This article analyzes the results and achievements of scholars-humanists who have participated in a state research programme “Economics and Humanitarian Development of Belarusian Society for 2016–2020”, in 2017. The paper presents the most prominent scientific results in the field of archeology, history, economics, philosophy, sociology, linguistics, literature, art history, ethnography, law and pedagogy. The work denotes unparalleled and the most important fundamental studies that reveal rich historical, cultural and spiritual stratum of Belarusian people. Authors also show the right place and the role of social and humanitarian sciences in Belarusian society. The work stresses that the main objective of the research of scholars-humanists is not only the defence of the historical legitimacy of the Belarusian statehood and nationalstate interests of the Republic of Belarus in the world community, but also the preservation of the spiritual, material, historical and cultural values of Belarusian people and the strengthening of both: the country’s international prestige and Belarusian humanitarian science. And finally, the paper presents quantitative results of the work and the most significant practical achievements of scholars accomplished in 2017.

Models of university education are analyzed. The conceptual foundations of the Graduate School of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus development as university type higher education establishment (academic university) in the framework of a synergetic model are presented. The competence of intellectual leadership as a synergetic parameter of order for effective management of an educational program is proposed.

The article considers the value and theoretical specificity of the Chinese Marxism, the ideological foundation of the national modernization project of the People’s Republic of China. Its discursive and categorical space is problematized against the background of classical Marxism. Тhe correlation of the value-ideological and pragmatic aspects of Marxism with Chinese characteristics is revealed, which serves as an actual occasion for discussing the possibilities and limits of the participation of the humanitarian theory in the design of strategies for social transformations. The tradition of Sinification of Marxism is formed by several generations of social scientists and ideologists. The unique dialectic of the stability and variability of the discursive space of Chinese Marxism, the pragmatization of the theory to meet the challenges of social practice, openness to global trends and fidelity to national traditions should be understood simultaneously as both a condition and a product of China’s successful progressive development.

One of the most acute problems of the present is the crisis phenomena in the institute of family connected with the weakening of its basic functions of reproduction and primary socialization. Being consequences of the dominant way of life of an individual in the conditions of a modern postindustrial society, the processes happening with the family at the theoretical level are comprehended through a methodology that has been formed within the framework of a more static industrial society. The aim of the research is to systematize the available theoretical approaches and substantiate the conceptual scheme based on the synthesis of the axiological-normative understanding of the social institution of T. Parsons and the idea of the institutionalization of P. Berger and T. Lukman. Based on the analysis of available approaches, it is shown that most of the studies of the family institute rely on the structural-functional approach in its Soviet modification. The article substantiates the possibility of supplementing it with the provisions of the theory of social construction of reality. It is shown that family values can be viewed through a three-level value-normative complex that includes the family value as a universally shared cultural standard, family values of individuals and individual normative representations. This approach focuses on the value component of the institution of the family. On the one hand, this is in accordance with the conclusions of the leading family researchers that the changes in value orientations lie at the basis of the transformation of the family. On the other hand, it contributes to the development of effective family policy measures that take into account the existence of diverse family models, as well as the development of an integrated approach, where axiological measures will have their conceptual justification.

This article examines one of the less studied issues in Belarusian historiography – the participation of Germans in the partisan movement and the defeat of fascist Germany. This article shows examples of the heroism of German patriots and describes military operations in which German antifascists took part. One of the most important problems for domestic and foreign researchers is to study the contribution of each nation to victory over fascist Germany. The youth should know that not all Germans shared Hitler’s doctrine, many of them died on our land together with representatives of other nationalities.

The relevance of the topic is due to the fact that cultural interstate relations are viewed as a democratic trend in diplomatic activity. In this connection, it is of scientific interest to reveal the mechanism of participation of various kinds of social circles, organizations and movements in foreign policy activity. In the article the main tendencies, stages and forms of the Anglo-Soviet literary exchange in the 1930s are analyzed on the basis of extensive archival material. It is emphasized that the basis for this was the interest of the public in the mutual enrichment and penetration of the cultures of the two peoples. Socialist construction was the subject of close attention of citizens of capitalist countries. On the other hand, the expansion of literary contacts with Great Britain was viewed by the Soviet leadership as a way to solve a number of political problems. The article concludes that the literary exchange in the 1930s has not undergone significant development, although there has been some revival in this area in 1934–1936, which was due to the improvement of political relations between the two countries. Since 1937 there has been a decrease in the intensity of literary connections. In the second half of 1939 there was a sharp decrease in the number of such contacts, although, in comparison with other cultural spheres, literary exchange still retained its significance. By the beginning of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, the cultural ties between Great Britain and the USSR, including literary ones, were virtually collapsed. The reason for this was the negative attitude of most of the British intelligentsia towards the Soviet Union in this period and the antiBritish orientation of Soviet propaganda.

Comprehensive study of the confessional history of Belarus requires the implementation of the wide range of historical sources. In the article the main stages and methods of field archaeographic expeditions aimed at replenishing the source base for confessional history studies are taken into consideration on the example of the Central Scientific Archive of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus,. The locations of unique documents are described; the main factors that have affected their safety are characterised; the main methods that allow to identify these historical sources and introduce them into the scientific field are shown on the results of field work. The historical context of the preservation of documentary materials in the parishes of the Roman Catholic Church in Belarus is being reconstructed. The results of the field work show that a significant complex of historical sources is in the parish archives and is stored according to the traditional system that existed in the Roman Catholic tradition from the end of the XVIth century. Based on documents and materials discovered during the archaeological expedition, the archival collection 3C «Materials of field archaeographic expeditions» was created in the Central Scientific Archive of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, containing electronic copies of historical sources for the XIVth-mid-XXth centuries.

Reduplication (symbol repetition) is one of the most common and universal methods of encoding information with its sign transmission method. The scope of this technique covers an extremely wide range of language forms, updating the semantic modifications of lexical units. The article is devoted to the analysis of cases of reduplication of linguistic units in modern Belarusian spoken dialect speech. The analysis of the collected material showed that the lexical type of reduplication (the full repetition of the word) is the most in-demand in the daily practice of live communication of speakers. According to observations, the communicatively motivated repetition of the lexeme in a significant number of cases serves to realization of the pragmatic intention of the speaker. More often – to implement expressive content. In these cases, the repetition is complete, and the reduplicated lexeme has the form of an integral prosodic unit that is pronounced without pausing. In addition, these words have all the characteristics of ordinary expressive words, including a set of so-called actualizers. Less often reduplicated lexical units in live communication can realize emotional significance. Such lexemes formalize a negative spectrum of emotions, and characterized by a divergent repetition with a clearly expressed pause between components. Appropriate conjunctions in these cases is used too.

This article analyses mechanisms of interaction between the economic sphere and art. It addresses the phenomenon of art market which is not only a commodity turnover system for pieces of art but also is an economic mechanism of their selection; the art market also significantly influences creative processes. The main feature of a piece of art as a commodity is its integrated nature which includes, on the one hand, its artistic value, and on the other hand, its market price. Although the price is theoretically supposed to be no more than a monetary expression of the artistic value, nowadays we see increasing subordination of aesthetic principles to purely commercial purposes, which contributes to the increasing spread of kitsch in the contemporary culture. The modern art market, which is characterized by the perception of artworks solely as a commodity or as a potential investment object, demonstrates an inconsistent combination of economic, political, ethical and aesthetic factors in the evaluation of works of art. Pricing much more depends on the artist’s self-presentation than on aesthetic qualities of his works. Based on the example of Belarusian and Russian artists, the article addresses methods of promoting and branding the author’s name that are most common in the post-Soviet region. It is pointed out that the pressure of the commercial component on artistic merit is seen not only in traditional art forms but also in so-called conceptual art. A low role of art criticism in art marketing is noted as a local feature.

The article deals with the national features of personages created on the basis of such traditionally typified characters as “a small man”, “a superfluous man”, “a man in the case”. The paper considers their psychological and mental dominants, peculiarities of the ideas and poetics. It centers on the feature of type that brings together characters of different times, appearances, temperaments and status. Authors’ metaphorical nominations of human types / literary persons are singled out and their role in the typology of characters and aesthetic value are described. From the perspective of the modified world the type-“refrain” of the owner and the authors’ concepts of the collective images are presented. The analysis of literary process during transitional periods shows its tendency to social typification. The criteria for the evaluation of personage as an image and personage as a character are outlined. It is concluded that the influence of classical and national literary traditions in combination with the specific socio-cultural situation on the individual author’s vision of a man makes it possible to regard the artistic anthropology of Belarusian prose of the first third of the twentieth century not only as the distinctive aesthetic phenomenon but perspective for scientific research.

The prospects of literature research in its connections and interaction with other national literatures are substantiated. The comparative studies, which investigate the art works on the basis of their comparative and cognitive analysis, like no other discipline, on the one hand, trace the general trends in the development of the verbal art, and on the other, reveal the distinctive, specific features and characteristics of the historical literary process. The author reveals the characteristic features of the complex scientific project “Belarusian-European Literary Interrelations and Imagology: Myths, Stereotypes, Reality”, which is carried out within the State Program of Scientific Research “Economy and Humanitarian Development of the Belarusian Society” (2016–2020). The innovative character of the researchers of the Department of Literature Interrelations of the Center for Belarusian Culture, Language and Literature Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus is underlined. Within the project, for the first time in literary studies, the specific features of the formation and evolution of the images of Spain and the Spaniards, embodied in the works of Belarusian writers, are being studied. The analysis of the presence of the ideological, thematic, artistic and figurative components associated with Ukrainian national and cultural realities in the Belarusian literature of the 20th century, is being conducted. The images of historical personalities in the Eastern Slavonic prose of the beginning of the 21st century as well as the phenomenon of Russian and Belarusian ethnostereotypes, which are revealed in the works of the contemporary Russian-speaking poets of Belarus, are being analyzed. The work also involves the investigation of the components of “one’s own” and “another’s” in the contemporary Belarusian and English poetry, the analysis of the evolution of classical and modern Polish poetry translation into the Belarusian language, revealing the stages in the development of translators’ preferences in the Belarusian-language variants, etc.

Comparative legal analysis of the differences in the regulation of status of ownership and property right in the constitutions of a number of countries were conducted in the article. The study was executed in three directions. First, it is analyzed how exactly the property is represented in the constitutional norms. The study of the texts of the constitutions made it possible to establish that the question of property is represented either as a subjective right of a citizen, or as an economic and legal category (form of ownership), or as a sum of both. Secondly, the volume of constitutional regulation is compared. Depending on this, it is proposed to outline a brief, medium and detailed model of constitutional property regulation. Thirdly, there are differences in the nature (form) of the constitutional norms governing property relations. They can be formulated either as a norm-setting, or as a guarantee norm.

The article examines the methodological principles of the balance of payments under the regional integration. The main channels of the influence of regional integration on the balance of payments of Belarus are identified. The analysis of the articles of the Balance of payments of Belarus and Russia as the main trading partner of Belarus are conducted. Recommendations on improvement of foreign economic relations of the partner countries of the Eurasian Economic Union are made.