Versus is a young journal, established only in 2021. Yet it has an editorial board made up of philosophers, economists, philologists, anthropologists, and cultural historians who have spent decades contributing to university education and academic publication. The members of the advisory committee further expand this list of disciplines. The editorial core, distributed between Moscow and St. Petersburg, sets a salubrious degree of tension and debate that stems from differences in scientific tradition, intellectual practise, and academic habitus. In this sense, the energy of debate is inscribed not only in the name of the journal and the means of setting forth its contents, but also in the everyday work of the editorial office. The lack of the journal’s history can in part be compensated by the rich etymology of its title. The word ‘versus’ expands within a certain set of spatial semantics – in the sense of prepositions, nouns and verbs: ‘towards…’, ‘in comparison with…’, and then ‘row’, ‘line’, ‘furrow’. The Latin verb vertere means ‘to unfold’, ‘to turn, rotate’, ‘to turn to’. Thus the journal’s main focus is not contestation, but to the desire to structure and orientate various landscapes in the social sciences and humanities.