European Culture in Thesaurus Coverage
The article reveals the thesaurus foundations of the encyclopaedia "European Culture in Russian Thesaurus", based on works by outstanding Russian culture and literature scientist Vladimir Andreevich Lukov (1948-2014). This edition is released factoring in Vl. A. Lukov's basic theoretical ideas, which have contributed to the thesaurus concept. The article characterises the most important of the ideas that have become theories: 1. The thesaurus theory of culturology (subject culturology); 2. The thesaurus theory of genres, which was initially developed for literature studies, but turned out to be applicable to the whole construct of culturology, sociology and philosophy of culture; 3. The thesaurus theory of influence concentres, including forceology - a subdiscipline of thesaurus analysis that reveals "strong positions" in culture, the ones to which culture concentres correspond; 4. The theory of personal models designed by the author of a literary work is one of the most original ideas of Vl. A. Lukov: not referring to the author's personality, but transforming personalities research from a descriptive to a theoretical form, i.e. revealing in them values common for a specific culture. This viewpoint goes beyond the limits of the literary research and acquires a methodological significance for humanitarian knowledge in all its units. 5. The theory of thesaurus spheres, which was based upon generalisation of numerous works on the sphere of Shakespeare by Vl. A. Lukov and his colleagues at the Institute of Fundamental and Applied Research under Moscow University for the Humanities. The Shakespearian proceedings by Vl. A. Lukov and his co-authors have advanced the thesaurus methodology referring to a number of points, in particular, showing a broad applicability of the ideas of the thesaurus enlargement and the cultural view of the world. The five aspects of the thesaurus methodology development specified above basically reveal the applied tasks of its use in philology, philosophy and sociology of culture, and also they define approaches to constructing encyclopaedia by Vl. A. Lukov called "European Culture in Russian Thesaurus".