ABSTRACT The present paper is devoted to an outstanding Kazakh poet, musician and writer Zhumeken Nazhimedenov who lived during the Soviet Union. Zhumeken Nazhimedenov is one of the authors of the Anthem of the Republic of Kazakhstan, adopted in 2006. The object of the research was the collection of poems and prose by Zh. Nazhimedenov, published in different years, and literary criticism written about him by well-known critics and writers of that time. The purpose of the paper is to analyse (...) and distinguish thematic and ideological features the genre-literary issues and stylistic analysis of Nazhimedenov’s poetry and prose. In the study, the methods of thematic and stylistic analysis were used. The poet’s literary works are distinguished by the diversity of contemporary scenes and traces of the search for the discovery of the human world, the possibility of depicting nature. In conclusion, each work of Zh. Nazhimedenov summarizes the realities of life in its time, touches the hearts and conveys the truth. The ideology of literary works is based on the traces of goodness, which began with the homeland, consisting of a passion for life, compassion and appreciation of mankind. (shrink)

Nature is frequently operationalized as greenery or water to estimate the restorativeness of the environment. Pursuing a deeper understanding of the connection between representation of naturalness and its relationship with restoration, we conducted an experiment aimed to investigate if the sky is perceived as an element of nature. The main goal of this study was to understand how the composition of the environment guides people’s selection of sky as nature in an explicit task. Moreover, we investigated how the amount of (...) visible sky determines this relationship. One hundred five participants participated in a novel explicit judgment task conducted online. In this task, we prepared a set of images trimmed out of 360-degree high dynamic range images. The images were classified according to two primary independent variables representing type of environment and horizon level. Each participant was asked to select, by clicking on the image, what they consider as “nature.” In addition, they were asked to judge images on five visual analogue scales: emotional response, aesthetic preference, feeling of familiarity, the openness of the space and naturalness. For analysis, images were segmented into 11 semantic categories with each pixel being assigned one semantic label. Our results show that, sky is associated with selections of nature in a specific pattern. The relationship is dependent on the particular set of conditions that are present in the environment rather than the type of the environment. The availability of sky on the image affects the selection of other nature labels with selections more likely when only a small amount of sky was available. Furthermore, we found that the amount of sky had a significant positive association with the naturalness rating of the whole image, but the effect was small. Our results also indicate that subjective selections of sky predict the naturalness better than trees and water. On the other hand, objective presence of trees and water has a stronger positive association with naturalness while objective presence of sky is positively associated with naturalness. The results show that, relative to its availability sky is considered as nature. (shrink)