TRAINING SPESICLISTS IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: TEXTS, STEREOTYPES AND CULTURAL PATTERNS

Abstract

Knowledge of texts representing various types of discourse helps the reader get to relevant discursive practices and, consequently, reduce the culturological distance and eliminate the corresponding cultural gaps. To read the contexts of an alien culture requires familiarity with common cultural and historical background of the epoch when the texts were created. Criteria for relevance of the text and its meaningful potential with respect to the relations between this text and the given communicative situation depend on the available information that the reader needs. They are determined by political, economic and cultural relevance of the text within the society that is receiving the text. For the West, Russian literature remained largely unknown until the beginning of the 19th century. Despite the fact that Russian-British relations began in the epoch of Ivan the Terrible, steady interest in Russia, its history, culture and literature emerged only in the first half of the 19th century, when the first translations and the first anthologies of Rus-sian poets and writers’ works began to appear. Nevertheless, the choice of these works turned out to be motivated by the personal interest of interpreters and compilers in them or particular authors. Selection of texts for the “Anthology of Russian literature from the earliest period to the present time” was influenced by their practical value. They ought to have been good illustrations of the important events in the history of Russia from the point of view of students, will-be historians and future diplomats. The texts in the anthology are affecting the main dominants of Russian mentality and Russian communicative behavior. They estimate characteristic features of the linguacultural type THE RUSSIAN(S).