Russian and Ukrainian students' ideas of their future

The article analyzes peculiarities of constructing ideas of the future by individual subjects of society. Ideas of the future are regarded as a design of these subjects' discourse. Discourse is a model of the world which includes the unclear image of the subject himself/herself and schemes of his/her behavior in some kind of social context according to their goals. Correspondingly, a design contains the image of the discourse's author, supposed areas of his/her self-fulfillment and goals of his/her life activities. Construction of future images means understanding by the subject of his/her «I», of the area(s) of self-fulfillment, and also accordance of the present goals, both those organizing life activities and those targeted. It has been revealed that construction of future images is a process of the existing structure differentiation and its integration at the new level of complexity. The results of interviews with Russian (n = 148) and Ukrainian (n = 136) students doing a course in the humanities present cross sections of the consequent stages of this process. Different groups of students are on the different stages of construction of the sustainable structure of their future images, which corresponds to the stage of their life path. It is shown that organization of future images and peculiarities of their (re)construction among Russian and Ukrainian students doing course in the humanities differ insignificantly. Significant differences were only revealed in the evaluation of possibilities for the full self-fulfillment in their own country, which was shown by a number of students who declared intentions to emigrate. If the image of the country in the semantic space was located far from the expected image of the future country, the number of subjects who had no intention to connect their future with this country increased. The authors conclude that construction of new ideas of the future, reconstruction of the existing ideas of the future and their integration into a single model occur simultaneously with the expansion of the range of the subjects' identifications, emergence of new social practices and new areas for their application, increasing complexity of the discourse organization.