Abstract: The essay is devoted to the memory of a poet Alexander Aronov. This year it will be thirteen years since his death. Alexander Aronov was born on August 30, 1934 in Moscow. His mother was uneducated but well read. She named her sons after the brothers Pushkins. She named her eldest son Alexander and her youngest son Lev. Alexander Aronov’s father was a musician. He tried to teach his son some music but Alexander, as he himself admitted, ‘would fall on the piano hitting his forehead and go to sleep’. However, he discovered another talent – a gift for poetry. Alexander started to write poems when he was a school student. His poems were often published in newspapers much time had passed by till a book of his poems was published. Aronov’s first book ‘The Island of Safety’ was published in 1987 when the author was 53 years old. His second book ‘The Text’ came two years later. However, many Russians still hum his verses from the movie ‘The Irony of Fate’ that became words of the famous songs in the movie such as ‘If you have no house, it will never go on fire, if you have no wife, she will never leave you for anyone else, if you have no aunt, she will never decease, if you don’t live, you will never die’ and etc. The author of this essay uses the literary critical analysis of Alexander Aronov’s works. He also compares his poetry with the poems written by other poets and uses the method of phenomenological analysis of poetry. Many authors have written about the poet such as Bella Akhmadulina, Evgeny Rein, Vadim Chernyak, Sergey Nitochkin, Igor Guberman, Alexander Eremenko, Alexander Minkin, Sergey Aman, Gennady Aygi, Ivan Zhdaov, Leoid Zhukhovitsky, Tatyana Bek, Sergey Mnatsakanyan, Oleg Khlebnikov, Andrey Chernov and Andrey Yakhontov. But there is no limit to understanding poetry so the author of the present essay offers his own interpretation of the poetry of a famous Russia poet Alexander Aronov.

Keywords: poetry, poet, Aronov, speech, word, prophet, love, anxiety, moment, fate.

Abstract: The subject under review of the present research is the images of the devil in classical literature that were, on one hand, obtained from fairylore and science fiction and, on the other hand, created by the human mind. Introduction of the image of the devil into a literary work has become one of the conceptual symptoms of the threat to human life. Appearance of the image of the devil as been usually accompanied with all sorts of incidents and has been making a bold and explosive impression in the drama. These observations have made the author of the present article to study the so-called ‘demonic tradition’ in famous literary works. In order to view this topic, the author of the article uses the method of psychological analysis that is based on the phenomenon of the binary archetype discovered by M. Uvarov and used by the author of the present article as the representation of the ‘twins effect’ of the man and devil. The novelty of the research is in the description of the main source of psychological relations between the man and the devil, in particular, the sale of one’s soul. The author of the article shows that in each case human soul has its own price which, in the end, reveals the degree of the feeling of catastrophism experienced by the man. The author also describes different motives for the sale of one’s soul based on which he shows the moral failure of the man and inevitable physical destruction. The author of the article shows that the images of the devil in literary works are nothing else but the fantasy of the man reveling against the reality. Based on the results of the research of different interpretations of catastrophism expressed in art through depersonalization of human, the author concludes that the history of the humankind is based on his attitude to transcendence and inevitably connected to the moral principles of the humanity. When these moral principles are defied, transcendence in the human mind assumes a particular shape and becomes humanized gaining the force of the catastrophic expectations and achievement of the moral punishment.

Keywords: human, devil, imp, demonic, Mephistopheles and Faust, binary archetype, catastrophe and catastrophism, image, sale f one’s soul, consciousness.

Abstract: In her article Susan Sontag provides a review of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ works underlying his attitude to the profession of the anthropologist as the profession related to ‘spiritual responsibility like a creative artist’ or a psychoanalyst has. Susan Sontag gives the highest appraisal to Clause Levi-Strauss’ work ‘Tristes Tropiques’ saying that it is ‘one of the greatest books of our century’. Levi-Strauss was born in 1908 and belonged to the circle of Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. Being disappointed in philosophy, Clause Levi-Strauss began to study anthropology and in 1935 he went to Sao Paulo as a professor of anthroplogy. It is Susan Sontag’s opinion that his ‘Tristes Tropiques’ is an ‘intellectual biography and an example of personal history’. Due to his profession, the anthropologist divides the world into the ‘internal’ and ‘external’, domestic and exotic, academic urban world and tropics. The anthropologist also deliberately uses his own intellectual estrangement. According to Clause Levi-Strauss, anthropology is the method of political non-involvement and therefore the profession of anthropologist demands true impartiality. The anthropologist, first of all, is a witness and therefore it is an illusion that he can be taught only the theory. In his ‘Structural Anthropology’ Levi-Strauss describes the method for analyzing and recording myths that can be processed on the computer. Levi-Strauss also applies strict formalism to traditional topics of blood relation, totemism, the balance between myth and ritual and so on.

Keywords: ‘Structural Anthropology’, primitive societies, ‘Tristes Tropiques’, preliterate tribes, impartiality, field researches, spiritual rebirth, strict formalism, anthropological material, computer processing.

Abstract: The subject under review is Alexander Blok’s marginal notes on Thomas Carlyle’s essay ‘The Life and Works of Dante’. These notes are part of the creative heritage of the poet and constitute the semiotic text that is used for both understanding Blok’s reception of Dante and more profound understanding of the inmost confessions, thoughts and hidden intentions of Alexander Blok’s poetry and his anticipations of Russia’s historical future. The focus of the attention is the Dantean Orphic themes in Alexander Blok’s lyrics that are used to study Blok’s tragic path resulting from both the patterns of the development of the Russian symbolism and peculiarities of the creative personality of the poet. The research methodology is based on a famous thesis that a text exists only when it is accompanied with other texts. The plot of the article develops as the event of the ‘dialogic knowledge’ (M. Bakhtin’s expression). The novelty of the research is in using the dialogic text (which has never attracted the attention of researchers before) for interpreting the collisions of the creative mind of Alexander Blok. The poet’s moving from Dantean themes to Orphic themes which is interpreted by the author of the present article as a semantically important episode of Blok’s biography reflecting the dramatic nature of the last stage of Blok’s path has been out of the sight of literary historians.

Keywords: Carlyle, essay, Dante, Alexander Blok, the ‘leading dream’, ‘secret freedom’, ‘trilogy of humanizing’, Beatrice, Astarte, Orpheus, Gabars.

Abstract: The article is devoted to the phenomenon of Daniil Andreev, a genius Russian poet, writer and philosopher. Andreev’s creative works are a significant yet unique phenomenon in the Russian culture. On the one hand, Daniil Andreev continued the tradition of the Silver Age. On the other hand, he discovered new paths of the development of philosophy and culture and offered new and sometimes unexpected ideas. His creative works were born at the confluence of art, philosophy and religion. His works had the element of research, too. Andreev introduced his own concept of history and used that concept for analyzing historical process, first of all, in respect of the Russian reality. However, it is not so easy to understand Andreev’s views because his works are usually based on the profound and versatile spiritual experience of the poet. Unfortunately, modern science does not have the methods to clarify the nature of the poet’s experience but in the course of personal ‘vivification’ we can understand the motives that moved the poet. Many things that Daniil Andreev touched upon in his works are still rather unknown and unfamiliar for the majority of people. However, this does not mean at all that the poet just made it up for certain purposes. Such unfamiliarity makes his works especially interesting and attracts attention to Daniil Andreev’s heritage. Daniil Andreev managed to combine the independence and the freedom of the thought with the unconditional faith and true religiosity.

Keywords: transpersonal, vivification, trans-physics, meta-history, culture, ghost-seer, Russian philosophy, religiosity, utopia, new human.

Abstract: The present article is not a research in the classical meaning of the word. The article contains the three philosophical essays written by the author on different topics. Generally speaking, these are the thoughts of the author on the emotional perception of cultural objects and creative inspiration. The author of the article had the goal to withdraw from the usual logic and methodology of scientific research and take a completely new look at the human. The author of the article tries to withdraw from the subject-object dualism that views the consciousness as the split phenomenon. The disadvantage of the scientific point of view seeing human as an object of research the inevitable distortion of facts by postulating the position of the analysis and decomposition of the whole into parts as the established truth. In other words, a researcher defines an object of research based on a very uncertain feature and by doing so, the researcher breaks the integrity which creates the hermeneutic circle. Therefore, anthropological researches always view the human nature as incomplete and always doomed to doubt. The author of the present research makes an attempt to view an action of a researcher as a creative action where the primary structure of the phenomenon is not separated as an object of research but reveals itself in the process of thoughts being dissolved in the emotional perception. In this case the primary structure stops to be universal and becomes real and personal and part of the autorythmia of human activity. As a result, the author refers to the most realized creative action performed by the author and presented in her attempts to work with different literary genres remembering about the goals and purposes of a philosophical and literary experiment. Conclusions whether the author’s attempt was a success are left up to the readers.

Keywords: creativity, self-cognition, autorythmia, literature, philosophy, anthropology, poems, essay, knowledge (cogitation), hermeneutic circle.

Abstract: The article is devoted to Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–19520) as a figure understudied in the history of philosophy. Creative legacy of Vasily Zhukovsky as a poet, translator and literary critic has been studied a lot but his philosophical views are rarely paid attention to. According to the author of the article, it is very important to study Vasily Zhukovsky as a foregoer of the Russian religious philosophy in order to understand the genesis and development of the Russian religion. Based on the analysis of Zhukovsky’s epistolary legacy, his diaries and notes, the author of the article makes an attempt to outline the nature of his philosophy and localize the forms and spheres where his philosophy was especially revealed. The author shows the cultural environment in which Zhukovsky’s philosophical thought developed. Noteworthy that sentimentalism and romanticism are viewed not only as categories of the literary theory and history but also as cultural forms defining peculiarities of philosophizing in the zone of their influence. Indeed, the author believes that Zhukovsky can be viewed as one of the founders of the lyrical philosophizing, the latter in many ways creating the singularity of the Russian philosophical thought as a spiritual and cultural phenomenon. The author shows that the development of Zhukovsky’s philosophical thought was defined, firstly, by his religious world view and, secondly, by his talent for teaching.

Keywords: Zhukovsky, sentimentalism, melancholy, mysticism, romanticism, language of philosophy, poetry and philosophy, Christian philosophy, lyrics, spiritual culture.

Abstract: Dominating role of psychology made Russian philosophers and writers of the early 20th century become interest in existential topics. Rehabilitation of life was the main topic for Russian writers of the early 20th century. Certain efforts and super-super narrative are necessary in order to think about that life. The idea of life became the main topic for writers and the main metaphor of the creative act. Philosophizing turned into the ‘universal mission of the humankind’ and the style of life. However, that philosophizing acquired a rather tragic nature. The loss of the meaning of life created by Nietzsche’s statement about the death of God led to the growing interest towards occult sciences and myths. Not only psychiatrists studied different mental disorders and narcisstic neuroses. Catastrophic nature of being has resulted in people fragmenting their life, thinking and action. Moreover, fragmentation has encouraged a man to think about himself as the main person. Researchers share rather ambivalent attitudes to the definition of narcissism. For some researchers narcissism was inevitably connected with the fragmentation of culture and estrangement of the human. Researchers stated that the humanity had very unhealthy relations with their own ‘selves’. However, Christopher Lash had a completely different opinion on the matter. For him ‘narcissism’ was an essential tool of socialization. Researchers define intellectual, esthetic, erotic, political, legal and other forms of narcissism and describe narcissism as the element of poetics and etc. There are culturological, sociological, psychological and other interpretations of the myth. At each stage of the historical development researchers gave their own definition of the myth about Narcissuses. The beginning of the 20th century can be called the ‘epoch of narcissism’. In the Russian culture of the early 20th century narcissism was something more than just an artistic device. In some way narcissism was a response to the nihilism of the epoch. It was the symbol of instability, direction in thinking and a form of existence in the world. and it had antinomies of the Silver Age such as reality and illusion, integration and fragmentation, life and death, subject and object, superficies and depth, activity and passivity, feminine beginning and male beginning, spirituality and physicality, common sense and mental disorder and etc. Narcissism of the epoch had an impact and on the form of artwork, too. Modernism was characterized by narcisstic interest towards language, metaphors, epigrammatism, radical disturbances of the linear pattern of the narrative and the tendency towards subjective distortions. The main feature of the present research is that it is interdiscursive, i.e. open for interactions between philosophy and literature, psychoanalysis, history and art. The dialectic method used in the research is inseparable from the culturalhistorical, comparative-historical and historical-philosophical research methods. The historical-philosophical method is used to analyze artwork in order to reconstruct spiritual and social concepts. Therefore, in the Russian culture of the early 20th century narcissism was something more than just an artistic device. It was the symbol of instability, direction in thinking or a form of existence in the world. We can define intellectual, esthetic, erotic, political, legal and other forms of narcissism and describe narcissism as the element of poetics and etc.

Keywords: narcissus, narcissism, the God complex, Fyodor Sologub, beauty, Salome, Christopher Lash, Zinaida Gippius, Lev Tolstoy, Andreev.

Abstract: Cassirer develops his own concept of the philosophy of language in the first four chapters of the first volume of his ‘Philosophy of Symbolic Forms’. There he successively views the functioning of the language at the stage of sensual and emotional expression and offers a definition of language at the initial stage of the development of the Russian society as an expression of the movement. Cassirer refers to psychological and esthetical researches carried out by J. Engel already in the 19th century as well as Wundt’s ‘Language’. The concept is based on the idea that the initial movement and the feeling of the movement create the circle of terms defining the content of consciousness and consciousness, in its turn, is only a sum of ‘connections’ and states. In addition, Cassirer appeals to German Kogen’s ideas who also viewed the movement and the feeling of the movement as the element and the main factor in the creation and development of human consciousness. The research methodology is based on the analysis of Ernst Cassirer’s works and critical literature about Cassirer. The author has been carrying out the aforesaid analysis for over 10 years. The author of the article shows that Cassirer reconstructs the evolution of the term ‘language’ from the mimic and analogous stage through the stage of symbolic expression to the language of terms and conceptual thinking up to the abstract forms of the modern scientific language. Due to the fact that Cassirer ‘breaks’ the integral universal of human culture into a number of autonomous spheres including language, he constantly compares language with myth, religion, art and science in order to clarify the role and place of language among all other phenomena of human culture.

Keywords: Ernst Cassirer, language, phenomenology of language, philosophy of language, human, culture, symbol, consciousness, sign, symbolic form.

Abstract: Addressing to the literature of the 19th – 20th centuries, a famous researcher Grigory Konson uses significant art material in order to reveal the phenomenon of human destructiveness. Images of the main characters of different literary works show that some people have neither conscience nor compassion. Such people generally have a rather powerful destructive nature. In this regard, the author of the present review analyzes the phenomenon of catastropism in personal consciousness. The author also raises a question about a very fine line between the norm and pathology. The author of the review appeals to the works of a famous essay writer of the early last century Max Nordau who was nearly the first one in the humanities to talk about the degradation of the humanity that influenced the minds and feelings of people. The author of the review uses the historical method allowing to trace back the sources and development of fatal anti-humanistic tendencies in modern culture along with Grigory Konson. The author of the review also uses the phenomenological method in order to provide a full description of the phenomenon of degradation based on the analysis of Grigory Konson’s book. The novelty of the research is defined by the fact that Grigory Konson’s thesis was the first one in Russian literature to provide a full and versatile research of the phenomenon of the murdering intellect. In this regard the analysis of the dual conscience syndrome is of particular interest. The author of the review also underlines the special role of the moral opposition to the public psychopathic temptation.

Keywords: language studies, catastophism, degradation, mental health, psychiatry, neurasthenia, pathology, decay of personality, passions, tragedy of personality.