During the reign of King Philip II, the Spanish Empire reached the peak of its territorial expansion. A second expansion, this time in the realm of ideas and legal practices, took place parallelly, embodied in the phenomenon widely known as the great European Witch Hunt. This article studies the demonological discourse in José de Acosta’s «Natural and Moral History of the Indies», taking into consideration these two peculiarities of the aforementioned historical context. Through a detailed analysis of the image of the Devil, in connection with various Amerindian religious practices, the article presents the hermeneutic principles with which the Jesuit historian explained the human world of the American continent. The article argues that José de Acosta’s vision in this regard springs from the encounter of two exegetical traditions born with early Christianity, to wit, the so-called diabolical mimesis and the typological-figural interpretation of world history. Resorting to early modern historiographical works, as well as to biblical and patristic sources, this article explains how the Jesuit historian carried out this complex epistemological assimilation of the American otherness, despite having aimed explicitly to account for the New World starting from its own principles. Finally, the article concludes that the Spanish historian used this hermeneutical mixture to build a cognitive bridge between the Old and New Worlds, thus keeping the internal coherence of Christian cosmology, threatened by the new cultural realities of the Americas.

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the image of Russia in the History of Spanish Traditionalism (30 volumes), the most relevant work created within the framework of the traditionalist historiography of Spanish Carlism. The History of Spanish Traditionalism was written by a team of authors led by Melchor Ferrer and published in 1941–1979. The article examines the main trends in the portrayal of Russia in Spanish culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Such methods as critical discourse analysis, contextual analysis, and linguistic-political interpretation of the data obtained are helpful in analyzing references to Russia in the History of Spanish Traditionalism. In addition, it is worth exploring cases where authors abstain from discussing the possible influence of Russia on Carlism. The article shows how the authors first tried to minimize the mentions of the influence of Russia on the Carlists in the first three volumes, published in 1941–1942. This can be attributed to the international situation in Europe at the time when the work was published. In subsequent volumes the authors positively assess Russia’s policy towards the Carlist movement. M. Ferrer and his co-authors consider Alexander I as the ideological predecessor of the Carlists, and Nicholas I as a monarch who consistently supported the Carlist movement. The History of Spanish Traditionalism cites rumors discussed in the Carlist press in the mid-19th century about a possible Russian intervention in Spain to restore the «legitimate» king or about a project to transfer the Pope’s residence from Rome to St. Petersburg. Although the authors of The History of Spanish Traditionalism generally have a positive attitude towards the policy of the Russian Empire, at the same time they sympathize with the struggle of Poland for independence. Furthermore, the authors also criticize the revolution of 1917 and the policy of the USSR in Spain in the 1930s

The armed forces were pivotal to sustaining the stability of the Francoist regime, which initially crystallized as a military dictatorship. This was particularly evident during the initial phase of the regime (1939–1957). Franco successfully engineered an institutional framework that guaranteed the loyalty of the military establishment, a factor that proved decisive in ensuring the durability of his dictatorship. To this end, the regime resorted to various measures. On the one hand, the republican reforms that had generated resentment within the officer corps were systematically dismantled. The pre-republican military structure, in place prior to the abolition of the monarchy in 1931, was reinstated. The regime did not make officers redundant in spite of the cessation of hostilities. The armed forces enjoyed a wide array of privileges, ranging from secure material provisions to preferential access to scarce commodities, alongside advantages in the competition for civilian administrative jobs. On the other hand, since the army was the only force capable of challenging Franco’s authority, command was deliberately organized so as to hinder coordination among potential conspirators. The Ministry of Defense was divided into three distinct departments, each endowed with its own autonomous command hierarchy. Significant emphasis was also placed on integrating the military into the economic sphere. Officers took up strategic posts in both state-owned and private enterprises, which simultaneously made them wealthier and diminished the chances of organized dissent. Moreover, mechanisms of control over military lidership were carefully institutionalized, including the practice of assigning officers to posts that, while ostensibly prestigious, effectively curtailed their capacity to exert political influence. On balance, the system meticulously constructed under Franco entrenched the loyalty of the armed forces, thereby enabling him to consolidate and preserve his authority for over three decades.

Individuals and groups that live in a region and together form its community constantly manifest many different identities, i.e. national, ethnic, confessional, linguistic, territorial, political, professional, etc. Identities in Spain’s regional communities undergo significant changes, particularly in Catalonia. The aim of the study is to determine the social profile of the adherents of Catalan identity based on the results of surveys conducted in 2011–2024. The findings show that dual identity prevails in this regional community, with 47,6 % of respondents identifying as «both Spanish and Catalan». The identity of 20,3 % is described as «more Catalan than Spanish», followed by «only Catalan» (14,8 %), «more Spanish than Catalan» (6,1 %), and «only Spanish» (5,8 %). The exclusive and predominant Catalan identity is mostly shared by people over 45, women and residents of sparsely populated municipalities who vote for such parties as Junts («Together for Catalonia»), The Republican Left of Catalonia and Sumar. The exclusive Spanish identity is most widespread among women and people over 45, while the preferential identity of «more Spanish than Catalan» is also prevalent in the 18–24 age group. These segments of the regional community are most supportive of the People’s Party, PSOE and Vox. Changes in identity are caused by globalization and reflect the economic situation: the exclusive identity prevails in times of crisis, yet wanes as the standard of living rises. The latest trend towards a weaker exclusive Catalan identity also results from the failed secession attempt in 2017, the volatility and increasing fragmentation of the party system in the region.

Latin American civilization is characterized as «borderline» for which constant cultural synthesis, internal diversity, and a continuous process of self-identification are typical. The article is devoted to analyzing the disposition of Latin American society towards intra-regional integration through the lens of civilizational-cultural identity. Can a common identity serve as a solid foundation for integration processes in the region? Answering this question requires considering the historical, social, and cultural factors influencing the attitude of Latin American society towards regional integration.

The following research methods were used in the work: the historical method while analyzing the deep-seated causes and origins of integration processes in the region; comparative analysis when applying various civilizational-cultural paradigms to the Latin American region; analysis of public opinion when studying the attitude of modern Latin American society towards integration. The work employs authoritative theoretical civilizational-cultural models by S. Huntington, Inglehart-Welzel, and Sh. Schwartz, the analysis of which demonstrates significant value heterogeneity among Latin American countries. Based on these models, several groups of states with fundamentally different cultural priorities are identified, which creates serious obstacles to the formation of a unified integration model.

The results of the study reveal a significant dissonance between formally high public support for integration (about 81 %) and its actual driving forces. Data from sociological surveys indicate that this support is predominantly pragmatic in nature and associated with expectations of specific economic benefits, rather than with a sense of civilizational-cultural commonality. The analysis shows that the foundation of the integration process in Latin America is anti-imperialist orientation and common geopolitical interests, however, value unity remains rather conditional. As a result, the success of regional cooperation depends more on conjunctural political and economic factors than on a deep-seated common identity.

Brazilian society actively engages with two concepts laden with memories of a shared past that shape its present: favela and comunidade. These two concepts embody the dark and light side of Brazilian slums, which were formed on the ruins of the slave system and have preserved many of its specific traits. Using memory studies tolls, specifically, the theory of collective memory by the German cultural scientist Jan Assmann and the concept of memory sites by the French historian Pierre Nora, this article examines the favela as a unit of collective memory, where all the most painful experiences of Brazilian society are «encrypted»: the 1897 Canudos uprising defeat, the 1888 Golden Law and the creation of a domestic worker army in favelas, for whom a wealthy neighborhood’s kitchen became a new senzala. These are memories of hunger, drug trafficking, and criminal wars. The Favelas symbolize an eternal threat to the civilized «city of asphalt». However, the economic successes of the early 21st century sparked a growing demand in society for a new narrative. Many politicians and intellectuals viewed integrating slum dwellers into consumer culture as a sufficient condition for social integration, which allowed them to «abolish» the favelas excluding them from the Brazilian Institute of official terminology. Public discourse replaced it with comunidade, a concept designed to protect vulnerable groups from verbal stigmatization and highlight the vibrant, exotic, and distinctive aspects of the folksy, syncretic culture that emerged from the favelas as a form of existence. This article explores the conflict between these narratives surrounding Brazilian slums and its impact on public discourse at various levels, from the terminology of social surveys and academic research to blog discussions and traditional media.

Reggaeton, born at the crossroads of Caribbean and Afro-Latin traditions, has become in contemporary Latin American cultural space not only a musical genre but also a social phenomenon through which the values and meanings of a new youth identity are articulated. In the Colombian context, this genre acquires a particular significance: it is in Medellín that a local school of reggaeton emerges, combining street culture, global media, and traditional cultural codes. Maluma’s work allows us to consider reggaeton as a «discourse of identity», where three cultural layers intersect: the Latin American (hybridity, mestizaje, carnivalesque spirit, machismo), the Colombian (the experience of la violencia, parlache slang, social polarization), and the youth (openness to globalization, code-switching, pop culture aesthetics). These levels create a complex and multilayered system in which linguistic and stylistic devices become cultural markers. The use of excessively familiar and diminutive terms of address, metaphors and hyperboles, code-switching, themes of corporality and festivity constructs a space of «everyday carnival», where traditional Catholic morality and patriarchal models are inverted, giving way to a culture of pleasure, freedom, and emotional sincerity. Maluma’s reggaeton functions as a cultural compass that signals the transition of Colombian youth from traditional identities towards a hybrid and globalized model of self-expression. Thus, the study of Maluma’s song discourse reveals reggaeton not only as a musical practice but also as a reflection of the profound sociocultural processes of Latin America, where contemporary Colombian, and more broadly, Latin American youth identity is being shaped.

his article is an attempt at a comprehensive interdisciplinary study focused on reconstructing the formation and transformation of Brazilian national identity through the prism of the evolution of key religious images in poetic discourse over two centuries. Based on an extensive corpus of texts by Brazilian poets from Romanticism to Postmodernism — including both canonical figures (Gonçalves Dias, Machado de Assis, Olavo Bilac) and key representatives of the Afro-Brazilian tradition (Cruz e Sousa, Abdias do Nascimento, Edimilson de Almeida) — the author identified three recurring hallmarks of Brazil’s identity transformation: search for God (in all His manifestations), time and eternity (including through metaphors of the sea and the river), and search for the meaning of life (the concepts of happiness and joy).

The research combines historical and cultural analysis, which helps to analyze poetry as a projection of deeper social shifts, with Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, which is instrumental in interpreting poetic symbols as codes of collective consciousness.

The work traces how Brazil’s religious landscape changed over the history, from the establishment of Catholicism as the foundation of nation building in the poetry of the 19th-century Romantic poets to the existential quest and return of Afro-Brazilian religious traditions in modernism, and the polyphony of identities in 20th-century postmodernist poetry. The study of all these stages shows that Brazilian poets have reflected in depth on the changes in the country’s religious life. Moreover, it reveals how multifaceted the mechanisms of nation-building are, and how essential the religious imaginary is to this process.

The paper discusses the first results of a linguistic expedition to Slavic communities made in the spring of 2025. The study seeks to to document the Slavic languages of migrants, establish the dialectal basis of the Slavic speech under study, and analyze the preservation and reflection in narratives of dialectal features typical for the region that the first Slavic migrants came from. The fieldwork was done using semi-structured interviews among Polish speakers in São Paulo, Bosnian speakers in Santos (Brazil), Croatian speakers in Santiago, Iquique, and Antofagasta (Chile), Russian, Belarusian, Polish, and Ukrainian speakers in Encarnación, Fram, and Coronel Bogado (Paraguay). All respondents are representatives of economic migration who settled in South America. The degree of influence of foreign language items, their level of adaptation, as well as cases of code-switching were analyzed using the comparative method based on oral interviews and the most representative statements that the respondents made in Slavic languages. The narratives discussed a variety of topics, including the language situation in the past and present, as well as cultural adaptation mechanisms within both spiritual and material aspects of culture. On the one hand, when Spanish and Portuguese words are adapted, phonetic features that are atypical for a specific Slavic language are eliminated. Morphological adaptation occurs by integrating into existing declension paradigms and by eliminating the unusual endings of words in the nominative case. On the other hand, there is interference from other languages. The linguistic competence of respondents varies; still, all of them use Spanish or Portuguese elements. The linguistic situation shows a similar trend everywhere: early on Slavic languages were used for communication within families, whereas today there has been a linguistic shift in favor of Spanish and Portuguese, which calls for preservation of the existing Slavic languages in the region.

This monograph, prepared by a group of prominent Russian specialists in Iberian studies, examines the challenges faced by the Spanish state and society in the late 2010s and early 2020s. The analysis delves into the complex sociopolitical landscape that emerged from the transition of a long-established two-party system to a multiparty one, alongside the systemic measures undertaken by the government in order to mitigate the devastating impact of the pandemic — the coronavirus-plagued 2020 was the most unfavorable year in Spain’s recent history. The authors describe serious economic and social problems that affected Spanish society as a result of the pandemic. Particular emphasis is placed on the phenomenon of a «rightward shift» in electoral preferences of Spanish society, as well as the growing role of small regional parties which complicates the formation of a stable government. The extensive factual and statistical material combined with the researchers’ analytical conclusions, provides a detailed picture of the country’s political life during one of the most troublesome periods of its development. This approach allows to assess the state of the Spanish economy in comparison with other EU countries, the real living conditions of different social and age groups, and, finally, demonstrate qualitative changes in relations with other countries, including Latin American ones. The scientific value of the monography is rooted in its multifaceted analysis of the mechanisms underpinning Spain’s adaptation to the challenges of a globalized era of instability.

For the first time, a collection of short stories by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, translated by Boris Kovalev, has been published in Russian. «Sad Valencian Stories» creates a colorful image of Spain, unfamiliar to Russian readers. Valencia, the writer’s hometown, is presented in all its diversity of expressive characters and landscapes. These include narrow streets where it’s impossible to hide from prying eyes, a blooming spring gardens filled with the sweet aroma, a stuffy bakery, a turbulent sea and a train rushing at full speed toward its destination. Valencia is populated by courageous and cowardly, cruel and compassionate, vicious and innocent men and women, united by a single desire — to live and give life. The city tests its inhabitants for greed or pride, creating situations in which people are forced to make difficult decisions. The hero of Blasco Ibáñez’s stories is a lonely man. He may be surrounded by family or friends, but a feeling of abandonment and loneliness always accompanies his every action. The collection «Sad Stories from Valencia» is a mosaic of tragic human destinies, which Blasco Ibáñez interprets as a constant struggle between life and death.