Gothic Taste and Russian Culture of the 18th Century

This project was an experiment in widening the traditional borders of study in the field and looking at the phenomenon of Gothic taste in many genres and kinds of art. The Gothic taste was a major element in the cultural image of the Enlightenment both in western Europe and in Russia. It was an essential component in the world outlook of an educated person and without studying this phenomenon it is impossible to fully understand the thinking of artistic professionals, amateurs and users in Russian society in the 18th century. Mr. Khatchatourov first analysed the reasons for the importance of Gothic taste in the culture of the European Enlightenment and then studied its linguistic and lexicographic evolution in 18th century Russian culture. He sought to determine the semantic context which actively formed the human mind set in the Enlightenment, including potential users and producers of articles in the Gothic taste. He then looked at the process of absorption of this concept by those forms of art which express it most strongly, in particular architecture and the theatre. His study was based on a comprehensive historical and culturological study using a wide range of sources, a formal stylistic method approach considering the interaction of non-classical styles of the Enlightenment with the dominant classicism, and an iconographic approach which revealed the essential aspects in a new image synthesis of the culture of the Enlightenment.

A Comparative Study of English Word Order Acquisition by Elementary and Secondary School Pupils - Native Speakers of Serbian and Hungarian

Kitic investigated the phenomenon of English word order acquisition by Serbian and Hungarian speakers, examining both the theoretical and empirical aspects of this phenomenon. She began by looking at language learning and language acquisition, viewing word order acquisition in the context of relevant linguistic and psycholinguistic knowledge. The main hypothesis of her empirical investigation was that the majority of word order mistakes in the language production of Serbian and Hungarian speakers of English is due to mother tongue interference. Three supporting hypotheses were introduced to specify the phenomenon of interference in its correlation to (1) language proficiency, (2) sentence patterns, and (3) optional adverbials. The conclusions were based on error analysis of 9280 sentences of 464 elementary and high school learners. The results showed that a learner's level of proficiency seems to be a relevant factor in mother tongue interference as this decreases with increased proficiency. Word order errors are however fossilised at the highest levels. The causes of interference errors, which increase with the number of sentence elements, are either absent sentence patterns or similar ones. In the case of adverbials, word order errors have two forms: interrelation (with canonical elements) and mixed adverbials.

Liberal Nationalism: A Historical and Critical Analysis of Conceptions

At the end of the 20th century we live in a pluralist world in which national and ethnic identities play an appreciable role, sometimes provoking serious conflicts. Nationalist values seem to pose a serious challenge to liberal ones, particularly in the post-communist countries. Malinova asked whether liberalism must necessarily be contrasted with nationalism. Although nationalist issues has never been a major concern for liberal thinkers, in many countries they have had to take such issues into consideration and a form of 'liberalism nationalism' has its place in the history of political ideas. Some of the thinkers who tried to develop such an idea were liberals in the strict sense of the word and others were not, but all of them tried to elaborate a concept of nationalism that respected the rights of individuals and precluded discrimination on ethnic grounds. Malinova studied the history of the conceptualisation of nations and nationalism in the writings, of J.S. Mill, J.E.E. Acton, G. Mazzini, V. Soloviev, B. Chicherin, P. Struve, P. Miljoukov and T.G. Masaryk. Although it cannot be said that these theories form a coherent tradition, certain common elements of the different approaches can be identified. Malinova analysed the way that liberal nationalists interpreted the phenomenon of the nation and its rights in different historical contexts, reviewed the structure of their arguments and tried to evaluate this theoretical experience from the perspective of the contemporary debate on the problems of liberal nationalism and multiculturalism and recent debates on 'the national idea' in Russia.

Civil Society and Political Parties in the Period of Transition

The major aim of Mr. Marada's project was to investigate the role of political parties on the one hand, and various institutional forms of civil society on the other, in the process of establishing mechanisms of political decision-making and policy-formation in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, after November 1989. Mr. Marada wanted to examine what consequences the interplay and tensions between political parties and institutions of civil society had on the status and practical understanding of citizenship and civil society. At the beginning of his research Mr. Marada found that, while the sphere of the political was relatively clearly defined, the phenomenon of civil society required a conceptual clarification. He devoted a great deal of time to analysing the emergence, development, and disintegration of Civic Forum as the major agent of the regime change and subsequent political reforms. Alongside this analysis is a commentary on Czech society in general, drawing on established research to show how, as yet, a kind of civic incompetence reigns within the country, and how this situation has its roots in the belief, promoted by politicians themselves, that politics is an activity for experts only. The final outcome of his research took the form of a series of articles, in English, totalling 40 pages.

Socio-Epidemiological Aspects of Suicide in Sarajevo from 1992-1995

The project investigated the phenomenon of suicide in war-encircled Sarajevo, where the population was uninterruptedly exposed for four years to direct danger of life from constant shelling and sniper fire, as well as from the lack of essential food items, energy sources and water. It showed that in the pre-war peacetime year of 1991 the suicide rate was 8.36, which was almost 100% less than that in the first post-war peacetime year of 1996, when 16.13 suicides were recorded per 100,000 citizens. The first wartime year, 1992, was characterised by a fall in the number of suicides by almost 40% of the 1991 figure. It is indicative that not a single suicide was registered during the six months from May to October of that first wartime year. In 1993 there was 96.29% increase on 1992, with a total of 53 suicides, showing that the initial shock of danger to one's life from others had passed and that statistics on suicide had returned to "normal". In the following year, 1994, 47 suicides were recorded, and in 1995 the figure was 49. Data from the first post-war peacetime year clearly shows that the human tragedy of taking one's own life has continued, with the number of suicides increasing steadily, especially among demobilised soldiers ranging in age from 30 to 40. Most of them ended their lives by activating a bomb or other explosive device, choosing the place carefully so as to avoid any possible risk to other lives during the act of taking their own.

Resocialization of the Street Children

This project studied the phenomenon of street children through various forms of action dealing with them. The target group included 100 children who frequented the Pygmalion and Open House day centres in Bucharest. On the basis of this sample it was possible to establish the main problems of the street children: reasons for appearance, age on the street, origin, family size, attitude towards parents, reasons for street life, consumption of toxic substances, reasons for detention by the police, main health problems, needs and wishes. The work in Bucharest was supplemented by visits elsewhere in Romania and abroad which provided a breadth of understanding and knowledge of the specific profile of street children, of the complexity of their problems and of their prospects. A comparison of the causes of the phenomenon, and study of some projects and intervention programmes both from Romania and abroad provided the basis for a proposed strategy for combatting the problem. The practical activities on the project included continuing counselling and informative and education activities with the children in order to motivate them to change their life. Further mediation was aimed at changing the hostile approach of the public opinion and some people in authority towards these children. The experiments with schooling and professional resocialisation of the street children provided clear evidence of the possibility of reintroducing them into the social framework but this will require systems and mechanisms specially developed to achieve this.