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This paper examines some historical, cultural, and institutional processes involving a Jewish minority from the Russian and Azerbaijani Caucasus, now mostly displaced in the huge and multiethnic Moscow: the Mountain Jews, or Juhuro. These Jews were subjected to a historically multifaceted and endangering diaspora, but they have been making big efforts to preserve their identity and survival by means of accommodating, mimetic, and cultural strategies. In the present day, despite the few representatives living in the Russian capital, the community is striving to find its own niche to transmit its history, language, and tradition within the multicultural “salad bowl” city of Moscow. More changes and transformations are at stake to preserve their long-lasting ethnic, religious, and linguistic characteristics. This paper is devoted to analyzing such elements, in an attempt to explain why and how Juhuro seem likely to succeed in preserving their religious community by innovating it in spite of their minority position within a globalized society.

This article is devoted to the topic of work, in the frame of the Soviet labor camp, from the point of view of two leading exponents of the lagernaya literatura: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, with his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski with the memoir A World Apart. Both authors write on the same theme, the life of a prisoner, but the focus on the work activities and the interpretation they give is completely different. The description of the working day, the consequences it makes on the everyday life of the prisoners, the struggle for the food needed for surviving the harsh climatic and detention conditions, and finally the philosophical approach used to represent the forced labor, present relevant differences. This article is meant to analyze those differences through the authors' very own words and literary studies. We start from the very raw information detectable by a thorough reading of the two works, going through a moral analysis of the events narrated. While the core narration happens within the same tragic frame, the conclusions they draw are ultimately different.

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According to our previous research no attempt was made to find a multiple regression model, and consequently a correlation between the personality trait of an introvert/extrovert, individual motivation and an approach to Russian language L2. After a general review of the literature, we mainly concerned English as a foreign language (ESL). A research was made through a survey of Italian students learning Russian L2 outside the language environment in Italy. Starting from their answers we made a suitable score system, thanks to which we made a distribution, graphical and descriptive function for all the three variables. Finally a multiple regression model is provided to make reconciliation among the variables with statistical estimators of reliability.