether the Cold War should be considered as a dangerous anomaly that threatens the development of the world community, or on the contrary, this global confrontation allowed to transform the conflict tensions between the world’s largest military powers into a relative strategic stability. The article highlights the issues in the history of the Cold War that require further study or conceptual clarifi cation. Particular attention is paid to the currently widespread approach of considering the most signifi cant confrontations of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in terms of the Cold War.

The Second World War was a multidimensional, complex conflict covering several large-scale and narrow armed conflicts which intertwined, interacted and influenced one another. Some of them had already been existent, starting before 1939; some were interstate conflicts that had not previously moved into the phase of armed confrontation, some did not emerge or become the pivot for the system of international relations until September 1939. In connection with this intertwining of conflicts it would appear necessary to clarify the question of the causes of the Second World War. In order to put forward a scientific hypothesis about the causal relationship between the structural specifi city of the system and the conditions for the start of the war, we should discuss, first of all, whether the system had a functional core (ensuring its stability) and what was its state in on the eve of the war. Another set of problems is related to the political poles (centers where power concentrated and the military-political decisions were made) in the system, as well as to the process of polarization (increasing confrontation of interests) of these centers. The proposed concept of the origin of the Second World War and the conditions for its outbreak is based on the thesis that the systemic state that emerged in the period between the two world wars was not multipolar. Polarization (as a process of a sharp divergence of interests within a group of the major powers) led to the emergence of bipolarity as a new macrostructural principle of system organization. At some stage the state of affairs was complemented by the change of the leading power at global level. The state of the system of international relations in 1939 acquired a fundamentally new macrostructural quality — incomplete (or cluster) bipolarity. This feature arose because the process of forming confl icting military-political alliances was far from being completed. Thus, the central complex of theoretical problems posed in the article will involve an assessment of the role that the accumulation of power and the struggle for leadership in this area played in shaping the conditions for the outbreak of World War II.

For the first time in Russian historiography the article uses documents from Lord Beaverbrook’s fund under the title “Moscow Narrative” from the parliamentary archives of Great Britain to demonstrate the activities of Lord Beaverbrook, the head of the British mission at the Moscow supply conference (1941). Lord Beaverbrook was Prime Minister, Winston Churchill’s confidant and was given extensive authority by the British government to propose, negotiate and sign a protocol on the British aid to the USSR. In domestic and even foreign historiography, this topic is relatively little studied, although in the framework of the formation of the anti-Hitler coalition the significance of the Moscow supply conference is extremely considerable. During the conference, the allies made all possible efforts to meet the requirements of the USSR. Of fundamental importance was the statement of Lord Beaverbrook that Britain was ready to forego the portion of American aid equivalent to the one required by Russia. Lord Beaverbrook’s notes show his impressions of Stalin and the changes in the atmosphere of the meetings of the allies, which is not recorded in the offi cial protocol of the Soviet side. According to Beaverbrook, when the British and Americans presented to Stalin a list of possible supplies, they adopted the tactic of a “cumulative effect”, that is, they often made concessions, agreeing to supply certain goods, then included the lists of goods that could not be “conceded” and eventually provided a long list of materials they agreed to supply. As a result, they accomplished their task. The negotiations resulted in satisfaction on the Soviet side, and in an atmosphere, which Lord Beaverbrook called “sun after rain”. During the meetings, a confidential personal contact was established between the allies. Head of the American delegation W.A. Harriman praised Lord Beaverbrook’s work. As a result of the negotiations, the Moscow Protocol was signed, which launched the Lend-Lease Program for the USSR. In the first year of the war, Great Britain handed over to the USSR almost everything that the Americans supplied to it under Lend-Lease, and did its best to fulfi ll its obligations on deliveries to the USSR.

The sharpened attention of Russian society to the World War that broke out in 1914 prompted teachers, scholars and public figures to organize lectures and to explain the causes and nature of the war, its course and consequences. Educational and public organisations, self-government bodies, primarily the Moscow Society of People’s Universities, district and city authorities, were particularly active. When the war began, the procedure of coordinating lectures did not radically change, since the Moscow province was not subject to full military censorship. Nevertheless, the provincial and city governors had the authority to prohibit any lecture, and the wartime circumstances provided a good excuse for it. In the second half of 1914, all lectures of Moscow Society of People’s Universities about the war were banned without explanation. From 1915 onwards, the government’s approach became more flexible: against the background of the protracted war, pro-war propaganda had to be intensified, and lectures could be useful in this regard. In addition, during the first year of the war many lecturers had managed to “prove themselves” by staying within the boundaries of a stipulated program and not touching upon issues of domestic politics. Finally, lectures were oft en permitted, because they were part of charity events. However, the practice of bans and suspicion of the authorities towards civic organisations and public figures continued amidst the loosening of certain restraints. When deciding on public lectures on military subjects, the Moscow authorities took into account the weighty opinion of the military censorship. The approval process could be protracted and end with a controversial decision. Quite often a lecture that was allowed in one place was banned in another. On the whole, the number of lectures and public readings about the war did not match the demands of the population, and the empty information space was filled with negative rumours, which became one of the most important factors in the 1917 revolution.

About two months after the death of Alexander III the first posthumous biography of the Russian emperor was published, first in New York and then in London. Its author was the British journalist Charles Lowe. He did not know the Russian language and was not deeply informed about Russian domestic and foreign policy. This raises the question of the sources used by Lowе. Finding an answer to this question is complicated by the fact that this biography was not an academic study, but a historical and journalistic essay about the recently deceased monarch, so it was extremely incomplete in citing its sources. Hence, the analysis of the range of the biographer’s sources makes it possible to answer the question of which and whose perceptions infl uenced the formation of the commemoration practices of the era and the image of Alexander III in European public opinion. The sources of Lowe’s book are classified in the article into four groups: monographic studies, articles from periodicals, newspaper material, and quotations, which are subdivided into statements made without reference to sources and fragments of official documents (either public or not). After this initial classification, the author examines the distribution of sources according to the specific issues of Lowe’s interest to the biography and personality of Alexander III. Since such issues vary in their impact on the Lowe’s paradigm of commemoration, it is possible to trace the correlation between the tendentiousness of any source and the extent to which it is engaged by the biographer. The author concludes that Alexander III’s biography by Lowe was most infl uenced by the observations and judgements of the Irish writer and journalist Emile Dillon, who wrote about Russia under the pseudonym E.B. Lanin.

The article examines the history of the compilation and special features of the Indian section of the unique collection of clippings compiled by M.D. Khmyrov from domestic and foreign periodicals. Particular attention is paid to the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857–1859, which was widely covered in the domestic press, but had little coverage in the Khmyrov collection. The disproportion is explained by the bibliographer’s greater attention to the events of domestic, rather than foreign history, the biased choice of the press which replenished the collection (its creator preferred rare editions to mass “gazettes”), as well as Khmyrov’s efforts to systematize the entire available array of clippings, rather than accumulate clippings on individual issues. Thus, the collection lacks short articles on India, which are representative of the publications about this region in the press of the mid-19th century. The entire body of materials, including clippings on the East, was supposed to become the basis for the Encyclopedia of the Russian Homeland Studies, which was a grandiose but unfulfi lled project aiming to compile a collection of all kinds of materials related to the history of Russia and its periodicals. Considering the scale of Khmyrov’s plan, collecting short publications was technically impossible, and his collection has practically no information about the military side of the Sepoy Rebellion, as the reports were published in the press in 1857–1859 very often, but in the form of short articles. In addition, the article explores the reports about India stored in the “England” section, as well as the messages not related to Indian topics, but placed by the compiler in the Indian section. On the basis of these materials, the author argues that Khmyrov collected clippings on India mechanically. At the same time, there was a tendency to separate reports on India from reports on Great Britain, although, in the years when the collection was created, domestic and foreign periodicals adopted a completely diff erent approach. News about the major British colony was most oft en published alongside news from the British Isles.

The Tale of the appearance of the Icon of Our Lady of Korsun’ in Yur’yevets Povol’sky is an Early Modern historical and literary monument that has been overlooked in the bibliography. We have found its only manuscript in a Moscow bibliophile collection. It is of great value, largely due to the proximity of the date of its compilation, the late 17th century, to the miraculous events described in it. The Tale of the Appearance of the Korsun’ Icon contributes to the history of the revered objects in Yur’yevets, which became famous in the 17th century. Yur’yevets is a key place on the map of history and literature and is connected to the names of Simon of Yur’yevets, protopope Avvakum and icon painter Kirill Ulanov. The Tale is typologically similar to some other works of the 17th century, and each of them is unique in its own way and closely linked to local hierotopies and histories. The memory of the Yur’yevets icon has been lost and only left a trace in the manuscript in question. The 17th-century wooden church, where the miraculous appearance of the Korsun’ Icon took place in 1695, has not been preserved, but the 19th-century Orthodox church with the same dedication stands on its place. All this allows for a more tangible representation of what is described in the Tale. Yur’yevets is also unique due to the presence here of another especially revered icon of the Mother of God, a replica of a wonderworking Jerusalem icon by Kirill Ulanov, who lived in the neighbouring Krivoyezerskaya desert. Yur’yevets is nowadays devoid of almost all its sacral objects, and the manuscript of the Tale helps to shed light on one of them. The anonymity of this text gives a perspective for further research.