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The Ballets Russes piece Liturgie (1915) was rife with radical conceptions of dance, costume design and the aesthetics of performance. But Liturgie never existed in any other than an unfinished, fragmentary form; a concept of a ballet that never came to a premiere. The aesthetic use of religious imagery in Natalia Gončarova’s designs and the gesture-based movement material for Liturgie brought out the transformative potential of performance, but were, ultimately, impossible to become a reality on stage. In the article we use the notion of liminality to scrutinize the complex relation between the sketches and the outline of the choreography as well as the relation between the artistic and religious modes.

Julia Kristeva is Europe’s best-known living humanist thinker, born in Bulgaria in 1941 and residing in Paris since 1965. She is a feminist, psychoanalyst and literary theorist. In the spring of 2018, she was accused of having served as an agent for the Bulgarian security service during her first years in Paris. A special state commission in Bulgaria, with the task of investigating citizens’ connections to the security service during the Communist era, has published her file, which is over four hundred pages long. This article examines this file in order illustrate some of the ways in which East Bloc security services operated during the Communist era. The article also aims to show how the Bulgarian security police of the time portrays Kristeva’s Bulgarian background and her intellectual work. I argue that this file can be seen as a special form of literary creation, applying in my analysis the term coined by the American scholar Cristina Vatulescu, “police aesthetics”.

On March 6, 2014 the final judgment was issued in a strange and for the Russian cultural history very interesting lawsuit. The Russian dancer Pavel Dmitričenko had then admitted that he was behind the sulphuric acid attack on 17 January 2013 against Sergei Filin, artistic director of the Bolšoj Theatre's ballet. He was sentenced to five and a half years in prison. At that time Dmitričenko danced the lead role in the ballet "Ivan the Terrible", with music taken from various compositions of Sergei Prokof’ev and choreography by Jurij Grigorovič. In the article the theme violence in relation to Ivan the Terrible is studied as manifested in different arts and between arts with the focus on the ballet and Repin’s painting “Ivan the terrible and his son”. Texts of Maksimilian Vološin, Selma Lagerlöf and Dmitrij Prigov are also used. The article demonstrates a complicated interrelation between “real” and mediated violence.

The discourses of terrorism. About the terror acts in the Moscow metro in 2010 The article aims at a discourse analysis of the mediation of the terrorist actions in the Moscow metro in March 2010. Using a whole range of materials from newspapers and the web, discourses pertaining to the following words and notions are discovered: war, guilt, victim, conspiracy, moral and memory. The guilt and victimization discourses are by far the most important ones. There is also discovered a similarity – an almost identical language use – between the war discourse of the Russian leaders and the Chechen rebels.