The category and phenomenon of the prototype in the context of the phenomenological-dialectical concept of A. F. Losev and the phenomenology of the poetic imagination of G. Bashlyar

Dubovitskii Viacheslav PhD in Philosophy Senior lecturer at the Russian State Social University 129226, Russia, g. Moscow, ul. Vil'gel'ma Pika, 4, stroenie 1 fenaur25@mail.ru Other publications by this author

1.     The prototype in the phenomenological-dialectical concept of the art form by A. F. Losev

In the Dialectic of the Art Form, distinguished by scholastic discipline and precision of thought, A. Losev, along with other aesthetic problems, addresses one of the key problems of the philosophy of art – its primitive, archetypal foundations. An essential, if not the main role in Losev's understanding of aesthetic and artistic phenomena is played by the concept of expression, which Losev developed, in particular, under the influence of the works of E. Husserl and B. Croce. The concept of the prototype, which occupies perhaps the main place in Losev's "Dialectic of Artistic Form", was not something fundamentally new. It is clearly inscribed in the historical and philosophical, as well as theological tradition, which will be discussed below. However, the combination of logical, phenomenological, linguistic aspects of expression with the ontological models of Neoplatonists is, perhaps, quite original in Losev's teaching about expression in general and about artistic form in particular.

Losev, in the Preface to his "Dialectics of Art Form", which was published in 1927, wrote: "This small work is trying to fill the gap existing in Russian science in the field of dialectical teaching about art form" ^{[1, p. 3]}. Losev is interested here, in fact, in the "logical layer", the logic of art. Losev calls his method phenomenological-dialectical. We will not go into the topic of Losev's understanding of the phenomenological method and phenomenology in general, especially in the context of Husserl's phenomenology, although Losev himself says that he uses the phenomenological method in Husserl's understanding (however, Losev in a certain sense already found the phenomenological method in Plato [see: 2, pp. 309-365]). For Losev, phenomenology, revealing phenomena in their specifics, is a preparatory stage of dialectics. "Phenomenological vision", unlike physical vision, Losev notes, fixes its subject in such a way that "... sees its semantic structure, independent of randomness and diversity" ^{[3, p. 160]}. Dialectics builds an explanatory analysis of the categorical structure of the phenomenon, linking it with others. Thus, Losev considers the art form, first of all, as an eidos, consistently deducing it as a category from the very source of dialectics and ontology – the One.

Losev brings an essential ontological meaning to the understanding of the aesthetic, using the terminology and thinking models of Neoplatonists: the tetractyde ratio meaning (the sphere of essence) with the other is what allows us to talk about expression and form. And in the best traditions of dialectics, Losev characterizes the expression as "a kind of active self-transformation of the inner into the outer", "the self-identical difference between the inner and the outer" ^{[4, p. 423]}. Bypassing all subjective prerequisites, exposing the "skeleton", the "logical bonds" of the artistic form, Losev also turns to the existential foundations of the artistic and aesthetic. This "ontological bias" in the aesthetics of early Losev was criticized. In this criticism, it was, in particular, that Losev's ontological interpretation of the category of expression does not allow identifying the specifics of aesthetic expression [see: 5, p. 24]. It should be noted, however, that the ontological interpretation of the sphere, which since the time of A. Baumgarten has been called aesthetic, is a very long and stable tradition dating back to antiquity. We find the same ontological interpretation in the Russian religious and philosophical tradition. It is enough to recall the "schemes of aestheticism" by K. Leontiev and P. Florensky. Florensky, comparing his scheme with Leontiev's scheme, says: "There beauty is only a shell, the outermost of the various "longitudinal" layers of being, and here it is ... a force that permeates all layers across" ^{[6, p. 586]}. Ontologism, although in a different theoretical model, was also a landmark for the European aesthetics of the 20th century. It is enough to refer to the works of M. Heidegger, H.-G. Gadamer, especially to his criticism of the abstraction of aesthetic consciousness. Losev, in his interpretation of the aesthetic, relied on the concept of Croce, in which expression is identified with intuitive acts of the spirit, in which one or another form is given to the expressed, and an aesthetic or artistic fact turns out to be intuitive (expressive) cognition. What is remarkable here is that Croce, dissociating himself from the understanding of art as a refined sphere, immerses it in the general expressive element of the spirit, without even singling out aesthetic expression in a special sphere ^{[7, pp. 11-19]}. In general, it should be understood that the aesthetic in the ontological sense is a specific ratio of different layers of being, their expression of one in another, and hence the totality of all expressive forms of being. The graceful plasticity of a tiger, a panther are aesthetic phenomena that exist as an expression, a bodily expression of the physiological and mental layers of being. Abstracting from any expediency of this plastic (the perspective outlined in the methodology of I. Kant), but not from this plastic itself as a sensually perceived biological reality, we contemplate it as an aesthetic phenomenon. Max Scheler noticed: "But already in plant existence there is a proto-phenomenon of expression, a certain physiognomy of the internal states of the plant: stunted, strong, lush, pathetic, etc. " The expression "is just the proto-phenomenon of life..." ^{[8, p. 36]}. Understanding the aesthetic in such a perspective captures the richest primordial connections of aesthetic phenomena with various layers of being, opening up diverse ways of cognition of these phenomena. The ontological logic of aesthetic and artistic in Losev's "Dialectic of Artistic Form" is one of such ways. The search for the specifics of the aesthetic in the ways of its "purification" from all other expressive forms of being would lead to the loss of all existential connections and the foundations of the aesthetic.

There is another important aspect in Losev's understanding of aesthetic phenomena, which should be paid special attention to. Losev speaks about the expressive power of meaning, about essence as semantic energy: "The expression, or form, of essence is an essence becoming in another, invariably flowing with its semantic energies" ^{[1, p. 13]}. This view, obviously inscribed in the tradition of Orthodox name-worship, gives a special tonality to the concept of art form, since it emphasizes the moment of energy, ultimately, the energy of the impact of the art form, more precisely, the impact of its semantic energy. This is no longer just representation and mimesis, which are carried out in any artistic form and always imply (in one mode or another) the absence of its object, but a transmission that is unrepresentative and is the direct action of the energy of meaning. (A kind of dialectic of representation and transmission in the works of N. Gogol is considered by M. Yampolsky ^{[9, pp.404-421]}).  

In the concept of Losev's artistic form, the category of the prototype is fundamentally important, to which all of the above directly relates. Losev's concept of the prototype is phenomenological–dialectical in terms of methodology and ontological in terms of content. This concept, as well as, in general, the concept of artistic form, is built according to the canons of the ontology of Neoplatonism and has a truly scholastic clarity and discipline of thought. In current publications devoted to the subject of the prototype, this concept is not given due attention. We are talking, as a rule, about Jung's analytical psychology, about the deep foundations of culture, about the deep foundations of the semiosphere, and only in this context - about ontology. For example, V. B. Malyshev understands primordial images as "... representations of the transcendental foundations of ways of activity that are characteristic of a certain epoch and are manifested in language" ^{[10, p. 80]}. Of course, all these approaches are quite legitimate and reveal various facets of the primordial element. But Losev shows how, in a purely philosophical reflection based on classical ontology, the category of the prototype arises with dialectical necessity. It seems appropriate to apply this concept to the artistic material that meets it. This will allow, without denying the culturological, psychological approaches, and even partially using them, to reveal the primordial element of art at the metaphysical level.

The Greek word arhetupon has a rather definite meaning – the prototype (the original, the original image), the original, the original. However, having entered the Christian tradition through Platonism and Neoplatonism, this term, especially in the polemics of iconoclasts and icon-worshippers, acquired a number of shades. According to this tradition, there is an ontological connection between the image and the prototype (God, heavenly forces), not a conventionally symbolic one, but an ontological one. Plotinus pointed out this connection in the context of his own concept, arguing that the image is produced by the prototype and cannot exist separately. Responding to possible opponents, Plotinus remarked: "... perhaps you will take as an example the image created by the painter, but this will be an inappropriate example, because here it is not the original that produces its image, but the painter. Moreover, such an image is not in the strict sense an image of the prototype, even if someone paints his own portrait, because even here it is not (by itself) the body of the painter that draws and not the form reproduced in the drawing (it depicts itself in it). Such a portrait is even more correct to consider the result of the combination and arrangement of colors, in which the painter himself is absent, because there is no reproduction of the image at all, such as happens in a mirror, in water, in the shade, where the image in the strict sense of the word flows from the previous prototype and in its absence cannot exist, namely, in our opinion, the lower forces originate from the higher ones" ^{[11, pp. 158-159]}. The image in such a natural, non-man-made art is not created by the artist, but appears in the literal sense as a reflection, or shadow of the prototype, in a certain sense as its natural photo. Poetic intuition is able to capture and convey the subtleties of this art, which creates not simulacra, detached from reality, but integral, indivisible paintings. In V. Nabokov's novel "The Gift" we find such intuition. The fence that once protected the parking lot of a traveling circus was reassembled in such a way that the images of animals on the boards randomly shuffled, breaking up into component parts: "... here is a zebra's leg, there is a tiger's back, and someone's croup is adjacent to someone else's inverted paw: the promise of life of the coming century was restrained in relation to the fence, but the destruction of earthly images on it destroyed the earthly value of immortality; at night, however, little could be discerned, and the exaggerated shadows of leaves (there was a lantern nearby) lay on the fence boards quite meaningfully, in order - this served as some compensation, especially since they could not be transferred to another in any way place, along with the boards, breaking and confusing the pattern: they could only be transferred on it entirely, along with the whole night" ^{[12, p. 159]}. Non-man-made images (reflections, shadows) can exist on any material medium, but at the same time potentially they also exist outside of matter. In the context of the ideas of icon-worshippers, among whom were such prominent image theorists as the Rev. John of Damascus, Rev. Theodore the Studite, Patriarch Nikephoros, such an understanding of the image has an essential ontological meaning. The original, the prototype, is in the image not in essence, but in likeness. But this connection cannot be broken: the shadow (image) is always potentially present together with the original. Such an image reveals, makes an archetype visible, it is not just an image that somehow refers to the archetype (such a limitation of images was at the center of Plato's criticism of mimetic arts), but a special form of expression of the original. It is this ontologism that is essential in Losev's understanding of the art form. However, for icon–worship theorists, like Plotinus, the primordial image is the cause of the image: the image cannot be an image proper if it is not attributed to the archetype that precedes the image, does not depend on it and is its cause. In this sense, the images themselves cannot be called the statues of pagan gods, since their originals do not exist.  Nicephorus says: "The image refers to the prototype, as an effect to the cause" [Cit. according to: 13, p. 473]. Such an ontological understanding of the image among iconoclasts, which after the cessation of iconoclastic polemics was actually canonized in the Byzantine Orthodox tradition, is in the context of understanding art as a means, although very important in cult practice, but still a means.

Losev is interested in art in its specifics, that is, an art form that can, and in Losev's concept should be self-sufficient. Losev does not understand the art form in such a way that it is imitation in the order of existence: "Until an art form is created," Losev writes, "there can be no question of a prototype. [...]. The artist creates the form, but the form itself creates its own prototype. The artist creates one definite thing, and it turns out that there are two spheres of being at once, because the something he creates is just the identity of two spheres of being, the image and the prototype at the same time" ^{[1, p. 67]}. The creative act of the artist makes it possible to open up to what lies beyond this act itself. Fundamentally significant in this case is Losev's concept of the game, which has a purely ontological meaning for him and does not directly include the subjectivity of the artist, the recipient. Several decades later, H.-G. Gadamer in his work "Truth and Method" will turn to the topic of the ontology of the game, implying not the subjectivity of the creator or recipient, but "the way of being of the work of art itself." Explicating the ontological meaning of the game, Gadamer focuses on the metaphorical use of this word. The play of colors, the play of light, the play of waves, the play of words – such word usage, as Gadamer shows, characterizes the game as "... making a movement as such. So, we are talking, for example, about the play of colors, and in this case we do not assume at all that there is a certain paint playing with another; we mean a single process or kind that shows a changing variety of colors" ^{[14, p. 149]}. In this understanding of the game, any goal outside of this movement itself is excluded. Several decades earlier, Losev had actually substantiated the ontological meaning of the game in relation to art. Speaking about the fact that the primordial image in art "plays" with itself with the help of reason and sensuality, Losev clearly considers the primordial image as a kind of regulatory idea (but not the cause) of the image, since in the artistic form "... all this circulation of meaning in the sensory sphere and sensuality in the semantic sphere is carried out under the guidance of the primordial image, which all the time it is present both in the mind and in sensuality, directing them to each other and forcing the first one to draw on the second drawing, and the second, according to its inherent sense of becoming ... to spread ... abstract meaning and thereby be for him the material of the semantic drawing emanating from him" ^{[1, p. 85]}. However, this game, no matter how stormy it may be, is still the greatest calmness and contemplation. All these storms in the sensory and intellectual worlds, born by the prototype, are only his play with himself. V. Bychkov accurately notices in Losev's phenomenological and dialectical methodology a naked, really essential feature inherent in art: "Here Losev managed to reveal the most important and most general law of art… A work of art, according to Losev, does not "reflect" anything except itself; it does not mean anything except itself… It is self-valuable and self-sufficient" ^{[15, p. 897]}. The monk-artist, in fact, Gogol himself says in The Portrait: "A hint of a divine, heavenly paradise is enclosed for a person in art, and for that alone it is already above everything. And how many times is the solemn peace above all the excitement of the world ... [...]. For in order to calm and reconcile everyone, a high creation of art descends into the world. It ... strives eternally to God with a sounding prayer" ^{[16, pp. 170-171]}. However, art itself is not a sermon (Gogol was well aware of this), and if art "strives eternally to God", then in this aspiration it does not cease to be art, that is, a completely autonomous "play of the prototype with itself", despite the most diverse "piles", layers of the material raised here.

In The Dialectic of Myth, Losev speaks of the dialectical necessity of an ideal world. The ultimate, infinite degree of realization of an idea, assumed in all its (idea's) real realizations, is a dialectical necessity, that is, a condition for the conceivability of all possible realizations of an idea. The ultimate object of this conceivability, the limit of "every possible completeness and wholeness of embodiment" turns out to be "... an intelligent figurativeness of meaning, which has absorbed the alogy of becoming and through that has become precisely something intelligent-corporeal ..." ^{[4, p. 549]}. This idea of sophistry gives the prototype another meaning. The fact that the artistic form is a prototype also means for Losev that in this hypostasis it is a kind of "intelligent body", assuming, of course, not perception or even imagination based on the combination of sensory forms, but spiritual contemplation, a kind of, if I may say so, "pure imagination", which obviously has something akin to the intellectual intuition of Rene Descartes. Descartes wrote about the limitations of people whose mind is unable to go beyond the imagination attached to sensory realities: "At the same time, they do not know that such substances are only consisting of extension, movement and figures, and that there are many other intelligible substances; they also do not assume the possibility of the existence of anything else, except for bodies, and, finally, the possibility of the existence of imperceptible bodies" ^{[17, p. 346]}.

Around the same years when Losev was creating his "Octateuch", K. Jung was creating his analytical psychology, an essential component of which was the concept of the prototype, the archetype. The primordial image in Jung's concept has an archaic in its origins (coincides with mythological motives), unconscious and timeless character. The primordial image is the "echo of the primitive world", the "primordial image" that "... underlies the imagery of art" ^{[18, p. 25]}. This is the "original", "primary", "primordial" image, rooted in archaic impersonal structures of the psyche, instinctively producing mythological plots. These primordial images, not determined by factors beyond their control and therefore self-sufficient, limit the most violent imagination, directing it in accordance with the "primordial schemes", which in artistic creativity are a kind of a priori basis of an artistic image. According to Jung, in its autonomy, "... the original image is an expression of its own and unconditional creative power of the spirit" ^{[19, p. 542]}. Losev's concept and Jung's concept are two theoretical models of the primordial, primordial element – respectively, ontological (phenomenological-dialectical in its methodology) and profoundly psychological. The first substantiates the primordial image as a structural unit of being, the second – as a structural unit of the archaic layer of the psyche. In the "Dialectic of Art Form" Losev really succeeded in a purely philosophical reflection to identify and substantiate the role of the primordial element in the formation and existence of the phenomena of art, without which the art form could not have found its autonomy.

2.     Spaces of primordial images

"... the dream is the only guide at the entrance to the holy of holies" (Novalis, "Disciples in Sais")

The theme of the prototype in art is presented in an original and fruitful way in the "Poetics of Space" by Gaston Bachelard. If for Losev phenomenology is a preparatory stage of dialectics, then for Bachelard "phenomenology of poetic imagination" is a completely self-sufficient study. In the further presentation of the topic, we will focus on the phenomenology of poetic imagination, without losing sight of the essential provisions of Losev's phenomenological-dialectical concept, as well as its contextual connections, which were mentioned above. Bachelard believes that the connection of the image, "a new poetic image with a certain archetype dormant in the depths of the unconscious", "is not causal in the exact sense of the word" ^{[20, p. 7]}. The poetic image is not an echo, not a consequence of the past, on the contrary, "... the power of the image awakens echoes in the distant past ..." ^{[20, p. 7]}. Bashlyar speaks about the "direct ontology" of the poetic image, about its independent existence, calling the poetic image, with all its variability, "a flash of being in the realm of imagination" ^{[20, p. 8]}.

Primordial images are beyond the realm of direct sensuality and they are given not in perception, but in contemplation, or even in a dream(dream is one of the most significant concepts in the phenomenology of Bachelard's poetic imagination). The dream here should be understood, of course, not as a barren and vague fantasy, but as a kind of contemplative pathos in which the primordial images are revealed. The primordial image, "raising whole heaps of sensual material and meaningful connections," as Losev said, remains itself and does not have a sensual image. A dream is not a sentimental reverie, but a penetrating look beyond the limits of the present and the finite. The dream, Bachelard notes, "... rushes away from the nearest object, and soon finds itself already far away from here, in the space of the otherworldly... the dream, one might say, represents primary contemplation" ^{[20, p. 269]}. Primacy here means primordial, not integrated into reality. We are dealing here with a directly experienced mythology, which does not have a distinct iconicity and clarity of linguistic formulas, but only spontaneously outlines the main mythological motifs, these primordial primordial schemes of life. The thematic field of the primordial element in Bachelard's research is as diverse as it has been familiar for a long time: a dream, a dream, "eternal childhood", poetry of the past, the neikos and filia of the world elements, home, the primordial habits ...The primordial images are not objective, they do not reflect something concrete in the world, they are revealed in the first experiences, -the experiences of the faces of being, - divine and demonic, native and frighteningly alien. Various primordial images, intersecting in one or another plot, reveal a rich, ambiguous palette of images and experiences.  

The phenomenology of the round

"The Phenomenology of the Round" is what Bashlyar called the last chapter of his book "The Poetics of Space". Revealing here one of the facets of the phenomenology of poetic imagination, Bachelard departs from geometric imagery and starts from the idea of roundness existing in our soul, that is, from the primary image of roundness. Citing statements about the round philosopher, artist, poet, fabulist, Bachelard brings them to the utmost phenomenological purity: "Being is round." We are talking here about the "primary images of being", which have a non-empirical origin and refer to the primary way of life of the inner world of man. Baschliar quotes Rilke's lines, then explaining the phenomenological picture that opens up in them:

                          «…  This round bird cry

                           Resting in the moment that generates it,

                           Huge as the sky over a withered forest,

                          Everything obediently fits into this cry,

                          The whole landscape seems to rest in it."

"The round cry of a round creature," says Bachelard, "turns the sky into a dome. And in the rounded landscape, everything seems to be resting. A round being spreads roundness, it spreads the peace inherent in any roundness" ^{[20, p. 339]}. 

         In our study of the primordial element of art, we will turn to the texts of N. Gogol. Andrei Bely noted that one of the features of Gogol's artistic world is "the reincarnation of characters and themes from one story to another" ^{[21, p. 7]}. Indeed, the primordial, archetypal element literally permeates the diversity of Gogol's characters and plots. 

The round as a primary image, as a primordial image that reveals being, can have many "incarnations", "derivatives", revealing itself only in one or another expressive element, "playing" with itself. We find one of his faces in the "Sorochinskaya Fair". Here, as in many of Gogol's early works, the spiritual, which has not yet realized itself, exists in the corporeal itself, in nature. This artistic pantheism of Gogol deserves special attention. Here is just one of his plots: "How delightful, how luxurious a summer day in Little Russia is! How torturously hot are those hours when noon shines in silence and heat, and the blue, immeasurable ocean, bending over the earth like a voluptuous dome, seems to have fallen asleep, all drowned in bliss, embracing and squeezing the beautiful in its airy embrace! There is no cloud on it. There is no speech in the field. Everything seems to have died; only above, in the heavenly depths, a lark trembles, and silver songs fly down the air steps to the land in love, and occasionally the cry of a seagull or the sonorous voice of a quail reverberates in the steppe" ^{[22, p. 20]}. This image, which is on the verge of iconicity (of the elements and the most ancient gods – Uranus and Gaia), is filled with a noonday erotic yearning, as if gone into itself, in the brilliance and silence of a sultry afternoon. This picture, existing only, to use Bachelard's expression, in the "cosmic imagination", in its self-sufficiency does not accept anything from the outside, and there is nothing outside of it, and that is why this image closes everything into its circle and fills the beholder with amazing longing and peace, conveyed in this very mytho-poetic experience. This image is complemented by the motif of the mirror (river), which endlessly reproduces all this self-sufficient harmony.

In the "Old-World Landlords" we find the same prototype of the round, but in a different non-event material: "Sometimes I like to go for a moment into the sphere of this extraordinarily secluded life, where no desire flies over the palisade surrounding a small courtyard, behind the fence of the garden..." ^{[23, p. 9]}. And Gogol admonishes us, "marveling" at the constancy of the life of Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulcheria Ivanovna and the "long", "hot" sadness of the bucolic Afanasy Ivanovich for the deceased Pulcheria Ivanovna: "Which is stronger over us: passion or habit? […]. Whatever it was, but at that time all our passions seemed childish to me against this long, slow, almost insensitive habit" ^{[23, p. 38]}. Yu. Lotman noticed that in the "Old–World Landlords" the inner world of the heroes is achronic: "It is closed from all sides, has no direction, and nothing happens in it. All actions are not related to the past and not to the present, but represent a multiple repetition of the same thing" ^{[24, p. 25]}. This circularity, this "long, slow, almost insensitive habit" is not a consequence of repetition, on the contrary, it determines this repetition itself as a mental mood and rhythm. It is in this sense that Bachelard's words about the paradoxical nature of habit can be understood: "... a habitual, repetitive action has primordial nature" ^{[20, p. 123]}.

The "roundness" of Gogol's plot was noted by A. Bely: "In the "Inspector" and "Marriage" the plot is a circle; Podkolesin ends up where he started; in the "Inspector" the last phenomenon returns to the first... not from the spot! In "from nowhere," adds A. Bely, "the whole force of the explosion, as a result of which the action is interrupted by a pantomime, the petrification of heroes forever and ever!" ^{[21, p. 20]}. This interruption of action as the transformation of life into a painting, or into a sculpture, could become a separate theme of primary images. The "picture" again refers to the "movement", and the "movement" refers to the "picture", and in this cycle you can even feel some cosmic rhythms. Moreover, in this game of the prototype with itself, the very picture of the petrification of life is important, the pantomime of which can take a variety of forms, and the power of influence, the energy of the prototype, revealed in the specifics of plots and images, is important. This primordial image can be revealed both in the "silent scene" in the "Inspector", and in the transformation of the church into a virtual ruin ("Viy"): "So the church remained forever, with monsters stuck in the doors and windows, overgrown with forest, roots, weeds, wild thorns, and no one will find a way to it now" ^{[23, p. 262]}. A. Bely wrote that Gogol used "a method of killing movement". However, Gogol's movement, rather, does not mortify and does not stop, but passes into a plastic picture, continuing to carry all its energy. Particularly interesting in this case is the "silent scene" of the "Inspector", to which Gogol himself attached great importance. In the "Forewarning for those who would like to play the "Inspector" properly," Gogol, putting the mayor in the center of the "silent scene", wrote: "The announcement of the arrival, finally, of a real auditor is a thunderbolt for him. He is petrified... and around him the whole active group forms in an instant a petrified group in different positions. This whole scene is a silent picture, and therefore it must be composed in the same way as living (my italics. – V. D.) paintings are composed. Every person should be assigned a pose consistent with his character, with the degree of his fear and with the shock that the words that announced the arrival of the real auditor should produce. [...]. At first it will come out forcibly and will look like automatons, but then, after several rehearsals, as each actor enters deeper into his position, this pose will be assimilated to him and will become natural (my italics. – V. D.) and belonging to him. The woodiness and awkwardness of the automata will disappear, and it will seem as if a numb picture came out by itself" ^{[25, p. 145]}.  It is significant that, describing this scene, Gogol understands "numbness" not as "mortification", but as "petrification", but still with an emphasis on the fact that this picture is alive, natural, and therefore has the energy of impact. M. Yampolsky discusses this topic in the context of the history and theory of representation, rightly noting: "A silent scene is described by Gogol as the result of a stopped movement. Without movement, the genesis of this scene is impossible. [...]. The news of the arrival of a real auditor paralyzes the movement of the characters and thus expresses their essence" ^{[9, p. 411]}. Gogol is talking not just about the stopped movement, but about the quintessence and crystallization of life in this picture.

Continuing the theme of the "phenomenology of the round" and turning to Gogol's cosmology (the thematic field of primordial images can be divided only with a certain degree of conditionality, the themes intersect, are included in each other), it should also be said about the motive of reflection, mutual circulation, which was important for Gogol. From a number of examples, we will only point to a picture from the "Ganz Kuchelgarten", idylls in paintings – an early work by Gogol:

Everything turned out captivatingly

Upside down in silver water:

The fence, and the house, and the garden in it are so well.

Everything moves in silver water:

The vault is turning blue, and the waves are rolling,

And the forest is alive, but it doesn't make noise ^{[22, p. 307]}.      

In this, to use Bachelard's expression, "cosmic narcissism", when the world sees its reflection, there is no striving outside, this landscape together with its mirror image becomes a world frozen in a circle of constant return to itself. There is no geometry here, but there is an experience, more precisely, the first experience, the primary image of the round, the image is completely unempirical and based on the rhythmic pulsations of life itself, the desire for self-representation. In relation to this foundation, even the archetype of the mirror will be close, but still already an otherworldly material.

Gogol 's Cosmology

In Bachelard we find a remarkable observation in the field of the phenomenology of poetic imagination. He says that in poetry the familiar world can become a "magnificent cosmic miniature", and "the big is compatible with the small" ^{[20, p. 254]}. "There is a correlation between the macrocosm and the microcosm" ^{[20, p. 251]}.

We find one of these cosmic miniatures at the beginning of the story "The Night before Christmas": "The last day before Christmas has passed. A clear winter night has come. The stars looked out. The month rose majestically into the sky to shine a light on good people and the whole world, so that everyone would have fun caroling and praising Christ. […]. Not a single crowd of boys has yet appeared under the windows of the huts; for a month alone he only peeped into them stealthily, as if summoning the girls who were dressing up to run out more quickly into the sticky snow. Then smoke fell in clouds through the chimney of one hut and went like a cloud across the sky, and together with the smoke a witch rose riding on a broom" ^{[22, pp. 143-144]}. This witch, having risen so high that she seemed like a "black speck" from below, collected stars from the sky and gathered their "full sleeve". And soon the devil appeared in the sky and hid the month in his pocket. The space of space is huge, but in the poetic imagination, in "cosmic poetry" it becomes in a certain sense close and even habitable. In such a space, the witch casually descends to the ground: "... raising her hands up, she put her foot aside and, having put herself in such a position as a person flying on skates without moving a single joint, she descended through the air, as if on an icy sloping mountain, and straight into the pipe" ^{[22, p. 156]}. Despite the huge height of the flight on the line, everything around looks somehow close and accessible: in order not to catch the month with a hat, Vakula bends over, a sorcerer flies past him in a pot, the stars play blind man's buff, a broom flies .... The village is part of the cosmos, the cosmos is part of the village. The flight of the witch, the flight of the Vakula on the line do not transcend the earthly space, everything is enclosed in a kind of "magnificent cosmic miniature", and the earthly and cosmic are not just correlative, but also mutually reversible in the poetic imagination. The first experience of power, the greatness of the cosmos, the heavenly bodies and their involvement is transformed in this primordial game into a "magnificent cosmic miniature".

In the "Vie" in the flight scene there is a special world, the space of which is filled with an unearthly dream, in which there is a truly cosmic Eros. The philosopher Homa Brutus in a metaphysical dream "sees" a mermaid: "... the back and leg flashed, convex, elastic, all created from brilliance and trembling... her face, with bright, sparkling, sharp eyes, invading the soul with a stump... and now she tipped over on her back, and her cloudy peaches, matte, like porcelain, not covered with glaze, they shone before the sun along the edges of their white, elastically delicate circumference. Water in the form of small bubbles, like beads, sprinkled them. She is all trembling and laughing in the water..." ^{[23, p. 223]}. Heinrich in Novalis' novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen has a dream in which cosmic Eros also appears in the play of the elements: "He desired irresistibly, he longed for ablution and, undressing, plunged into the lake. A heavenly feeling overflowed his soul, as if the evening dawn washed him with its brilliance, countless thoughts sought to blissfully combine in him, unprecedented unknown images were born in him, merged and, already visible, rushed around him; and the waves of the intoxicating element, like tender persias, clung to him. It seemed that girlish charms were dissolved in the stream, delighting for a moment with their physicality, as soon as they come into contact with a young man" ^{[26, p. 9]}. The dreams of Homa and Henry reveal quite similar faces of cosmic Eros, in which the panpsychic dissolves the experience, the first experience of the unity of man and the elements, the primordial the unity of the human and cosmic soul, the experience of the primordial world. The deepest force that is awakened here by the primordial image revealed in the image is neither cause nor effect, and the artistic form, being both an image and a prototype, does not refer to anything, but reveals, expresses this force in itself as an effective factor in the deep life of the soul. Here, in an artistic, poetic image, "... the creation of the innermost beginnings" takes place ^{[26, p. 56]}.

In "Old World Landlords" the narrator says about the mysterious call: "I confess, I have always been afraid of this mysterious call. I remember that as a child I often heard it: sometimes suddenly someone behind me clearly pronounced my name. The day was usually the clearest and sunniest at this time; not a single leaf in the garden on the tree moved, the silence was dead, even the grasshopper stopped at this time, not a soul in the garden; but, I confess, if the night was the most frenzied and stormy, with all the hell of the elements, overtook me alone among the impenetrable forest, I would not be so afraid of it as of this terrible silence, in the midst of a cloudless day" ^{[23, p. 39]}. Pan, the ancient natural god, was represented in the mythological consciousness as acting on a person in the natural silence. This god could be the "cause" of baseless fear, which is sometimes called panic. Let's call this fear "not human, but cosmic, anthropocosmic" (according to Bachelard). This silence permeating nature in itself, obviously, could be perceived as a theophany, a phenomenon of Pan. If we talk specifically about silence, then the word "perception", if we understand it in a psychophysiological sense, is not quite appropriate here. A different kind of sound background is perceived, in combination with which silence is contemplated. In this sense, silence is a "smart phenomenon". In this case, this contemplation has the character of horror. Let us recall what M. Heidegger said: "From what horror is not an inner-world being… The threat does not have the character of a certain specific harmfulness ... From which horror is completely indefinite. [...]. Threatening therefore cannot approach here in a certain direction within proximity, it is already "here" - and yet nowhere, it is so close that it squeezes and interrupts breathing – and yet nowhere… from what horror is the world as such" ^{[27, pp. 215-216]}.  In this primordial, archetypal contemplation, a person whose gaze is directed literally to "nowhere" finds himself face to face with the world (cosmos) as such, which here appears in the silence of the midday heat full of natural forces. This psychocosmic ecstasy was wonderfully conveyed by F. Tyutchev (for Tyutchev, this "hour" is midnight, but we understand that "the game of the prototype with itself", its non-existent derivatives do not detract from the impact of its semantic energy, in which the prototype itself is transmitted, that is, experienced):  

There is a certain hour of universal silence,

And in this hour of phenomena and miracles

The living Chariot of the universe

Openly rolling into the sanctuary of heaven

         This primordial image - the sacred silence of the universe – is not the cause of all its otherworldly "consequences". For the first time, He is only revealed in all these contemplations, experienced both in horror and in blissful fading. And yet, all these contemplations, finding their individual form, find their entelechy in this prototype, created together with the image, as if by itself, without any volitional efforts.

Bachelard quotes an excerpt from the novel d`Annunzio "Fire", where we are talking about the look of a hare: ""A hare sitting motionless in a moment of respite from his eternal worries contemplates fields over which steam rises. It is impossible to imagine a more reliable evidence of the deep calm reigning around. At this moment, the hare is a sacred animal to be worshipped"" ^{[20, p. 301]}. The gaze of a hare, Bachelard notes, contemplates not individual objects, but the world: "Yes, if a timid animal makes such a look, this is indeed a sacred moment of contemplation" ^{[20, p. 302]}.

All these primordial images related to the Cosmos, which do not exhaust this topic and intersect with other topics, are revealed in one or another artistic form.      

Anima

Here we turn to Gogol's story "The Terrible Revenge", which presents the life of the patriarchal collective. This story is one of those works in relation to which it is necessary to talk about what Jacques Rancier called "a literary and philosophical figure of the aesthetic unconscious." Rancier in his book "Aesthetic Unconscious" speaks about the "unconscious mode of thought" - the unconscious as a component of the aesthetic structure, especially effective in the territory of art and literature ^{[28, pp. 11-12]}. However, the "configuration of unconscious thought" in the field of literature and art, as well as the most important themes of Freud's psychoanalysis, are most closely connected with the theme of mythology, and therefore, one way or another, with the theme of archetypes, the collective unconscious. The aesthetic unconscious can manifest itself in one of the forms, in the words of Rancier, "mute speech", "unconscious discourse". About this speech, Rancier says that it "... no longer expresses the thoughts, feelings and intentions of the characters, but the thought of the "third character" who is constantly present in the dialogue, a collision with the Unknown, with anonymous and meaningless forces of life" ^{[28, p. 40]}. The union of the aesthetic unconscious with the unconscious revealed in Freud's psychoanalysis and Jung's analytical psychology, with all their differences, can contribute to the penetration into the primordial element of visionary works.

One of the figures of the unconscious in Jung's concept is the anima, the soul acquiring the qualities of male and female. The anima, according to Jung, is the "inner personality", the "inner face" of a person, "... that inner attitude, that character with which he is turned to the unconscious" ^{[19, p. 511]}, in contrast to the persona – an external attitude, a kind of "mask" that arose as a result of adaptation to the requirements of the collective, society. The anima complements the persona: there is something in the anime that is missing in the persona. Therefore, if a man has his "inner personality" - anima (female soul principle), then a woman has an "animus" (male soul principle). According to Jung, unconditional merging with an external role creates a cardinal dependence on the soul, more precisely, on the object into which the soul is projected. Such a mental image created by the unconscious can become an object of love, hatred or fear. Freudian analysis, one way or another, follows the path of biographization of fiction, while Jungian analysis turns to archetypal origins. However, with all the differences between these approaches, one can find something in common in them, which is important for our research. In "Creepy" Freud makes two significant remarks. Firstly, animism, various superstitions, etc. in the civilized world, as a whole, have been overcome. But nevertheless, all this can come back in different contexts. For example, when we take our reflection for someone else and only then understand it, this also includes the fear of the dead, etc. From this kind of creepy, the creepy that arises as a result of the return of repressed infantile experiences differs. As a result of a diverse analysis of the phenomenon of the creepy, Freud comes to an unexpected conclusion: "... the creepy (unheimlich) is in the old days native, long familiar. The prefix "not" (un) in this word is again a stigma of displacement" ^{[29, p. 277]}. The creepy is the "repressed habitual", but Freud in this case calls infantile complexes "habitual". There seems to be a watershed between these two kinds of creepy: one creepy is connected with the sphere of the archaic, collective unconscious, and the other with the personal unconscious. However, secondly, Freud speaks directly about the possibility of a close connection between the infantile-personal and the archaic in the psyche "... both types of the creepy presented here in the experience can not always be firmly separated. If we take into account that primitive beliefs are closely connected with infantile complexes and, in fact, are rooted in them, then this blurring of boundaries will not be very surprising" ^{[29, p. 279]}. It should also be noted that Freud, speaking of the "modified processing of the same material" in Sophocles' Oedipus and Shakespeare's Hamlet, points to the "difference in the mental life" of two different epochs. Is it only the personal unconscious that Freud is talking about here? The Oedipus complex itself is a synthesis of biological and symbolic, and any particular manifestation of it necessarily includes both, both matter (biological) and spirit (symbolic). If we free the symbolic (in the case of the Oedipus complex, as Jung believed, this audacious crime nomosa) from the biological, then (in the case of the Oedipus complex) the symbolic will become abstract, allegorical, at best one-sided socially oriented, and the archetypal plot will lose a lot of vivid colors. Therefore, in our opinion, it is not necessary to categorically oppose the approaches of Freud and Jung to each other, at least when referring to archetypal material.

"Terrible Revenge" tells about the life of a patriarchal collective, where identity and individuality are allowed only within the framework of differences of clans, religions and confessions. The primitive mental structure of the heroes of the story corresponds to the patriarchal world. Considering all of the above, it can be assumed that in this sense, the character of "Terrible Revenge" Katerina's father, endowed with demonic features, is a projection of the anima (animus) – the soul of Katerina. Katerina tells her husband her candid dream in which Katerina's father appears to her as a freak, before whom she trembles and whom she is afraid of.: "He said: Look at me, Katerina, I'm good! People are wrong to say that I am bad. I'll be a nice husband to you. Look how I look with my eyes! Then he directed his fiery eyes at me, I screamed and woke up" ^{[22, p. 217]}. The sorcerer father is a character in Katerina's dreams, which are as real as reality, in the sense that dreams still carry out repressed desires. In this sense, the dream world is a double of the real world, often, however, outwardly so unlike it (after all, dreams overcome any taboo, it is the patrimony of the collective and personal unconscious), and yet it is a double, like another face of Katerina's father. And it is not difficult for Pan Danilo to look "from the outside" into the world of Katerina's dreams, which are intertwined with reality. In the conditions of the fairy–tale world, looking out of the castle window from a tree, Danilo sees this other face (the subject of infantile fears and a caricature at the same time) of Katerina's father: "He looked into the face - and the face began to change: the nose stretched out and hung over the lips; the mouth in a minute expanded to the ears; the tooth looked out of the mouth, bent to the side and the same sorcerer who appeared at the wedding of yesaul stood in front of him" ^{[22, p. 222]}. Pan Danilo sees anima (soul) At the same time, he experiences a state that happens during a dream with explicit or implicit erotic content: "Here Danilo felt that his limbs were shackled; he tried to speak, but his lips moved without sound" ^{[22, p. 224]}. With all the difference in situations, the philosopher Homa Brutus in "Vie" experiences a similar state when, instead of a beauty, her double appears to him – a dirty old woman whose eyes "flashed with some extraordinary brilliance": "The philosopher wanted to push her away with his hands, but, to his surprise, noticed that his hands could not lift, his legs could not they moved, and he saw with horror that even the voice did not sound from his mouth: words moved without sound on his lips" ^{[23, p. 222]}.

If we follow the path of interpretation, we can assume that Katerina's dreams are Oedipal, both in the sense of Freud's personal unconscious, and in the sense that Jung gave incest as a symbol of breaking the taboo of the human race, which only gods are allowed to do. But in the "Terrible Revenge", incest, as Weiskopf believes, giving a wonderful symbolic explanation, "... means a pernicious return to the ancestral bosom – a prospect that plunges the heroine into the same confusion as a sorcerer – a meeting with his fascinating twin ancestors" ^{[30, p. 126]}. This is undoubtedly the primordial motif that Weiskopf finds in "Vie", calling this motif "... the dark reverse side of pantheism, which promises the irrevocable dissolution of the individual in the supra-personal generic element" ^{[30, p. 157]}. It is important that this "dissolution" is experienced, including in erotic tones, which not only powerfully colors the experience, but directly transcends it into the sphere of the non-personal, non-figurative, generic, spontaneous. A kind of culmination, a plastic picture of this "dissolution" is Katerina's crazy dance: "Like a bird, without stopping, she flew, waving her arms and nodding her head, and it seemed as if, exhausted, she would either fall to the ground or fly out of the world" ^{[22, p. 245]}.

The aesthetic unconscious is inscribed in the artistic text, and it can, as Rancier notes, come into conflict, say, with the unconscious Freudian. But, perhaps, in the fragment we are interested in now, the aesthetic unconscious opens the wings of the "theater of consciousness" in a completely Freudian spirit. Freud calls ambiguity a speech situation in which two meanings, "both intentions of speech" are expressed in the same word order. Katerina says to her husband: "Oh, how terrible my father is!" ^{[22, p. 226]}. "No, don't call him my father! He's not my father. God is my witness, I renounce him, I renounce the father. [...]. You are my father!" ^{[22, p. 227]}. (We meet something similar in the story "The Night before Christmas": Vakula says to Oksana: "What do I care about my mother? You are my mother and father..." ^{[22, p. 154]}). Let us venture here to give only a sketch of interpretation in a psychoanalytic manner, understanding at the same time that the aesthetic unconscious is so diverse, and most importantly, so directly vital, that any interpretation of it, or rather, translation into the mode of theory, will seem abstract. Here we will highlight the erotic intention of speech, assuming the other intention is quite obvious. Katerina: "How terrible my father is" (how scary to admit ...). Katerina: "Don't call him my father..." (a lover shouldn't be a father). "... I renounce my father" (in the name of erotic love, we must forget that he is the father). To her husband , Katerina unequivocally says: "You are my father!" (all the passion for the father is transferred to the husband). The feelings of disgust and fear that Katerina feels towards her father in this context should be understood in a spiritual sense: what should be in the shadow, what should not be obvious, suddenly comes out of the shadow and appears, and then there is a rotation and fear, seeking to distance the proximity of what should not be, but long familiar and even native. In the context of Freudianism, it is obviously permissible to say that through the image of the sorcerer, the erotic image of the father is displaced. However, the repressed remains capable. Returning in the image of a sorcerer, the repressed frightens, frightens, turns away. But Katerina, like all the heroes of the story, is archaic, she does not rise above the archetypal element, has no conscious relation to it. Katerina's anima says: "Poor Katerina! she does not know much of what her soul knows" ^{[22, p. 225]}. Katerina is immersed in the spiritual, ritual machinery of the life of an archaic collective. In this case, in this understanding, the image of the sorcerer is not the result of the work of repression and the return of the repressed, he is the product of archetypal primal experience, one of the structural units of the anima, in which the personal and collective, eroticism and archaic are merged into a single initially given whole. These two approaches complement each other.

The art form is a synthesis of the image and the prototype. Emphasizing one of these aspects of the art form will inevitably lead to abstraction instead of the living reality of imagination. It would be wrong to say that the primordial image is realized through the image. This character, this painting, created by the artist, directly in themselves carry out the primordial image, which could not exist, manifest itself otherwise than through this "otherworldly material". So, the "devilishly sweet" dream of "flight" in Gogol's "Vie", Katerina's dream in "Terrible Revenge" artistically carry out one or another prototype, but they carry it out completely uniquely.Uniqueness here has nothing to do with the author's instance. Weiskopf, conducting an intertextual analysis, notes about the compilative nature of the scene of witchcraft in the castle ("Terrible Revenge") that it is "... a kind of quotation book from Teak, Zhukovsky and Pogorelsky" ^{[30, p. 43]}. But after all, this intertextual analysis surpasses the simple understanding of the text as a set of quotations from previous texts and realizes "... interest in the deep semantics of Gogol's works" ^{[30, p. 6]}. It is in the artistic expression of this "deep semantics", which is not always associated with the originality of the author, that both the uniqueness of the image and the power of influence are concluded the prototype. And it is not the primordial image as such, namely, one or another – this art form becomes an integral part of the intimate history of the soul of an individual or an entire epoch.

In the "game of the prototype with itself", the art form has autarky – autonomy and self-sufficiency, including autonomy in relation to the sphere of psychology, both personal and collective. Bachelard noticed: "Such (here are actually artistic. – My note - V. D.) images should be perceived in their being, which is the reality of expressiveness. It is the poetic expressiveness that determines their existence. Their existence would become flawed if we wanted to relate them to any reality, even to any psychological reality. They subdue psychology. They do not correspond to any psychological impulse, except for the pure need for expression that arises in an idle moment of being ..." ^{[20, p. 262]}.  The primordial image, in whatever context it is revealed - in everyday, everyday, or in the fantastic, or even mystical – is the "pro-light" in which existence appears in its primordial state "in an idle moment of being." And the artistic form represents this pulsation, the "play of the prototype with itself", not allowing contemplation to slip either into the sphere of non-existent figurative material or into the archetypal sphere, closing contemplation in the sphere of expressiveness as such. But this expressiveness, being an aesthetic phenomenon, as mentioned above, does not abstract from connections with various layers of being, but on the contrary, to one degree or another concentrates them, collects, collides at first glance completely heterogeneous phenomena.