The Dialectics of Myth

THE DIALECTICS OF MYTH

Aleksei Fyodorovich Losev translated from the Russian by Vladimir Marchenkov First published in English 2003 by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Ave, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group First published in Moscow, 1930, in Russian as Dialektika mifa © Aleksei Fyodorovich Losev Translation © 2003 Vladimir Leonidovich Marchenkov Typeset in Galliard and Frutiger by Bookcraft Ltd, Stroud, Gloucestershire

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Losev, Aleksei Fedorovich [Dialektika mifa. English] The dialectics of myth / Aleksei Fyodorovich Losev; translated from the Russian by Vladimir Marchenkov. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Myth. I. Title BL312.L6713 2003 291.1'3–dc21 2003043199

ISBN 0–415–28467–8 CONTENTS

Translator’s acknowledgements ...... [1] Translator’s introduction: Aleksei Losev and his theory of myth [3]

The Dialectics of Myth Abbreviations ...... 2 Author’s preface ...... 3

I Myth is neither an invention nor a fiction nor a fantastic fabrication (7) II Myth is not ideal being (9) III Myth is neither a scientific nor, more specifically, a primitive scientific construction (13). 1. A certain mythology and a certain science may partially coincide with each other but they are never identical in principle (13). 2. Science is not born of myth but is always mythological (15). 3. Science can never destroy myth (18). 4. Myth is not based on scientific experience (20). 5. In contrast to mythology, pure science needs neither the absolute assurance of the existence of its object (22) nor the absolute assurance of the existence of its subject (23) nor con- clusive veracity (24). 6. There is a specific mythological veracity (26) IV Myth is not a metaphysicalconstruct (28). 1. The metaphysical approach is hampered by the immediate and sensuous nature of myth (28). 2. Metaphysics is scientific or science-like, whereas mythology is the object of immediate apprehension (31). 3. This specific feature of mythology is universal (including Christianity) (31). 4. Mythical detachment and the hierarchicalcharacter of myth (32) v CONTENTS

V Myth is neither schema nor allegory (34). 1. The concept of expressive form (34). 2. The dialectics of schema,allegory,and symbol (35). 3. Various strata of the symbol (41). 4. Examples of symbolic mythology (43); theories of colour (a) by Goethe (43) and (b) by Pavel Florenskii (45); (c) the objective nature of the mythology of colour (47); (d) the symbolic mythology of moonlight,electricity, etc. (48); (e) Andrei Belyi’s analysis of nature in Pushkin,Tyutchev, and Baratynskii (51) VI A myth is not a poetic work (55). 1. The similarity between myth and poetry with regard to expressive forms (55). 2. Similarity with regard to intelligence (56). 3. Similarity with regard to immediacy (57). 4. Similarity with regard to detachment (57). 5. The fundamental difference between myth and poetry with regard to the character of detachment (58). 6. (a) Poetry is possible without mythology (59) and (b) mythology is possible without poetry (60). 7. The essence of mythical detachment (61). 8. The principle of mythical detachment (63): (a) a new form of uniting things (63); (b) the original instinctive biological response to the world in myth (63); and (c) everything in the world is myth (65) VII Myth is a personalistic form (67). 1. Summary of the preceding discussion (67). 2. The basic dialectic of the concept of person (69). 3. Every living person is in the final analysis a myth (71). 4. Mythological-personalistic symbolism (71); the symbolism and mythology of (a) the sexes (71); (b) everyday objects and illnesses (74); (c) actions (75); (d) ‘physiological’ processes and ‘imagination’ (76); (e) the pulsating,non-uniform nature of mythical time and its differences in various religions (80). 5. An outline of the dialectic of mythical time (82). 6. Dreams (87). 7. Approaching a deeper understanding of the concept of myth (88) VIII Myth is not an exclusively religious creation (90). 1. The most general similarity and difference between mythology and religion (90). 2. The energistic and substantial character of religion (92). 3. Image and person in mythology; examples from the types of space in paint- ing (93). 4. Religion cannot help but generate myth (96)

vi CONTENTS

IX Myth is not religious dogma (100). 1. Myth is historical whereas dogma is absolute (100). 2. Mythical historicism (101). 3. Estab- lishing the concepts of religion,myth,and dogmatic theology (102). 4. Mythology and dogmatics of faith and knowledge (105). 5. On the mythology of materialism (110): (a) the extralogical nature of grounding (the materialist outlook) in sensation (110); (b) various conceptions of matter (111); (c) subjectivism (112); (d) matter as a principle of reality and theories of matter in modern physics (113); (e) abstract metaphysics,mythology,and dogmas in materialism (114). 6. The bourgeois mythology of materialism (115). 7. The types of materialism (119). 8. Mythology and dogma in the doctrines of (I) the subject and object (122),(II) idea and matter (124),(III) consciousness and being (124),(IV) essence and phenomenon (126),(V) soul and body (127),(VI) individualism and socialism (129),(VII) freedom and necessity (130),(VIII) infin - ity and finitude (130),(IX) absolute and relative (132),(X) eternity and time (133),(XI) whole and part (133),and (XII) one and many (134). 9. Conclusion (134) X Myth is not an historical event as such (136). 1. The natural-material stratum of history (136). 2. The stratum of consciousness and understanding (138). 3. The stratum of self-consciousness or the word (141) XI Myth is a miracle (143). 1. Introduction (143). 2. What is not miraculous? (145): (a) a miracle is not merely a manifestation of higher powers (145); (b) a miracle is not a violation of the ‘laws of nature’ (146). 3. Other theories of miracle (151). 4. The basic dialectic of miracle (152): (a) the encounter of two personalistic planes of being (152) that (b) may exist within the same person (152); (c) these are the external-historical plane and the plane of inner design (153); (d) the forms of their union (155); (e) miracle is the sign of the person’s eternal idea (156). 5. The purposefulness of miracle as compared with other types of purposefulness (159): (a) Kant on logical and aesthetic purposefulness (159); (b) the concept of personalistic purposefulness (161). 6. The original and specific character of mythical purposefulness (162): (a) as distinct from the particular functions of a person (162); (b) a person is indivisible (163);

vii CONTENTS

a miracle is neither (c) cognitive (163) nor (d) volitional (165) nor (e) aesthetic synthesis (166); (f) summary (166). 7. Real being is myth and miracle in variable proportion (167):(a) the memory of eternity (167) and (b) its individual manifestations in great and small things (168); (c) not the degree of miraculousness, but rather equal miraculousness of different objects (173) XII A review of all dialectical elements of myth from the standpoint of the concept of miracle (174). 1. Dialectical necessity (174). 2. It is not ideal being (175). 3. It has extrascientific and particular character and veracity of its own (175). 4. It is not metaphysics (175). 5. Symbolism (176). 6. Detachment (177). 7. Myth and religion (178):(a) the dialectical place of science, morality, and art (178); (b) parallel dialectic in myth – the dialectic of theology, ritual, and sacred history (179); (c) the essence of religion is not mythology but the sacraments (180); (d) religion is the background of mythology (181). 8. The essence of mythical historicism (182) XIII The final dialectical formula (185) XIV The transition to actual mythology and the idea of absolute mythology (189). 1. Dialectics is mythology and mythology is dialectics (190). 2. A review of the syntheses of absolute mythology (192). 3. Continued (195). 4. Summary (201) 5. A few examples of holistic myths from absolute mythology (202)

The chronology of A. F. Losev’s life and work ...... 207 Notes ...... 211 Bibliography ...... 219 Index ...... 225

viii TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the course of my work on this translation, Aza Alibekovna Takho-Godi’s encouragement has been most inspiring and evokes in me a feeling of gratitude that I find difficult to put into words. I also received most gener- ous help from James P. Scanlan, an ideal guide through the bilingual laby- rinth of Russian–English philosophical terminology, and editor of my attempts to render Losev’s untameable style into plausible English. I am also deeply grateful to Robert Bird, whose extraordinary talents and heroic unselfishness I have shamelessly exploited. I express heartfelt acknowledgement to Caryl Emerson for her invaluable help with both the translation and especially my Introduction to it. Whatever polish the result has is due to the combined effort of these scholars and cherished friends. I am also obliged by the courteous permission of L. A. Gogotishvili, I. I. Makhankov, and V. P. Troitskii to use their notes and commentaries from Russian editions of Losev’s book. Elena Takho-Godi’s assistance in communication with my Russian colleagues has been indispensable over the last several years. I am grateful to Charles Schlacks Jr for granting permission to use excerpts of the translation previously published in the journal Symposium. Lastly but most importantly, I am profoundly grateful to my wife, Ludmila, for her unfailing support of my work and for giving me the reason to carry it on. Vladimir Marchenkov

[1]

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION BY VLADIMIR MARCHENKOV

ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH

The words ‘dialectics’ and ‘myth’ are frequently invoked in today’s debates on culture and politics, but the range of their meanings is quite perplexing. ‘Dialectics’ can describe such frivolous a thing as clever tricks in argumentation – the kind of ‘sorcery’ that Socrates was accused of – or such serious a thing as political struggle between the oppressed and their oppressors. The word ‘myth’ likewise embraces both deliberate deception and eternal wisdom. The reader will doubtless be familiar ad nauseam with yet another title ‘X: Myth and Reality’, where X stands for anything under the sun: from a politician’s love life to evidence of extraterrestrial visitations on planet Earth. In the meantime, twentieth-century anthropol- ogists and other students of myth have for decades patiently argued – to little avail – against the popular usage of myth as lie or superstition. They have pointed out that, on the contrary, myth enunciates indubitable and even sacred truths within the context of a given culture. Taking the argument even further, some theorists have held that myth is the expression of the indelible patterns of the psyche which are so basic that without them we shall cease to be human. The question of myth has always been among the most vexing for philosophy. Plato by turns derided traditional myths and composed his own; Marsilio Ficino embraced myth alongside philosophy; Hegel almost completely dismissed it, only to create his own grand story of Spirit in which many pages read like a magical tale; and in the twentieth century, myth became a matter of concern for a baffling variety of disciplines – from philosophy to anthropology to literary theory to political science. The scholarly interest in myth acquired a special urgency in late modernity because,

[3] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH as is often said, ideological myths wreaked havoc in humanity’s social, political, and military affairs. This book is one of many attempts by philosophers to grapple with the riddle that the concept of myth presents to rational thinking, and belongs among the most compelling solutions of this riddle. The juxtaposition of the two terms dialectics and myth in the title of Losev’s book is not accidental. It poses the philosophical problem of expli- cating their respective meanings, of course, but, more importantly, it also demands a reconciliation of dialectics as the art of rational understanding with myth as the tale that forever escapes such an understanding. On the most fundamental level and in its ultimate ambition, Losev’s book is an attempt to accomplish this reconciliation. He was well qualified to under- take this task. Losev’s peerless knowledge of dialectics was combined with an equally remarkable ability to think dialectically – gifts that do not always go together. He did not merely read and carefully study Platonism in all its permutations, as well as Schelling and Hegel, but learned from them the art of letting concepts live out their destinies in uninterrupted, mutually defining movement. Losev might well be the most outstanding dialectical thinker of the twentieth century. Likewise, his extensive and detailed knowledge of mythology, especially ancient Greek and Roman, was matched by a rare ability to enunciate a myth, to enter a particular mythical consciousness, and to speak from within it. The presence of these two poles within Losev’s intellectual persona, i.e. of the dialectical thinker and mythopoet, produced a tension that is the dramatic leitmotif of his entire oeuvre, but it also made him uniquely suited to articulate a dialectical theory of myth. Losev is almost completely unknown in the English-speaking world. The present translation of his 1930 essay Dialektika mifa (The Dialectics of Myth) makes available for the first time in English one of Losev’s major works. It will therefore serve as the first introduction of his legacy to the English-speaking reader, as it has already done in several other languages.

Aleksei Fyodorovich Losev was born on 23 September 1893 in the city of Novocherkassk, the capital of the Don Cossack Territory in the south of

[4] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH

Russia.1 His father, Fyodor Petrovich, was a teacher of physics and mathematics whose true passion was music, and he had some success as a solo violinist and conductor on the local musical scene. Family life was, however, incompatible with Fyodor Petrovich’s bohemian disposition. He left the family early, and yet his son must have inherited some of his intellectual and artistic temperament, in particular the love of mathematics and music. But by far the greatest influence on Losev’s early development came from his mother, Natal’ya Alekseevna Loseva (née Polyakova), who dedicated her life to her son’s upbringing and education. After Fyodor Petrovich had abandoned them, she and her son lived with her father, Aleksei Polyakov, an Orthodox priest, after whom the boy had been named. In 1903, the young Aleksei entered the Novocherkassk Clas- sical Gymnasium where he studied, among other things, mathematics, natural sciences, history, and Russian language and literature, as well as classical and modern languages. Initially an apathetic student, he eventually became increasingly interested in philosophy and classical philology. Aside from studies, his imagination was fired by the popular astronomy of the French author Camille Flammarion, and the enchanted vision of the starlit sky became one of the constants that defined Losev’s inner horizon. (‘I even married an astronomer’, he remarks humorously in The Dialectics of Myth.) While in the gymnasium, he also studied the violin with Federico Stadzhi, an Italian singer and violinist who had opened his own music school in Novocherkassk.2 Aleksei was so much in love with music that for a while he seriously dreamed of becoming a professional violinist. Philoso- phy and classical philology eventually triumphed, but the passion for music remained an indispensable part of his intellectual make-up. It found expression in a series of essays, written throughout his career, on compos- ers such as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Richard Wagner, and Aleksandr Skryabin, not to mention a study in the philosophy of music, Muzyka kak predmet logiki (Music as the Subject of Logic) (1927), and a later work in the history of music aesthetics, Antichnaya muzykal’naya estetika (Ancient Music Aesthetics) (1960). To mark passage to his last year in the gymnasium, its director presented Losev with an eight-volume edition of collected works by Vladimir Solovyov. It is difficult to overestimate the impact of Solovyov’s thought on Losev’s subsequent development as a thinker. It is not accidental that,

[5] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH at the very end of his life, Losev would write two books about Russia’s most remarkable nineteenth-century philosopher.3 In addition to classical studies, philosophy, and music, Aleksei was keenly interested in the theatre and, with the special permission of the gymnasium inspector, attended all plays performed in Novocherkassk. His engagement with the theatre was deeper than the interest of a spectator. The theatre stirred up in him the artistic inclination, which transformed itself, on one level, into the flair for effective presentation that marked Losev as a lecturer and, on a more substantial level, into a device of Losev’s hermeneutics – the above-mentioned tendency to assume the voices and postures of various mythical subjects. We shall return in due course to this significant aspect of Losev’s scholarly persona. In 1911, after graduating from the gymnasium and Stadzhi’s music school, Losev entered Moscow University to pursue a double major in philosophy and classics. These were happy years in his life. Living in a comfortable dormitory (although far from rich, his mother spared no expense on his education), he read and studied voraciously, plunging into classical philology, philosophy, psychology, and mathematics. With season tickets to the Bolshoi, he was a regular – and enraptured – spectator at the opera. As a university student, Losev became a member of two important asso- ciations: the Vladimir Solovyov Religious-Philosophical Society and Moscow University’s Psychological Society. He met with the ‘cream’ of Russia’s philosophical world of the time: Nikolai Berdyaev, Evgenii Trubetskoi, Semion Frank, Ivan Il’in, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pavel Florenskii. His graduation paper, ‘The Worldview of Aeschylus’, was read and favour- ably commented upon by none other than Vyacheslav Ivanov, a former student of Theodor Mommsen and one of the leading poets and theorists of the influential Russian Symbolist movement. This was yet another life- long link formed at this early stage of Losev’s intellectual and spiritual evolution. Ivanov became his favourite poet for whom he also had great respect as a scholar, albeit not without reservations.4 In 1914, Losev was sent to Berlin on a study tour that was cut short by World War I. In the bustle at the railway station, the suitcase with his manuscripts and books was stolen – a curious omen of how he would later twice in his life lose his entire library and archive. In 1916, his first three publications appeared, all dedicated to music. After graduation he

[6] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH was invited to remain at the Department of Classical Philology as part of preparation for professorship. During the revolution of 1917 and the ensuing civil war of 1918–22, Losev studied and wrote feverishly, as though to find refuge from the cold, hunger, and violence around him. His mother died of typhus in 1919, two years after he had last seen her. The same year, his article ‘Rus- sian Philosophy’, apparently written in German, came out in Zürich in a volume on Russian thought and culture. With all communication broken, however, between war-torn Russia and western Europe, Losev learned about his first publication abroad only in 1983; it came out in Russian translation after his death. In 1919–21, he wrote the essay ‘Skryabin’s Worldview’, which would see print only in 1990. In the 1920s, he earned a living by giving public lectures on music in Moscow and by teaching, for a short while, at the newly founded Univer- sity of Nizhnii Novgorod, where he was officially named professor. It was a difficult time for many Russian academics. The faculty of classical philology at Moscow University was closed: the Bolsheviks were determined, in the idiom of the time, to ‘throw overboard from the ship of modernity’ the ‘unnecessary’ baggage of the past. Prerevolutionary, ‘bourgeois’ philosophy likewise began to be exiled from Soviet Russia – sometimes quite literally.5 Losev found refuge as a professor of aesthetics in the State Institute of Musical Science and State Academy of Artistic Science. For a while he was also a professor of aesthetics at the Moscow Conservatory. On 5 June 1922, Aleksei Losev married Valentina Mikhailovna Sokolova. The wedding ceremony was performed by Father Pavel Florenskii in Sergiev Posad, a major centre of the Russian Orthodox Church near Moscow.6 Valentina Mikhailovna was the daughter of a Moscow couple from whom Losev had been renting a room since 1917. She was an eager student of mathematics and astronomy and shared with Aleksei, five years her senior, a love of music, symbolist poetry, and philosophy. Even more important for their mutual bond than common intellectual and artistic interests was their earnest spiritual quest. It eventually led them jointly to take monastic vows as monk Andronik and nun Afanasiya. That ceremony took place in 1929 and was conducted by Archimandrite David, who was their spiritual guide at the time, in strict secrecy. This significant fact was carefully concealed by the couple throughout their lives and did not become publically known until 1993, five years after Losev’s death.

[7] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH

In spite of difficult conditions, Losev continued to work at a great pace throughout the 1920s: doing research in ancient and contemporary philosophy, translating, and writing. The resulting works eventually came out as a salvo: eight books totalling over 2,700 pages published by the author between 1927 and 1930. This ‘Octateuch’, as it came to be called, included studies of ancient philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, music aesthetics, general aesthetics, symbolism, and mythology.7 The last work on this list, The Dialectics of Myth, published in 1930, became a milestone in Losev’s life, as well as in the history of twentieth-century Russian philosophy as a whole. Soon after its publication, Losev was arrested and taken to Lubyanka, the headquarters of the OGPU (later of the NKVD and KGB).8 The initial charge had to do with his contraband additions to the text of the book after it had already been approved by censors. However, the investigators had farther-reaching plans: they wished to prove that Losev was a member, even a leader, of the underground religious movement Onomatodoxy (centred on the veneration of God’s name) which planned, as the OGPU wished to show, violent attacks against the Soviet regime. Losev was indeed actively involved in this group, but mostly as a theologian rather than as a practical organiser, and, according to A. A. Takho- Godi’s account, the case against him, as well as against the entire organisation, was fabricated by the OGPU. We shall presently look into this story in more detail; here it suffices to say that, after a seventeen-month-long investigation (during which he spent four months in solitary confinement), Losev was sentenced to ten years of labour camps. At the time, the punishment seemed unexpectedly harsh, for we must remember that the large-scale repressions and mass executions of the 1930s were yet to come.9 The modest print run of The Dialectics of Myth (five hundred copies) was confiscated and destroyed.10 Losev’s library and archive were dispersed and almost completely lost – an event which, more than any other, almost broke his spirit in camp. Valentina Mikhailovna was soon arrested in conjunction with the same case and their apartment was occu- pied by an OGPU agent. At the Belbaltlag (the labour camp created for the construction of a canal connecting the White and the Baltic seas) Losev was first assigned to work on timber-hauling crews, where his health quickly deteriorated. He was then transferred as an invalid to guard a timber yard. Later, as a

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‘mathematician’, he was assigned to work in the timber yard office where, in turn, he became almost completely blind from poring over endless col- umns of numbers under a dim light. On 8 October 1932 he was released from custody by decision of the OGPU. He continued working at the canal construction, however, while waiting for the release of his wife. Soon, Valentina Mikhailovna managed to get transferred to the same area from the Altai camps where she had originally served her sentence. They were reunited, their extraordinary correspondence between camps ceased, and Losev began to write philosophical prose – in secret, of course. In 1933, with the canal successfully finished and Losev an invalid, his sentence was revoked by the decision of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. It has been suggested that his early release and the annulment of his conviction were the result of the intercession on the part of the Soviet Red Cross and in particular of Maxim Gorky’s wife, E. P. Peshkova, who coordinated the Red Cross in those years. When Losev and Valentina Mikhailovna returned to Moscow it was made clear to him that he could no longer either teach philosophy or publish philosophical works. Throughout the 1930s he had to earn a living by teaching as a part-time instructor in Moscow and then at provincial universities in cities such as Kuibyshev, Cheboksary, and Poltava. Despite the ban on publishing, Losev continued his research and writing. Apparently hoping that the innocuous subject matter would help persuade the censors (why should the Party care about Antiquity?), he prepared a large study on ancient mythology and another on the history of ancient aesthetics.11 Neither work was published, however, and the manuscripts went ‘into the drawer’ to await a more auspi- cious time. The only thing that he did manage to push through censorship in that period was his translation with commentary of several texts by the fifteenth-century Christian Neoplatonist St Nicolas of Cusa. In June 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union and German troops made quick progress deep into Soviet territory. By winter they had almost reached Moscow and the city was repeatedly bombed. In one of the bombing raids, Losev’s mother-in-law was killed and their apartment destroyed. Gone again, just like after the arrest ten years earlier, was almost all of his library and archive. The Losevs picked up from the crater a few remaining wet and dirt-stained pieces, whatever could be salvaged. Losev later confessed that the loss of his books and papers had been more devastating to him than anything else he endured during the war.

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It was in 1943 that Losev finally received his doctorate in classics honoris causa (for the sum of previously published work), while he was teaching at Moscow State University’s Faculty of Philosophy. However, he was soon removed from the University on the charge of idealism and found himself instead at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, where he would remain until retirement. At the Institute, he taught in the departments of Classics, Russian, and General Linguistics. Another important event that occurred in those years was the appearance in the Losevs’ house of the young graduate student, Aza Takho-Godi, whom the couple ‘adopted’, as it were, and who, in turn, came to regard them as the closest people in her life. Aza’s father had perished in one of Sta- lin’s purges, and her entire family was scattered across the country – not an unusual fate in Russia, ravaged both by the paranoid cruelty of its own government and by the worst foreign invasion in its history. In 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, Losev finally, after twenty-three years of enforced silence, managed to publish his work. It was the essay Olimpiiskaya mifologiya v ee sotsial’no-istoricheskom razvitii (Olympian Mythology in its Socio-historical Development) – one of the treatises on which he had been working in the post-war years.12 The joy of this break- through, however, was soon overshadowed by tragedy: Valentina Mikhailovna died on 29 January 1954 from cancer. Her place was taken, with Valentina Mikhailovna’s blessing, by Aza Alibekovna Takho-Godi. The last period in Losev’s life, the years from the mid-1950s to the time of his death in 1988, was filled with intensive teaching, research, and writing. Even taking into account the work of the previous years that was now finding an outlet, Losev’s productivity in this period is astonishing – especially given the fact that he was by now legally blind. More than four hundred publications, including two dozen new monographs, issued from his pen. Some of the credit for his extraordinary productivity must go to a small, dedicated group of young polyglot assistants who volunteered their time and energy to help their teacher. As the grip of Stalinism on Soviet society loosened, Losev began to enjoy increasing recognition among his colleagues and among the public. But there was still a significant resistance to his idiosyncratic worldview. The latter made itself felt in Losev’s writings, despite the surface veneer of official Marxism with which Losev camouflaged his underlying philosophical programme. Growing recognition notwithstanding, he remained a

[10] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH marginal figure for Soviet officialdom, and the derogatory reputation of an ‘idealist’ philosopher still hovered over him. Among the most important works of this period were the study of the history of ancient mythology [Antichnaya mifologiya v ee istoricheskom razvitii (Ancient Mythology in its Historical Development), 1957], eight volumes of Istoriya antichnoi estetiki (History of Ancient Aesthetics) (1963–88; the final volumes came out posthumously), a study in the philosophy of symbol [Problema simvola i realisticheskoe iskusstvo (The Problem of the Symbol and Realistic Art), 1976], a critical study on the philosophy of the Renaissance [Estetika Vozrozhdeniya (Renaissance Aesthetics), 1978], and a tribute to his ‘first love’ in Russian philosophy, Vladimir Solovyov [Vladimir Solovyov i ego vremya (Vladimir Solovyov and His Time), 1990]. These works were supplemented by hundreds of scholarly papers, chapters in textbooks, encyclopaedia articles, reminiscences, and short essays for popular periodicals. The eight volumes of the History of Ancient Aesthetics stand out in Losev’s impressive overall achievement as an unprecedented task, unri- valled in world classical scholarship. The term ‘aesthetics’ in the title of this series will not mislead anyone who as much as looks at its table of contents. Under this ‘innocent’ designation, Losev concealed what was in fact a study of the entire thousand-year-long history of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Using the term to downplay the scope of his approach, Losev was trying to reduce the chance of problems with censorship. Losev’s ninetieth birthday was celebrated with appropriate pomp by a large group of colleagues, students, and friends. The government joined in, too: he was awarded the prestigious Order of the Red Banner of Labour. The height of his official recognition, however, came two years later, when in 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev signed a decree bestowing upon Losev the USSR State Award in Philosophy for the first six volumes of the History of Ancient Aesthetics. Times had changed. The Russia of the last years of Losev’s life bore little resemblance to the Russia of the late 1920s and early 1930s when the Soviet regime ‘rewarded’ Losev for his first octave of books by a trip to the Belbaltlag. In spite of growing health problems, Losev continued to work on the seventh and eighth volumes of the History and did manage to finish them shortly before his death. He died on the providential Day of St Cyril and St

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Methodius, the creators of the Cyrillic alphabet and the patron saints of Russian letters. The Soviet Union, whose dawn Losev had experienced as a ‘world conflagration’ prophetically prefigured in Aleksandr Skryabin’s music, did not survive the philosopher by long: it was dissolved three years later. Losev’s scholarly work spanned a period of seventy-two years. The number of his publications, ranging from weighty tomes to essays and articles of varying length, has now exceeded eight hundred. During his tenure at the Pedagogical Institute, he educated many generations of Soviet scholars and to many outstanding Soviet philosophers of the post- war generation he served as an inspiration. As the Soviet ideological system disintegrated, Losev’s stature steadily grew, albeit not without occasional detractions. And finally, critical response to his legacy is growing in size and scope, both in Russia and abroad.

III

Many twentieth-century Russian books have their own tangled and tragic stories. The Dialectics of Myth is no exception to this sad rule. But while some books are shaped by circumstances, there are those that in turn create a historical situation around themselves. The Dialectics of Myth belongs to their number as well. Its most recent 2001 Russian edition contains, in A. A. Takho-Godi’s Preface and V. P. Troitsky’s notes, the most detailed account to date of what happened with the text of the book prior to its publication and after it.13 Takho-Godi’s account is largely based on documents from the OGPU file that included materials related to the case against Losev, and his archive that was confiscated when he was arrested in 1930. The archive was handed over to Takho-Godi by the heir of the OGPU, the Russian Fed- eral Security Service (FSB), in 1995, the year when she also for the first time was allowed to see Losev’s case file, which amounts to many volumes of documents. To this day, this convoluted story remains unclear in some of its details. The first draft of the book was finished in 1927 but then lay for a while without further activity. Losev began to make changes and eventually submitted it for approval to Glavlit, the censorship organ of the Soviet authorities, which cleared it for publication. Simultaneously, Losev was

[12] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH trying to publish another book, Veshch’ i imya (Thing and Name), also approved by censors. Hoping to speed up their appearance in print, he combined the two texts under the title Dialektika mifa i skazki (The Dialec- tics of Myth and Fairy Tale). In the meantime, he wrote the so-called ‘Ad- dendum to The Dialectics of Myth and Fairy Tale’ and tried to include it in the book. The censors, however, refused to approve it, which was not surprising given the glaringly provocative nature of many of its passages. Losev then decided to separate The Dialectics of Myth from Thing and Name and in the process transferred a few dozen particularly risky pages from the Addendum to the first version of the manuscript. ‘This was hap- pening’, Takho-Godi writes, ‘at the Glavlit office, as Valentina Mikhailovna and some clerk named Maria Ivanovna matched the author’s and Glavlit’s copies while breaking up The Dialectics of Myth and Fairy Tale into two separate books. The insertions into the Glavlit copy went unnoticed and the manuscript was taken to the printing shop’.14 The unauthorised additions, however, did not remain unnoticed for long. On 18 April 1930, Holy Thursday, Losev was arrested and charged with smug- gling ‘counter-revolutionary’ excerpts into an approved manuscript. The texts in question dealt, in an heretically non-Marxist fashion, with such matters as proletarian ideology, socialism and art, materialism, faith and knowledge, the body as the manifestation of spirit, and monastic wor- ship. It must be noted that the OGPU file-folder entitled ‘Addendum’ was empty in 1995 when Takho-Godi received it from the FSB.15 Losev was accused, as was mentioned above, of violating censorship regulations, but Takho-Godi believes that the OGPU’s intention was to prosecute him for participation in the Onomatodoxy movement. The government wished to present it to the public not only as a fanatical religious sect but also as an anti-Soviet terrorist organisation. Her opinion is corrob- orated by the fact that the case under which Losev was investigated involved forty-eight other people, and that the illegal insertions into the book did not figure in the investigation beyond the warrant for his arrest. Onomatodoxy was particularly offensive to the Soviet authorities at the time because its followers sharply disapproved of the then head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Sergius, and his compromise with the Soviet government. The compromise involved acknowledging the Bolsheviks as a legitimate secular power in Russia and was intended to save the Russian Orthodox Church from complete annihilation by the

[13] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH government’s virulent atheistic campaign. Losev and his fellow ‘venerators of the name’ believed, however, that the price of such a deliverance was too high and that, even under the threat of violence, the Church’s submission to the government meant betrayal of basic Christian ideals. To futile attempts at appeasing the Bolsheviks they preferred martyrdom for the Church. Thus, the true motive for Losev’s arrest was the anti-Sergian stance of Onomatodoxy. And yet there are indications that even this was, after all, only part of the reason for the trial, and the main cause of the government’s displea- sure did indeed have to do, as Takho-Godi points out, with Losev’s philosophical opposition to Communist ideology. The government had, in other words, a dual purpose: to discredit and suppress a religious movement opposed to its policies and, more broadly, to stifle all attempts at intellectual dissent in the country. Losev’s persecution had begun already in 1929 when his name was mentioned in the Soviet press among the ‘idealists’ and ‘reactionaries’ who ‘nested’ in the State Academy of Artistic Sciences.16 Soon after Losev’s arrest, the chief party newspaper Pravda published another attack against ‘priestly-idealist reaction’, containing harsh criticism of Losev’s books.17 A week later, he was again castigated in a report delivered at the Communist Academy Institute of Philosophy, in which the author called Losev a ‘militant mystic’. Given the large-scale, violent antireligious campaign being conducted at the time, this was not a trivial accusation. The same year, the journal Pod znamenem marksizma– leninizma (Under the Banner of Marxism–Leninism) mentioned Losev’s name in a list of ‘ideological enemies of Marxism–Leninism’. In June 1929, Lazar Kaganovich, Moscow Party First Secretary and member of the Polit- buro, made a speech at the Party Congress in which he announced that The Dialectics of Myth by the ‘obscurantist philosopher’ Losev was evidence of escalating class struggle and of the Bolsheviks’ slackened vigi- lance ‘in the areas of culture and literature’.18 In 1931, when Losev was already in the labour camp, Maxim Gorky published an article entitled ‘On the struggle against nature’, where he called Losev a ‘blind’, ‘insane’, and ‘illiterate’ professor, and suggested that the philosopher had ‘failed to die in a timely fashion’ (opozdal umeret’).19 For their assault against Losev, both Kaganovich and Gorky drew on the materials prepared by the OGPU and containing carefully selected excerpts from the Addendum. Some, if not all, of these reports seem to

[14] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH have been compiled by Losev’s investigators and, in particular, by Marianna Gerasimova.20 The investigation’s purpose was to demonstrate that Losev was a Black Hundred ideologue: a reactionary, anti-Semite, religious fanatic, and leader of a ‘right-wing monarchist’ conspiracy to over- throw the Soviet government. At the time, we must note, the accusation of anti-Semitism was serious in the Soviet Union. Stalin’s repressions against Jews came later, after World War II, when the regime decided to annihilate the Soviet Jewish Committee, which had become influential during the war, especially in the international arena. The historical significance of The Dialectics of Myth largely derives from the fact that it became, in 1930, the last pronouncement made by independent Russian philosophy in the Soviet Union. It marked a negative turning point in the history of philosophical thought in Russia – from the flowering of the so-called ‘Silver Age’ to the winter and desolation of the 1930s and 1940s. The history of the book resumed its normal course only in 1990 when it was published both in the Soviet Union and in the United States.21 The book now exists in seven editions. The most recent of them contains, alongside the main text and the surviving incomplete draft of the Adden- dum, several manuscripts from Losev’s archive on such subjects as Onomatodoxy and myth, types of mythology, other theories of myth, and mythical creativity. Given the history of the book, it is reasonable to expect that further research into its intended textual structure will yield new insights into its meaning. The biggest questions in this regard are posed by the mysterious Addendum which, according to the latest Orwellian statement of the FSB, ‘cannot be found, for it is missing’.22 Judging by Gerasimova’s reports, the Addendum was, in fact, a book-sized manuscript containing chapters on ‘The knowledge of God’, ‘The dialectics of incorporeal powers’, ‘Divine alphabet’, and ‘Magical name’.23 Some of the surviving texts in Losev’s archive seem to belong to the Addendum, such as the one entitled ‘Absolute dialectics = absolute mythology’, which has since been published separately.24 In Losev scholarship it is often observed, however, that the existing version of The Dialectics of Myth possesses a striking degree of integrity and is a complete, finished work in itself. This impression is borne out by my experience of translating and commenting on it.

[15] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH IV

At the time of writing The Dialectics of Myth, Losev defined his method as ‘phenomenological-dialectical’. An enthusiastic follower of Edmund Husserl, he was nonetheless convinced that the intuitive grasp of the eidos of things – which was, in his opinion, at the core of the phenomenological method – must be supplemented by the understanding of dialectical relations among elements within this eidos, as well as among various eidoi.In The Dialectics of Artistic Form, published three years prior to The Dialectics of Myth, he wrote, for example:

Phenomenology consists in constructing the eidos from its separate elements. The phenomenology of a group of objects consists in constructing their common eidos, in which they are contained as parts. Dialectics [by contrast] consists in constructing the eidos in its eidetic relations with other eidoi, so that this eidos is derived from a more universal one – not as its part, but as a category and logical moment within it.25

Losskii rightly observed that Losev’s method was a combination of Hegel’s dialectics and Husserl’s ‘eidetic vision’.26 But the list of sources on which Losev’s method depended must be expanded beyond Hegel and Husserl. The Russian philosopher derived his version of dialectics not only from German idealism but also – not unlike Vladimir Solovyov decades earlier – from Platonism, both ancient and medieval-Christian. Because of such a pedigree, Losev’s dialectics was sharply distinct from the Marxist species – especially from the vulgar and opportunistic variety that reigned supreme in the Soviet ideology under the name of ‘dialectical materialism’. The fear of one being confused with the other was perhaps the reason why Losev so frequently included extended discussions of dialectics in the books of his early period. In Losev’s relentless insistence on dialectical thinking in his early writings, one feels the desire to save that ancient speculative discipline from the onslaught of crude ideological materialism and the wave of devastating philosophical ignorance that was sweeping across the Russian intellectual landscape. The Dialectics of Myth does not include a special discussion of the dialectical method – perhaps because Losev felt that he had sufficiently expounded it in previous books, especially in The Philosophy of the Name and The Dialectics of Artistic Form. One can find,

[16] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH however, vivid examples of its application in Chapter IX, where Losev proposes his solutions of various exemplary antinomies: of subject and object, idea and matter, consciousness and being. The most important feature of the dialectical method is that in it each concept is defined through its relations with other concepts. Every concept is viewed as one side of a contradiction that involves, on the opposite side, what stands in the sharpest contrast to it. As light is defined by darkness, and vice versa, and as up is defined by down – and neither can be understood in separation from the other – so is one defined by its other, i.e. by the principle of plurality as such, and the respective meanings of these concepts are generated by their being locked into this opposition. Further, the handling of contradiction in dialectics is what sets it apart from formal-logical thought. In the latter, a contradiction is a ‘red flag’, as it were, raised against the movement of thinking. This is done, for example, in the procedure known as reductio ad absurdum, which consists in the drawing of logical conclusions from a proposition, until these conclusions come into an obvious and unresolvable conflict with one another. In reductio the appearance of a contradiction is the signal that progress must stop and another tack must be tried: the premises of the argument revised, perhaps, or a different mode adopted of attacking the problem at hand.27 In dialectical thinking, by contrast, the emergence of a contradiction (which, contrary to the assumptions of the formal-logical method, never really disappears from the horizon of thought) signals the need for the synthesis of the opposites that are involved in it. Light and darkness combine to generate visible forms: if there were only light or only darkness, no visible form would be possible (witness the black and white squares by Kazimir Malevich), for the latter emerges only from the interaction of these opposites. In like manner, the one and the other, or being and non-being, merge in the concept of becoming, as will become clear presently. Con- tradiction and opposition are the driving force of thinking, not a traffic light barring its way. The crucial thing about dialectical synthesis is that in it the opposites are not simply assimilated into the new concept without a trace, nor are they discarded altogether as in the formal-logical method, but are at once surmounted and preserved. Or rather, what is surmounted is their rigid isolation from each other (which renders them meaningless anyway), and what is preserved is their actual meaning (which only arises when they are viewed in their mutual contrast).28

[17] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH

One of Losev’s own examples will suffice as illustration. The meaning of personhood arises from the opposition between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’, or between subject and object. A person is the realisation of self- consciousness as a corporeal being or, as Losev puts it, ‘a material realisation of intelligence’ (p. 70). In this synthesis neither self-consciousness (intelligence) nor the body (material shape) is lost: both are present and preserved yet merge together and cannot be separated without destroy- ing the whole. Such operations are repeated virtually at every step of Losev’s argument. All major concepts of his theory of myth, such as person, expression, symbol, name, miracle, and history, are derived in this manner. The Neoplatonist heritage in Losev’s dialectics is evident, among other things, from the fact that he begins to unfold his series of concepts from the one, rather than from being, as Hegel did in his Science of Logic. In this he follows the Platonist tradition and, closer in time, Vladimir Solovyov’s example, set in the latter’s study Filosofskie nachala tsel’nogo znaniya (Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge, 1877). The one, which signifies unity and selfsameness, must be contrasted with something in order to be conceivable at all. Such an opposite cannot be another one, Losev points out, for then we would have not a contrast but a complete identity between the two: qua one, the second one will be the same as the first. The one needs a genuine other. The concept that would provide the needed contrast with it must signify something that possesses no unity and no lasting self-identity, i.e. pure shapelessness and instability. Losev finds such a concept in meon (from the Greek to me on, the ‘that which is not’ of Plato’s dialogue Parmenides) which he understands as the principle of pure plurality, as opposed to pure unity, and of pure otherness, alterity, as opposed to pure self-identity. Losev’s ‘meon’ provides the necessary contrast to the one, and by virtue of this contrast the one itself obtains its own outline, its own meaning and shape – it is for thought. But neither the one nor the meon are conceivable in isolation from one another and their unity thus demands yet another concept that would embrace the meaning of both. This new concept is becoming, for in becoming the one is at once itself and its own other, as it constantly changes. At the same time, it cannot be reduced to pure change as such because, in order for becoming to occur, there must be in it, alongside the flux of change, a substrate that does not change. Along with the constant

[18] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH non-identity and otherness of the meon, there must be something singu- lar, the one, that persists throughout the process of change and, in fact, makes change possible as a continuous process. So far, Losev follows a dialectical scheme that is not all that different from Hegel’s: unity, alterity, and becoming form the familiar triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. But he also proposed to emphasise yet another, fourth step in the unfolding of concepts. The becoming itself, Losev insists, must further be conceived as something completed, as that which has become. The triad must become a tetrad, or rather tetraktis,as Losev preferred to call it:

I find it necessary to speak of the tetraktis for the following reasons. The dialectical triad can easily be, and has been, understood as pure idea and pure meaning, whereas dialectics embraces the entire living movement of facts. One must therefore speak not simply of an abstract triad, but also of the triad as a thing,asa fact. The triad, in other words, must include its own reality and must become reality. Thus the ‘fourth’ component that I propose is the ‘fact’. Only this step will save dialectics from subjective, fleshless idealism that operates with abstract notions devoid of all corporeal quality.29

The tetraktis is, however, still not the end of the process. The fifth member of the dialectical equation is obtained from the fact opposed, in turn, to its own other. But since the process of the unfolding of meaning has already occurred, down to the meaning becoming a fact, the latter can only be opposed back to the triad of meaning out of which it has emerged. As the locus where meaning is created, the triad is, according to Losev, nothing other than intelligence. The fact, therefore, must become an object for intelligence. This means that it becomes something expressed, or, as Losev puts it, a symbol. A symbol is the meeting point, as Losev liked to repeat, of the inner, i.e. meaning, and the outer, i.e. external shape. The former shines through the latter in a symbol – shines for the intelligence that contemplates the fact. It is not hard to notice that, from this viewpoint, everything in the world perceived by intelligence is symbolic in nature, which makes Losev’s ontology thoroughly symbolic and his symbolism thoroughly ontological. Losev’s doctrine of universal ontological symbolism is of great significance for his explanation of myth.

[19] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH

Further transformations are possible, of course, but the five-step schema – from one to other to becoming to fact to symbol – should suffice as a general description of how Losev derived the fundamentals of his method. And yet it would be inaccurate to regard this method as purely dialectical and to think that Losev completely dissolved the intuitivism of phenomenology in the reflective interplay of speculative concepts. Losev repeatedly stated that, before the dialectical relations can be discerned within a phenomenon, one must first possess the initial grasp of the phenomenon as a whole: [F]acts must first be seen, and only after that can their dialectic be constructed. Hence I find it possible to speak of a phenomenological-dialectical method, while assuming that they (phenomenology and dialectics) implicitly presuppose each other and provide foundation for each other, and the truth is to be found only in their unity, despite their differences as methodological structures.30

This aspect of Losev’s method partially explains, by the way, why Losskii is justified in listing him among intuitivists. For the initial grasp of phenomena of which Losev speaks cannot help but be intuitive, and thus intuitivism does indeed constitute an essential component of his method. Returning to the work at hand, The Dialectics of Myth duplicates Losev’s methodological orientation on various levels. The inclination to view phenomena through contrast with their opposites shows itself, for example, in the fundamental design of Losev’s argument. We must note in passing that the plan of the book is driven by the idea of defining myth as precisely as possible, and the entire essay may be regarded as an extended definition of the concept of myth. It is perhaps this singularity of purpose that lends the book its cohesion – in spite of the astonishing variety of materials brought to bear on the argument and the number of neighbouring concepts analysed. Losev’s procedure consists in distinguishing myth from other cultural or, as Ernst Cassirer would say, symbolic forms that are closely linked with it. This involves a lengthy but illuminating explanation of what, in Losev’s opinion, myth is not. As many as nine out of the book’s fourteen chapters methodically deal with how myth is different from science, metaphysics,

[20] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH allegory, poetry, religion, dogma, and history. But such a ‘negative’ programme does not exhaust Losev’s argument. Losev also articulates several ‘positive’ theories that support the final definition of myth. Most notable among these are the theories of personhood, miracle, name, and absolute mythology. Losev begins by dispelling the widespread view of myth as fiction and fantastical invention. Myth is, according to him, the direct opposite of fiction: from the mythical subject’s point of view, that is to say, for the bearer of myth, the latter deals with the most palpable reality. This reality should not be understood as something ‘ideal’, Losev emphasises: on the contrary, it is apprehended as vividly material. Mythical consciousness, he argues, perceives the world in an immediate manner and its world is utterly real to it. Further, myth insists on telling the ultimate truth about reality and this distinguishes it, Losev argues, from science, which is by nature hypotheti- cal. Against James Frazer’s evolutionist view, stated in The Golden Bough, that myth is a primitive version of science and is to be discarded when the latter matures, Losev contends that myth and science stem from different impulses of the intellect: myth posits reality, whereas science strives to explain things. In this profound sense, myth therefore has little to do with science in general and ‘primitive science’ in particular. He also points out that pure science is indifferent as far as the ontological status of its object is concerned, for its main interest lies in grasping the abstract law govern- ing this object. Furthermore, science is equally indifferent towards the subject, the individual person who articulates this abstract law (try and surmise from the law of gravity, challenges Losev, who its author is), whereas myth is always projected from such a subject. The separation between myth and science that Losev establishes should not, however, be understood in rigid terms. He indicates that pure science never exists in history but is always mixed with one mythology or another – science does not stem from myth yet is always intertwined with it. Losev clearly antici- pates here later debates on science and the role of legitimation narratives in its history. The immediate encounter of consciousness with its environment that one finds in myth also sets it apart from metaphysics. In Losev’s view, metaphysical thinking divides the world into the real and ideal realms, the immanent and transcendent. It is concerned almost exclusively with the

[21] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH ideal and transcendent, leaving the immanent to physics. In contrast, myth is immediate and immanent, and knows no such separation. The distinctions between myth and science apply here, too – to the extent to which metaphysics overlaps with science. The main thrust of these arguments is that myth is not a product of abstract thinking, but of concrete, immediate, and pictorial representations. The concrete and non-abstract nature of myth, however, makes it seem close to those forms of expression that convey abstract ideas through pictorial means, such as schema and especially allegory, and Losev’s next step is to delimit myth from them. The tradition of the allegorical interpretation of myth has a long history and it is therefore very important for Losev to decide how the two expressive forms are related to each other. For this he relies on Schelling’s Philosophy of Art.31 The distinctions are based on the relation between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’, the meaning and the form, and break down as follows. In a schema, the meaning outweighs the external presentation: we see the mere skeleton of the meaning in its out- ward appearance. For an allegory, on the other hand, the reverse is true: its picturesque form is richer than its abstract content. The image of a lion, for example, is more colourful, interesting, and vivid than the bare idea of courage or might. The perfect coincidence and equilibrium of the inner and the outer occurs in symbol – and this is precisely what Losev finds the nature of mythical expression to be. Myth, Losev concludes, is not allegorical but symbolic, because in it the content is fully expressed in the form and, conversely, the form is fully imbued with the content. Such a thor- oughgoing mutual permeation of the two components results in a complete dissolution of the boundary between them: mythical meaning is literal, not figurative as in allegory. What symbol or myth is it means, and it means what it is. By insisting on the symbolic nature of myth, Losev came close to identi- fying mythology with poetry – not an infrequent occurrence in the theory of myth. Poetry and myth, he admits, both belong to expressive forms and are products of intellectual activity or of ‘intelligence’, in his own idiom. Furthermore, both are marked by spontaneity and immediacy, and even by the fact that they are somehow detached from the common, everyday experience. Yet it is precisely in the character of this detachment that they differ from each other. Poetry, Losev explains, is detached from the reality of its object, whereas myth is detached from the ordinary, mundane

[22] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH course of life while remaining, nevertheless, a tale about the real. The difference between the respective attitudes of the poetic and mythical subjects is epitomised in the following example: the first does not rush to save an actress ‘dying’ on stage, whereas the second does. The stage on which a mythical action takes place is, in other words, real to the mythical subject, whereas there seems to be something profoundly wrong with the idea that Hamlet or Ranevskaya from Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard are actual persons. One could, in fact, trace this difference between myth and poetry back to the immediacy that marks mythical consciousness. While poetry is a reflection on the world, however spontaneous and immediate such reflection may be, myth is the prereflective emergence of reality from what Losev calls an ‘almost instinctive-biological’ reaction to the world. It may seem that this emphasis on immediacy and literalness turns myth into something easily circumscribed by the concept of worldview, but this is not quite the case. The distinctive feature of myth is that it elevates, according to Losev, by the force of its peculiar detachment, a world away from its mundane and trivial existence, and illuminates the universal connectedness of all phenomena – a quality of myth that Losev will expand on in a later chapter. What emerges at this point with especial force is the idea that all objects of living experience are mythical, albeit the intensity of their mythical quality may vary. In fact, such a conclusion is to be expected if one assigns to myth the basic place in consciousness that it has in Losev’s doctrine: mythical vision is the first lens through which we begin to see the world. The basic quality of this lens, Losev argues further, is that it is personalistic. We have already seen that Losev viewed personhood as the synthesis of intelligence and the body. We cannot go into a detailed account of his personalism here, but the discussion above should prepare the reader for the conclusion that the synthesis that a person presents is nothing other than symbol and myth.32 Losev believes, in other words, that our personal perception of the world is always cast in mythical terms, and only the arrogant conviction that modern man has conquered myth – the myopic prejudice that stems from the Enlightenment – prevents us from realising this. But to Losev, as a Christian thinker, personhood inevitably evokes religion – yet another cultural form with which myth is routinely associated and often confused. Here, Losev’s solution is, however, quite unexpected:

[23] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH he rejects the idea that myth is necessarily religious. The obverse relation does obtain, i.e. religion always generates a myth, but myths may contain nothing specifically religious. The images of the heroes of folk epic poetry rarely if ever carry any religious significance, yet they are doubtless mythical. Losev could also have cited the modern myths of matter or of infinite and uniform cosmic space – much maligned by him in other chapters. Even though myth and religion are, according to Losev, fundamentally personalistic forms, their mutual connection is, nonetheless, asymmetri- cal. The asymmetry is rooted in their different types of relation to personhood. Losev defines religion as the ‘substantial self-affirmation of person in eternity’. Rather than being merely the cognition of or an emotional link to the absolute, Losev maintains, religion grasps the entire person and is thus life, the whole reality of a person’s existence. Myth, on the other hand, is not the affirmation of the whole person, but only her expression. While religion is life, myth is a tale about life. Losev uses here the contrast between substance and energy that he derives from his theological investigations: religion is substantial, whereas myth is ‘energistic’: Myth is not a person as such, but her face; and this means that the face is inseparable from the person, i.e. myth is inseparable from person. The face, the mythical visage, is inseparable from the person and is therefore the person herself. But the person herself is different from her own mythical visages and therefore is neither her own face nor her own myth nor these mythical visages (see p. 93 below). In the background here is the distinction between essence and energy that had been developed in Eastern Orthodox theology and was adopted by Losev in order to accomplish two important tasks. The energistic manifestation of essence in a symbol prevents a complete separation between essence and its expression. The symbol does express the essence, rather than being a mere sign related to what it signifies by convention. Yet at the same time, it is also designed to eschew a direct identification of essence with its expression. In other words, it proposes that the essence is present in the symbol not substantially but through its energy. These ideas have played an especially important part in the theology of the Eastern Orthodox icon. The icon, from this viewpoint, carries divine energies and

[24] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH must therefore be venerated; but what it is believed to possess is the energy rather than the essence of divinity, and its veneration is thus not idolatry.33 An analogous argument lay at the base of Onomatodoxy. And once again, resolving one distinction leads to the need for another. The contrast that Losev draws between myth and religion forces him to disentangle myth from yet another close parallel, namely dogma. The latter, Losev points out, is an expression of religion’s insights and in this sense energistic, like myth, but they differ in several ways. Dogma, Losev maintains, presupposes some religious experience, whereas myth does not. This distinction will probably not strike us as convincing today because we are so accustomed to the talk of ‘political’, ‘ideological’, and other dogmas. For us the term does not necessarily evoke any reference to religion. In fact, Losev himself calls atheism ‘a species of dogmatic theology’ a few pages later. In Losev’s defence, however, one could point out that the contemporary use of the term ‘dogma’ is indeed rooted in the language of theology and thus retains, if only as a trace, connection with religion. Be that as it may, the other two contrasts that Losev proposes seem more compelling: a dogma is a reflection on religious experience, whereas myth is not reflective at all; and a dogma is an absolutised myth, an eternal truth drawn from myth, whereas the latter is always historical and ‘simply the history of one or another personalistic being, regardless of whether the latter is absolute or not and even regardless of its substantial- ity’ (p. 101). Here belongs Losev’s intriguing discussion of the dogmatic postulates of materialism and of the Enlightenment, alternately scornful and humorous, which he offers in conjunction with the problem of faith and knowledge. It bears noting, however, that he formulates some of the most forward-looking theses in his doctrine that will be explored later by others to a fuller extent (albeit from a different philosophical perspective).34 He indicates, for example, that the Enlightenment cult of rational knowledge and the opposing cult of irrational faith were both the result of certain mythological dispositions and cannot be rationally founded themselves. ‘Modernity’, he remarks, ‘differs from the Middle Ages not because it puts knowledge ahead of faith but because it has different objects of knowledge and faith from those of medieval knowledge and faith’ (p. 108). Today, we have been desensitised to the radical character of such a view by the post-modernist critique of modernity, but at the time when Losev was writing, this was still bold and unorthodox. In Losev’s

[25] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH case, such declarations were also dangerous because they flew in the face of the modernist progressivism which was at the core of Soviet Marxism. But if, in contrast to dogma, myth is historical, then what is the difference between myth and history as such? Losev’s answer to this question is a theory of miracle, which clinches his whole argument. Myth is a miraculous, magical tale, Losev argues, rather than a factual historical account. What is meant by ‘miracle’ is explained in a lengthy counter-argument against rival theories. Losev rejects the views that understand miracle as the intervention of higher powers, violation of the laws of nature, projec- tion of one’s own wishes onto objective phenomena, and psychological suggestion. His main objection to these theories is that they view miracle from perspectives that ignore the question of how mythical consciousness itself perceives it, and thus, in fact, rather than explaining what miracle is, they explain it away. Losev’s own formula is that a miracle is the coincidence of two planes in personal experience: it happens when the original design of a person is fully, if only momentarily, realised in the person’s actual existence. We know already that myth is thoroughly imbued, in Losev’s view, with the personalistic element, and in the concept of miracle this aspect of it is further confirmed. What marks the miraculous implementation of the person’s original, pristine design, as distinct from the ordinary manifestations of it, is the ‘mythical’ or ‘personalistic purposefulness’ that one finds in it. In contrast to, say, the extraordinary technical prowess of a musician, which gives expression to only one aspect of a person, in a miracle, Losev argues, a person achieves absolute self-affirmation of her innermost apophatic essence: What does a person want, as a person? A person wants, of course, absolute self-assertion. A person wants to depend on nothing or at least to be dependent on something in a way that would not limit her internal freedom. A person does not want to fall into separate parts, dash about in contradictions, or disinte- grate into darkness and non-existence. A person wants to exist like the eternally blissful gods who enjoy the infinite peace and intelligent silence of their completely independent and luminous being (p. 167). The requirement of absolute self-affirmation of a person in a miracle,

[26] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH however, should be understood in flexible terms. Losev points out that its absolute degree is the limit of the self-affirmation that occurs in miraculous phenomena. However, these phenomena present the picture of varying degrees and types of its realisation, depending on how the ideal of a person is conceived in a given cultural context. The miraculous powers of epic heroes point to the affirmation of the person’s unlimited physical might; the magical transformations of a witch into animals and objects affirm the person’s omnipresence and infinite variety of forms; and the supernatural effects of mysterious herbs are testimony to the person’s powers of manipulation. The types of these ‘pristine’ and perfect persons may vary, but miracles are their perfection made visible. In fact, Losev comes to the conclusion that the whole world and everything in it are miraculous through and through: ‘The entire world and all its constitutive parts, all living and inanimate things, are equally a myth and are equally a miracle’ (p. 173). With miracle, it finally becomes clear what kind of detachment distinguishes myth from ordinary things, on the one hand, and from poetry, on the other: it becomes clear how myth can be at once factual and ‘fantastical’. A miracle is perceived by the mythical subject as a fact, but it is a fact of peculiar nature. In this visible, palpable fact, mythical consciousness catches a glimpse of the world as it should be in its ultimate perfection. In the concept of miracle, all the preceding threads of Losev’s definition come together: the reality of mythical being, its corporeality, its peculiar (miraculous) veracity, its symbolic nature, the energistic affirmation of person in it, myth’s historicity, and its verbal nature. All these qualities of myth can be condensed into the unity of three components of which it consists, namely person, history, and word. Losev calls these components ‘the dialectical triad in the depth of mythology itself’. All mythologies contain this triad, he believes, insofar as they tell us about some primordial being and a theogonic process, or, in other words, how the primordial being attains self-consciousness through its own sacred story. In one final step, Losev further revises this formula to reflect his Onomatodoxic stance, and defines myth as ‘an unfolded magical name’. The summary of his argument in Chapter XIII is the consummation of Losev’s book-long attempt at defining myth in phenomenological-dialectical terms. It was to be followed, however, by the exploration of various types of mythology as they found expression in history, i.e. by what Losev

[27] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH called in the Preface a ‘sociology of myth’. Chapter XIV was thus originally meant to be a transition to this further study of cultural-historical types of myth. As we know, Losev’s plan was thwarted by circumstances. It is possible, nevertheless, to form an approximate idea of the general direction in which this further cultural and socio-historical investigation was headed. We can glean it partially from Chapter XIV and partially from various excerpts found in Losev’s archive, confiscated by the OGPU after the publication of the book. The transition to this second part of Losev’s work begins at the end of Chapter XII. Here, Losev advances the idea, harking back to Schelling and the Romantics, of a universal system of world mythology:

All mythological ideas – Hindu, Egyptian, Greek, Orthodox-Chris- tian, Catholic, Protestant, and atheistic – constitute a single general Idea which is synthetically realised in the world-historical process, resulting in a single global mythology lying at the basis of individual nations and their outlooks and being gradually realised by replacing one religious-mythological, and hence historical, system with another (p. 184). Schelling’s influence also shows itself in Losev’s division of world myths into absolute and relative mythologies, and further, in the view that Chris- tian trinitarian monotheism is the absolute mythology, whereas all other mythological systems are relative and as such lead up to, only to be ultimately absorbed and transformed by, Christian myth. But perhaps the most philosophically important idea that Losev advances at the very end of the book is that mythology must be merged with philosophy in order to avoid the limitations of unreflective consciousness guided by irrational faith, on the one hand, and of abstract idealism divorced from life, on the other. Further important conclusions also have to do with the relation between myth and philosophy. Losev was convinced that under every philosophical system there can be found a corresponding mythology that predetermines this system on its most fundamental level. There is a certain mythology, he claimed, underlying Plato’s dialectics, another underlying Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s, and yet another underlying Hegel’s. These underlying mythologies sometimes force thinkers unduly to emphasise now one element in their system, now another, creating an

[28] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH imbalance and driving consciousness into error. In their absolute synthesis, however, mythology and dialectics will so completely fuse with each other that the old antinomies of the understanding will be finally resolved. The antinomy of faith and knowledge, for example, is resolved in the concept of ‘wisdom’ or gnosis, that of subject and object in ‘person’, that of consciousness and being in ‘creativity’, that of essence and phenomenon in ‘symbol’, and that of individualism and socialism in ‘religion’. These are only a few out of Losev’s twelve absolute syntheses, and they can all be subsumed, he proposed, under the above formula of myth: unfolded magical name, understood as absolute being. The above account of Losev’s argument is but the skeleton of an essay that contains, alongside its main theory, a wealth of vivid and captivating literary examples, illuminating auxiliary arguments, observations of both general and personal nature, and excursuses – quite fanciful at times – into a variety of types of mythical consciousness. Among the key ideas not discussed above are some of the most acute statements made by Losev, anticipating the late twentieth-century debates on culture, science, the role of the Enlightenment, and the nature of modernity in general. Some of these ideas will be touched upon below, in an attempt to describe Losev’s place among other twentieth-century theorists of myth. But a few key insights should be mentioned here. One such point is that myth is a necessary category of consciousness and as such cannot be ‘refuted’ by rational thought or ousted from consciousness by the latter. Thus, modernity’s claim to have rid itself of myth is patently false, and Losev finds many examples of modern myths that forcefully contradict it. Foremost among these examples are his discussions of the modern myth of matter, the myth of uniform and infinite space and time, typical of Newtonian cosmology, Soviet ideological myths, and the mythical significance of machine culture. The next theme is derived from the first one: myths are not replaced because they lose a rational argument with their opponents, such as science; rather, one myth ‘tramples down’ another, as Losev puts it – only to be trampled down by the next. A closer look at this claim reveals, however, a tension with Losev’s other theses, such as that about progress from relative myths towards absolute myth. If such a progression does indeed occur, then there must be some logic and teleology in the process, and it cannot consist of purely random violence visited by one myth upon

[29] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH another. But if this is the case, then mythical consciousness is guided by at least some inner logic from one myth to another, rather than being irratio- nally swayed by mythologies that come and go without rhyme or reason. Be that as it may, the history of mythology seen as a continuous struggle among complexes of mythical beliefs is a dynamic substratum of Losev’s main argument that pulsates throughout the book. Another thread in the complex fabric of The Dialectics of Myth is the obverse side of Losev’s critique of modernity: his apologia of the Middle Ages. Aside from German Romanticism and nineteenth-century Russian Slavophiles, Losev’s defence of medieval culture and philosophy was inspired, no doubt, by Father Pavel’ Florenskii’s example and should be seen in the context of the so-called Russian ‘religious-philosophical Renaissance’ in the early twentieth century. Losev’s chastisement of modernity amounts to a sustained diatribe, which sometimes may sound too shrill for today’s ear. We must not forget, however, that the modernity with which Losev was most intimately familiar was of a peculiar, Sta- linist–Soviet kind. Nevertheless, Florenskii and Losev were far from alone in their desire to re-evaluate the place that the medieval period holds in history. As the limitations of modernist progressivism became increasingly obvious, many twentieth-century historians, students of culture, and philosophers worked to overcome the dismissive attitude towards the Middle Ages that it had fostered.

There are many passages in the book that will strike today’s reader as out of place and at times even offensive. Losev’s worldview bears most responsibility for this: in many ways it is far removed from what is preva- lent opinion today in the West. And yet much of the difficulty that the book presents is rooted in its style. To confront, appreciate, and perhaps even to overcome the obstacles that this style poses, a few explanatory remarks may be useful. It was clear to his early readers that Losev often deliberately resorted to a difficult mode of presentation in order, as Zenkovskii put it, ‘to keep the Soviet censors from understanding it’.35 In books like The Ancient Cosmos and Modern Science or The Philosophy of the Name, Losev indulged in this technique of deception at the peril of losing his audience. ‘His style’,

[30] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH complained Natalie Duddington, ‘is enough to reduce his readers to despair.’36 It came all the more easily to Losev owing to his intimate famil- iarity with German philosophical literature, both classical and contemporaneous, in which the forbidding complexity of style was customary and at times even cultivated. Nor was Losev alone in using this precaution against the censor’s meddling pen: writing at the same time and under similar conditions, his contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin knew its value well and on occasion likewise used impenetrable phraseology to cloak his ideas. The Dialectics of Myth is less guilty of this offence and its language is more accessible than that of Losev’s other early books. It contains, nonetheless, several spectacularly dense passages, and even my efforts to alleviate, in translation, the untenable syntax of the original have not always made them fully transparent. Another feature of the style of the book has to do with Losev’s excessively agitated tone, which may make the reader bristle. The historical situation has been briefly described above and partially explains the author’s state of mind which is largely responsible for this agitation. The Dialectics of Myth is not a calm disquisition on an academic question, but a cry in the wilderness, the scream of a man who understands that he seals his own fate by writing this book. To compare Losev to the voice crying in the wilderness is also appropriate because, alongside being a theoretical work, The Dialectics of Myth was a reckless public declaration of his religious convictions. His official critics’ blunt but unerring sense immediately recognised it as popovshchina, their pejorative term for ‘clerical propaganda’. But the most perplexing passages in the book result from the author’s habit of assuming various mythical personas and of speaking from a particular mythical consciousness. He could play, for example, with the mythology of moonlight, seen through the eyes of a vaguely Gogolian subject; or quote with obvious sympathy Goethe’s and Florenskii’s rumi- nations on the psychology and symbolism of colour perception; or even let Vasilii Rozanov – towards whom he otherwise had highly ambivalent feelings – contemptuously snort at Copernicus on his behalf. He sometimes went so far as to speak with the voice of a Bolshevik Commissar, giving recommendations as to how the new social order should handle the freedom of art and science. At other times it was precisely these Commissars that became the object of his derision as their propagandistic declarations

[31] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH were set in counterpoint with strange ‘voices’ and images of mocking animals in the head of a mythical subject who bore only an uncertain resemblance to the author. This was a conscious practice with Losev, as is evident from his letter to Glavlit in which he asked the censors to reconsider their ban on the Addendum. He emphasised that he sometimes became involved with ‘a particularly complex mythological type to the extent of forgetting about everything else’. He was also aware that such a manner of presentation could give rise to misconceptions: I anticipated that I could be suspected of sympathy or antipathy towards particular mythologies and wrote for this reason [in the Preface], ‘I plead with my readers … that no alien opinions be forced upon me and that only what I am myself giving should be taken from me, i.e. the dialectics of myth alone.’37

And in the Preface itself he further stressed the point: If anyone thinks … that the facts of mystical and mythical consciousness that I cite as examples are ones that I profess myself or that myth theory consists only in observing bare facts, then they had better not try to understand my analysis of myth at all. Myth theory must be resolutely wrested both from the competence of theologians and from the realm of ethnographers. We must first adopt the point of view of dialectics and of the phenomenological- dialectical purification of concepts, and then do whatever we wish with myth. Resolute as these declarations are, however, the matter is much more complicated. There are good reasons to suspect that Losev was being dis- ingenuous, albeit not entirely so. He was addressing, after all, the censors. Above, I compared Losev’s method to wearing masks of mythical subjects and mentioned the diversity of these masks. But it would be misleading to pretend that Losev had no preferences among them. In fact, such a pre- tension would be offensive to his memory, for it would make him a relativ- ist which he never was nor ever wished to be considered. Nowhere in The Dialectics of Myth does Losev speak with sympathy about socialism, liberalism, atheism, and technology. And nowhere in the book does he speak disparagingly about Eastern Orthodoxy, monasticism, and living human

[32] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH experience. There is no mistaking in what direction his sympathies tended, and they were clearly not with the values of modern society. In other words, Losev did employ this mode of speech (which, by the way, brings The Dialectics of Myth close to a literary work, as distinct from a strictly theoretical one) with varying degrees of detachment from the mythical subjects paraded through the pages of the book, and sometimes the degree of this detachment is no easy matter to determine. Yet there are some cases in which Losev’s negative attitude towards many things modern can be understood, if not necessarily shared. Let us take, for example, his fuming tirade against electric light which, he says, is lifeless, mechanical, and fit for presenting a bill or for selecting a victim, but not for making love or for praying. There is no sweetness or fragrance in it, boredom is its essence, and it turns the genuine piety of the heart into a tasteless parody. Losev describes in it the black emptiness of the Newtonian universe, the greed of capitalism, the business-like indif- ference of ‘Americanism’, and many other similarly unattractive things (pp. 50–51). To most of us who can hardly imagine life without electricity, this ranting will seem extremely bizarre.38 And yet Losev, or rather the mythical subject who is speaking in this instance, did capture something important about the living perception of electric light, and his harangue against it is not wholly extravagant. When was the last time we sat down to have an intimate dinner or conversation with a close friend under a bare electric bulb? We try hard to transform electric light through all sorts of devices, in order to make it warmer, less harsh, and more human – in a word, to make it all of those things that Losev praises in candlelight. And we must not forget ‘Il’ich’s lamp’ in the timber yard office where Losev was losing his sight as he squinted at productivity reports.39 Other things that Losev says about modernity, however, are much more difficult to justify, let alone sympathise with. One such phrase is Losev’s famous observation that ‘it is more beautiful to burn people at the stake than to shoot them’ (p. 139). The remark occurs as part of Losev’s comments on various strata of our perception of history, differing from each other in their degrees of concreteness. There is a layer that has to do with the picturesque quality of this perception. From a certain point of view, Antiquity and the Middle Ages are more picturesque and beautiful, according to Losev, than abstract, mechanistic, and dreary modernity. Hence, medieval execution by fire is more colourful, more ‘beautiful’, than

[33] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH mass murder by shooting, which is typical of the modern period. Further, perception of history on this level is devoid of any ethical perspective, and the striking absence of moral judgement is one of the things that the remark is apparently intended to convey. Unfortunately, even though the statement can be explained, it can hardly be defended: the phrase is in poor taste. The desire to shock some readers and to provoke others by holding up before them a mythical consciousness radically different from their own sometimes took Losev too far, and we can and should distance ourselves from him in such cases. But what we should not do is to ascribe unequivocally to Losev sentiments like the one that animates the remark in question. In other words, to conclude that he was recommending in earnest to resume the practice of burning people at the stake would be wrong-headed and simple-minded. Another important aspect of his style is that, not only does Losev speak in a variety of voices, but his putative audiences vary, too, making the reader’s task both more intriguing and strenuous. For Losev is not addressing the same audience when he shares intimate thoughts about the sexuality of a nun at one point or when he admonishes modern science at another or when, at the end of Chapter XIV, he almost rudely asks the reader, ‘Are you satisfied now?’. In the first case he addresses his thoughts to a like-minded reader – in the manner characteristic of Pavel Florenskii’s letters to a friend in The Pillar and Ground of Truth – and hence the confiding tone. In the other, he levels his critique at a philosophical rival, the ostensible advocate of a positivist view, and hence the polemical key. In the third case, the question is thrown in the faces of the Soviet ideological watchdogs, and hence the brash inflection of voice. The book is densely populated by a bustling variety of speakers and listeners who step forth to deliver their message or to receive one from the author. As a result, Losev’s tone of voice covers the whole gamut of emotion from cool-headed calm to sentimental admiration to passionate appeal to angry exasperation. George Kline aptly described him as ‘the devout and learned, if sometimes irascible, monk Andronik’.40 As we read the book, we should bear in mind, though, that monk Andronik was only one of Losev’s numerous hypostases. Another felicitous characteristic comes from Sergei Khoruzhii, who has compared Losev’s book to ‘rearguard action’ on the part of Russian religious philosophy.41 The simile evokes the image of a retreating army

[34] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH under attack from the enemy. Independent Russian philosophy was leaving the battlefield with its head raised defiantly and without apologies. Having said all this, we must return to the substance of Losev’s worldview, because it can evoke more serious objections than matters of style and the author’s overbearing posture. Losev speaks as though in his version of dialectics he had found a crys- tal ball that provided an infallible perspective on phenomena. His unshakable faith in his method strikes one as typical of the tenor of the age. Tolerance was hardly among the highest virtues in European consciousness in the first third of the twentieth century. Passionate adherence to one’s ideals was frequently a higher value, whereas the slightest doubt with regard to one’s own opinion could signify weakness of character. Losev did not escape the grip of this Zeitgeist, and it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to discern any note of self-doubt in his categorical pronouncements. Some may be tempted to blame dialectics and the ‘hegemony of reason’ for this, but such a criticism would miss the mark. No matter how ardently he insisted on thinking dialectically, Losev himself did not always remain at the height of contemplative even-hand- edness. Moreover, in the intimate depth of his philosophy there was a profound mistrust of dialectical thinking. His failure to maintain a bal- anced, calmly confident perspective was the result of a transgression against dialectics, rather than fidelity to it. According to Losev, the progress of dialectical thought is checked on several fronts by what escapes logic and conceptual thinking. These limits are constructed by Losev in a consistent and systematic manner. Knowl- edge of all objects is bounded by an extralogical relation of the knowing subject to them. At the level of methodology, dialectics is restricted by phenomenological intuition. Finally, when it reaches the highest point in the unfolding of its concepts, dialectics is dissolved, according to Losev, in the suprarational One of Areopagitic Neoplatonism. For, in spite of the fact that he strove towards a mutual transparency between philosophical thought and mythical imagery in absolute mythology, Losev also argued in the Addendum that consistent dialectical thinking must posit something that goes beyond the grasp of logic and reason, ‘a full apophatic Abyss and Darkness’.42 There was in Losev’s philosophy a concept by which he strove to embrace the sum total of these boundaries. He called it ‘life’:

[35] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH

To affirm the reality of some object, one must, of course, have the corresponding sensation of this object. And in order to have sensations, one must have the organ of sensation. This is … not the domain of logic and dialectics, but of life. People have sensations and have the objects of sensations, depending on the life they lead. One life predisposes them towards one sort of sensation, and another life towards other sensations. In order to perceive and have the sensation of Divinity, one must lead a certain kind of life, both internal and external. To have the sensation of Divinity for someone who has never had such a sensation is to change his life. Most importantly, it means to change oneself physically …. Thus, the logic of triunity has behind it some extralogical experience that no logic can implant or inculcate and that, conversely, no logic can refute.43

But with regard to all these limits imposed on conceptual thinking, one may ask: how does one come to realise that they exist? It is not hard to see that the extralogical component of knowledge, the phenomenological component of Losev’s method, the suprarational apophatic One, and, finally, life which allegedly precedes thinking are nothing other than boundaries that thinking sets for itself. They are all rather complex concepts that do not arise with pure immediacy and spontaneity but, on the contrary, require a directed effort of cultivated reflection. If we look closely at how Losev understands ‘life’, we shall see that it is filled with products of highly developed consciousness: myth, art, and religion. These are, according to Losev himself, the work of intelligence. Thus, thought is ‘preceded’ not by something that is radically different from it, but by thinking itself and its own creatures. Losev himself did, after all, define ‘life’ as ‘the realisation of intelligence’ in Chapter VII. As a dialectician, Losev is remarkably refined and compelling. Once one grasps his method, it is easy and gratifying to follow Losev the philosopher. But the categorical gesturing that accompanies Losev’s evaluation of various myths is bound to make many a reader pause or turn away altogether. Further, it is not dialectics per se that motivates Losev’s choice of ‘absolute mythology’, but his own particular upbringing, personal inclinations, and biographical context. There is something to be said, after all, for the popular usage of the term ‘myth’ as a false belief. The beliefs of our others always seem to be [36] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH false – as long as one remains within the confines of one’s own myth. Reflective consciousness must rise above purely mythical thinking in order to recognise truth in various myths and acknowledge their value. Losev was right in proposing that dialectics mediate among mythologies to resolve their quarrels and unite them in an embrace designed to bring about the unity of human spirit. But he privileged one particular myth, which prevented his dialectics from pacifying the mythomachia that he so acutely perceived in history. Moreover, his partiality towards one mythology, the Eastern Orthodox, at times exacerbated the sense of enmity among competing myths. Presiding over all the gaps between thinking and being in Losev’s thought is the apophatic darkness of the Christian-Neoplatonist divine principle. The darkness comes not from dialectics, but from the mythology of the Absolute, ungraspable by the human mind. By contrast, dialectics will point out not only that the Absolute is grasped by thought but also that rational thinking is the only adequate means of comprehending it. We are taken back to the point that was made at the very beginning of this Introduction. The tension between philosophy and mythology, logos and mythos, is the central nerve in the drama of ideas that constitutes Losev’s worldview. Philosophy did not always triumph in this drama. Through the apophatic breach in its dialectical constructions, Losev’s worldview was flooded with a myth, and the philosopher’s boat was sometimes tossed off its steady course.

The Dialectics of Myth absorbed many influences from a variety of sources into its synthesis. Losev himself saw his theory as rooted in the work of Proclus, Schelling, and Hegel. This list must be supplemented by a number of figures from the Russian ‘Silver Age’, who for political reasons could not have been directly acknowledged at the time. These include, above all, Pavel Florenskii, whose writings were central to the development of Losev’s ideas in the 1920s. Further, Losev’s work was part of a larger trend in philosophy, which turned to the problems of language and symbolism in the first third of the twentieth century. It thus has important parallels in contemporaneous writings outside Russia. The most striking parallel is Ernst Cassirer’s work on myth, with which Losev was familiar and to which

[37] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH he responded in his own essays. And, finally, Losev’s analyses frequently anticipated the insights of later theorists. It is enlightening to compare briefly his ideas with some of these later approaches to myth. For Losev, the philosophy of Proclus was the final summing-up of ‘the thousand-year-long history of Greek philosophy and religion’ and hence a system of thought that articulated ‘the dialectics of the entire Greek mythology’.44 If the extant Addendum is any indication of what the second part of the book was supposed to become, then Losev took a cue from Proclus. For, in the surviving fragments, Losev’s aim is to construct a system of dialectical categories, which he calls ‘absolute dialectics’, in an intimate association with a series of Russian Orthodox mythologems, which he calls ‘absolute mythology’. Using his speculative approach, Losev derives categories and logical models which he then links with appropriate mythical images. Thus, the dialectical triad of the one, its other, and their unity in becoming is the analogue of the Holy Trinity; the fourth member of the tetraktis, i.e. the embodiment of meaning, is equiv- alent to Sophia (Divine Wisdom); and there are corresponding logical constructs for a variety of mythologems, such as Paradise, Hell, the Fall, and angels. In other words, Losev seems to have understood his goal as a philosophical justification of Eastern Orthodoxy that was akin to Proclus’ philosophical justification of Greco-Roman pagan myth. With regard to Schelling, Losev openly admitted that his own theory was, ‘in essence, also Schelling’s doctrine’, although he arrived at some of his insights independently of the German philosopher.45 Perhaps the most intimate affinity between the two theories lies in the logical models that they employ. Losev notes that Schelling’s definition of myth is based on Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes of things – potencies, in Schelling’s terminology. Myth, according to Schelling, is the unity of material, formal, efficient, and final causes.46 Further, Schelling designated the formal cause as eidos, or the ‘fourth potency’. ‘What I call eidos’, Losev explained, ‘is Schelling’s first three potencies (causes), and what I call symbol is Schelling’s fourth potency, or eidos as he understood it.’47 But the analogies between the two philosophies of myth go beyond their respective logical paradigms. First of all, Losev was impressed with Schelling’s demand (which was not lost on Cassirer either) that myth be seen in its own right, as an independent form of consciousness. This demand was far ahead of its time and was ignored by many mythologists.

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As a result, Losev must, like Schelling, explain how his view avoids the fail- ings of these other theorists. What I called above the ‘negative’ phase in Losev’s definition of myth, i.e. the series of distinctions that he drew between myth and other symbolic forms, is thus prefigured in Schelling’s systematic critique of competing theories in his lectures on the philosophy of myth. There is, further, a degree of similarity between Losev’s project of absolute mythology and Schelling’s idea of ‘new mythology’ which was later replaced by his doctrine of absolute and relative mythologies.48 But here one must carefully delimit Losev’s ideas from those of Romantics, among which Schelling’s early doctrine belonged. The Romantic yearning for a new mythology was born of the conviction that, as Friedrich Schlegel put it, ‘we (the moderns) have no mythology’ in the same sense in which it was the ‘focal point’ for the ancients.49 The Romantic mythological project aimed, then, to create a new, improved mythology that would ‘en- compass all the others’.50 Losev disagreed, first of all, with Schlegel’s initial premise, namely that there is no mythology in the modern age. Unlike the Romantics, Losev did not believe that the analytically minded Enlightenment had demolished myth as such; rather, he thought, it had merely replaced one particular mythology with another. As we have seen, Losev was thoroughly sceptical about the ability of rational thinking to dis- pense with myth. The mythological crisis of modernity consisted not in the absence of mythology as such, but in embracing the wrong mythology. This also means that traditional mythology was not dismantled by analysis but simply pushed aside by another myth. From this follows a task that is largely opposite to that of Romantics: it is not a new, improved mythology that we need, in Losev’s view, but rather the restoration and the philosophical apologia of the medieval Christian myth, which has been so tyrannised by its modern rival. It is noteworthy that both Schlegel and Schelling’s later thought also moved in this direction: away from the idea of creating a new myth and towards embracing traditional Christian mythology as the proper alternative to the Enlightenment’s mythophobia. Early Romanticism was, ironically, rather modern itself when it proposed mythological innovation as a means of overcoming modernity’s ‘mythical deprivation’. Losev more consistently proposed a quasi-medieval restoration of the Orthodox mythological tradition. I say ‘quasi-medieval’ because Losev was not, after all, a medieval thinker in the genuine sense

[39] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH of this word – in spite of his conscious imitation of Christian Neoplato- nists. But more of this later. Returning to Schelling, there is another subtle yet significant difference that must be mentioned. In spite of the fact that he drew a distinction between mythology and poetry, Schelling sometimes hesitated between separating and conflating them. In Lecture 10 of his Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology he stated, for example, that art and mythology are products of the same power, which is also the power that guides the progress of human history. Mythology, he argued, was the first, original poetry which preceded all artistic creativity and, in fact, created the material for the latter. ‘Even though it cannot be itself regarded as arising from the poetic art’, he wrote, ‘yet it is equally evident that [mythology] is related as such an original poesy to all subsequent free creative produc- tion’.51 The idea that myth stems from the same impulse of the psyche as poetry was unappealing to Losev, who was thoroughly sensitised to the aesthetic quality of modern art, based as it was on the Kantian notion of ‘disinter- ested pleasure’. The anti-Kantian critique of modern art was a leitmotif both in Russian literary theory and religious-philosophical aesthetics of the ‘Silver Age’. The Romantic view, of course, reversed this notion of disinter- ested pleasure and made art ‘the highest task and the real metaphysical activity of this life’, to use Nietzsche’s memorable phrase, in which man had a supremely vested interest.52 But Losev was anxious not to Romanti- cise the notion of myth, for he saw in Romanticism ‘the absolutised and deified human Ego’, which was the original sin of modernity brought to its highest pitch.53 It is for this reason that he rejected the idea of art as the final synthesis of myth, religion, and science. Therein lies one of his greatest disagreements with Ernst Cassirer and later thinkers, who adopted this tenet for their own theories of myth.54 Losev’s sceptical view of art as such a synthesis is analogous to Hegel’s disagreement with the Romantics. Like the philosopher of Absolute Ideal- ism, he preferred philosophy as the site where discrepancies among the varied creations of intelligence must be resolved. It is hardly surprising, then, that Losev claimed that Hegel’s Absolute Idea is ‘nothing other than myth’. This was because, Losev explained, Absolute Idea is the coincidence of subject and object, as well as of knowledge and life, and thus is both myth and person.55 This interpretation found additional support in

[40] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH the analogy that Losev perceived between Hegel’s conception of the classical ideal of art and Schelling’s understanding of symbol. In the classical ideal, the external form and the inner content are, according to Hegel, in perfect balance with each other. But the same equilibrium obtains, as we saw earlier, in both Schelling’s and Losev’s concepts of symbol.56 It is also interesting that, on the cultural-historical level, Losev linked Hegel’s doctrine of symbolic, classical, and romantic art to Oriental, ancient, and European mythologies respectively. In other words, he understood the underpinnings of Hegel’s philosophy of art as a philosophy of mythology.57 On the whole, however, Losev’s repeatedly acknowledged dependence on Hegel was qualified by the conviction, widespread among Russian philosophers, that Hegelianism suffered from panlogicism, i.e. from the reduction of the entire living experience to the interplay of logical concepts (p. 191).58 As I mentioned earlier, Losev was familiar with Ernst Cassirer’s work and closely followed it throughout the 1920s. Furthermore, he held Cassirer’s essay on myth in high regard and repeatedly commented on it in his early writings. ‘Cassirer’s study’, he wrote, ‘is, perhaps, the first work since Schelling that treats myth seriously and sees in it its own irreducible, purely mythical necessity.’59 On the broadest level, the two philosophers largely share the same philosophical tradition: Plato, Kant, Schelling, and Hegel are important points of departure for both Cassirer and Losev. Losev’s reliance on this tradition was, however, supplemented by Neopla- tonism and Russian religious-philosophical thought. Further, although he felt close to Neo-Kantianism as a welcome alternative to positivism, Losev consciously distanced himself from it where he thought Neo-Kantians fell short of thinking dialectically. Accordingly, Cassirer’s dependence on Kantian epistemology stands in sharp contrast to Losev’s generally critical view of it. On a more specific level, among the most important affinities between Losev and Cassirer is a view of myth as a symbolic form, the desire to grasp it in its unique significance, along with the resulting caution not to reduce it to other, closely related forms, such as religion and art, and a critical attitude towards empiricist attempts to define myth according either to its subject matter or to its function. Beyond these general traits, however, Losev’s standpoint with regard to his German colleague and contemporary was rather complicated. In The Dialectics of Myth, Losev directly

[41] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH engaged Cassirer, for example, on the question of contrast between myth and science (see the end of Chapter III). Cassirer was gravely in error, Losev protested, when he denied myth the ability to distinguish truth from mere appearance, real perception from mere representation, image from thing, and the essential from the particular. While myth does not discriminate between these things in a scientific manner, Losev points out, it certainly possesses its own sense of truth and falsehood, or veracity (dostovernost’). Christian mythical consciousness, Losev countered, could tell very well its own truth from the ‘falsehood’ of pagan mythology.60 In a more conciliatory mood, he made use of Cassirer’s observations on the nature of mythical time in Chapter VII. Losev also noted that Cassirer’s method was not genuinely dialectical, even though it went beyond the pure phenomenology of Husserl and thus merited the designation ‘transcendental-deductive’.61 The last part of the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (entitled ‘The dialectic of mythical consciousness’), in which Cassirer describes the historical progression from myth to religion to art, was, in Losev’s opinion, ‘inconsistent with the entire previous discussion’ in the book.62 Losev’s main objections have to do with Cassirer’s proposal that the oppositions that are inherent in myth and religion are ultimately resolved in art, or in aesthetic consciousness, which is supposed to ‘appease, if not negate’ these oppositions.63 Cassirer, we might recall, summarised this process as follows: In the image myth sees a fragment of substantial reality, a part of the material world itself, endowed with equal or higher powers than this world. From this first magical view religion strives toward a progressively purer spiritualization. And yet, again and again, it is carried back to a point at which the question of its truth and meaning content shifts into the question of the reality of its objects, at which it faces the problem of ‘existence’ in all its harsh- ness. It is only the aesthetic consciousness that leaves this problem truly behind it. Since from the outset it gives itself to pure ‘con- templation’ … the images fashioned in this frame of consciousness gain for the first time a truly immanent significance. They confess themselves to be illusion as opposed to the empirical reality of things; but this illusion has its own truth because it possesses its own law.64

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Obviously, such a ‘resolution’ of mythical and religious realism into the openly admitted illusionism of art would be just as unacceptable to Losev as was the Romantic exaltation of art at the expense of myth and religion. ‘Art does not reconcile the contradictions of religion’, wrote Losev in his commentaries on Cassirer’s theory, ‘because the latter occur in the realm of life, whereas artistic synthesis occurs in the realm of meaning, not in the objective realm.’65 In other words, Cassirer’s aesthetic consciousness ‘leaves behind’ the main problem of myth, namely the latter’s truth and objective meaning, much as an ostrich ‘leaves behind’ and ‘appeases’ danger when it hides its head in the sand. On the whole, however, Cassirer’s classic treatise on myth is the closest parallel to Losev’s theory outside Russia. By far the closest to Losev’s theory is that of Father Pavel Florenskii, and especially his doctrine of symbol. Florenskii’s view of symbol was marked, first of all, by a staunch ontological realism. ‘Symbols’, he wrote, ‘are the organs of our communication with reality. Through them and through their mediation we come into contact with that which has hitherto been cut off from our consciousness. Through the act of depic- tion we see reality, and hear it through its name. Symbols are openings pierced in our subjectivity.’66 Sergei Khoruzhii observed that, according to Florenskii’s ontology, being itself is ‘the Cosmos and Symbol’.67 This is precisely how Losev understood myth and its symbolic nature. From Florenskii also comes Losev’s Onomatodoxic interpretation of myth, for, according to Father Pavel, the most perfect aural symbol is God’s name.68 Further, the doctrine of the energistic presence of the prototype in its symbol is shared by both thinkers. ‘God’s Name is God, but God is not a name’, wrote Florenskii, ‘God’s essence is above His energy, although this energy expresses the essence of God’s Name.’69 The ‘medieval’ critique of the modern experience that puts such an idiosyncratic stamp on Losev’s outlook resonates with Florenskii’s attempts to construct a doctrine of the ‘medieval’ rather than ‘the Renaissance’ type.70 And finally, in light of such intimate consanguinity, the lengthy quotations from Florenskii’s treatise on the colour symbolism of Sophia the Divine Wisdom in Chapter V acquire special significance. It was particularly important for Losev, one surmises, to ensure Sophia’s presence in The Dialectics of Myth because the fourth member of the divine tetraktis is the model on which Losev elaborates his view of personhood. At the

[43] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH same time, Sophia, as Florenskii maintained in his opus magnum,isthe model of the human person and, more broadly, of created personhood as such.71 Losev’s connection with Florenskii extended far beyond theory and theology. They saw each other at the meetings of the Solovyov Society before the revolution; as we remember, Florenskii conducted Losev’s wedding ceremony. In the 1920s, Father Pavel’ had already had troubles with the Soviet authorities. For Losev to quote his writings in The Dialectics of Myth meant something beyond mere acknowledgement of philosophical agreement. Like Losev–Cassirer and Losev–Bakhtin, the Losev–Florenskii pair is a rich and complex theme that will no doubt be the subject of further study. Later in life, Losev confessed that, at the time of writing The Dialectics of Myth, he was strongly attracted to psychoanalytic thought. His interest in it was probably responsible for some limited analogies between his own and Sigmund Freud’s approaches to myth. At the same time, he had serious reservations about psychoanalysis. This attitude is revealed, for example, in Losev’s desire to dissociate his own observations about the phallic ‘protomyth of Platonism’ from a possible psychoanalytic reduction of it.72 Losev’s later criticism of the psychoanalytic approach also focused precisely on its reductive tendency. Freud’s and Carl Jung’s theories were limited, according to Losev, because ‘by interpreting all mythological phenomena exclusively from the vantage point of psychopathology [they] depicted mythical consciousness in an extremely simplified way and ignored its social character, as well as the historical conditions under which it originated’.73 However, in a setting that did not require a rigid adherence to the official ‘antibourgeois’ stance, Losev also noted the positive contribution made by psychoanalytic thought: I think Freudianism is a large and very important phenomenon in the history of philosophy and in the history of science. … We had been too rationalistic, exaggerated the effects of reason, and were not aware of hidden, secret longings and desires, of intimate and unconscious urges. In this particular sense Freudianism played an enormous part.74

Further, Losev’s interpretation of Platonism as founded on a phallic myth is complemented by his observations about the female sexuality which, in his opinion, thoroughly imbued archaic Greek myth:

[44] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH

All the gods and all human beings descend from Earth. Earth is such an explicitly sexual being! … For me, mythology is, first and foremost, sculpture, that is, beautiful, complete, and heroic images. But behind them there lurks their horrid, chaotic, dishar- monious and chthonic past, which is often frankly sexual.75

And yet, while he recognised the great importance of sexuality, he believed that it must be viewed as only one among many elements responsible for the shaping of mythical consciousness. In spite of his objections to psychoanalysis and exclusively psychological interpretations of mythology in general, there are numerous consonances between Losev’s view of myth and that of Carl Jung. Losev anticipated, for example, Jung’s conclusion that myth formation is ‘a living function actu- ally present in the psyche of civilised man’ or that ‘[t]he primitive mentality does not invent myths [but] experiences them’ or that myths have a ‘vital meaning’.76 Further, Losev would probably find a measure of harmony between his own apophaticism and Jung’s curious mysticism. This mysticism is evident in the Swiss thinker’s claim that ‘the ultimate core of meaning’ in mythical imagery ‘may be circumscribed, but not described’, because the ‘contents of an archetypal character [are] essentially unconscious’.77 Losev would, further, derive satisfaction from Jung’s criticism of science’s unsuccessful effort to rid consciousness of myth. When Jung was critical of the various attempts to cleanse human consciousness of myth, be they ‘euhemerism, or Christian apologetics, or Enlightenment in the narrow sense, or Positivism’; or when he asserted that ‘there was always a myth hiding behind [the scientific intellect], in new and disconcerting garb, which then, following the ancient and venerable pattern, gave itself out as ultimate truth’; or when he claimed that we cannot ‘cut loose from our archetypal foundations … any more than we can rid ourselves of our body and its organs without committing suicide’ – in all these cases he spoke, by and large, Losev’s language.78 Aside from broad differences in religious-philosophical outlook, however, Losev’s approach was at variance with Jung’s in that Losev did not look for a particular content of consciousness as the root of myth. The latter was defined for him by a certain mode in which consciousness operates rather than by specific mythologems, however basic to our psychology these may seem. He emphatically insisted that any object whatsoever can

[45] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH be mythical (p. 64), and a ‘divine child’ is not fundamentally different in this sense from a flying broomstick or a magical fern. Losev’s attempts to articulate the logical paradigm of mythical consciousness can be seen as akin, if only vaguely and remotely, to the structuralist approach to myth. Losev did not disapprove, for example, of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ search for structural matrices underlying mythology, nor of his pursuit of codes, embedded in myth, by which primitive consciousness constructs various models of the world. Other affinities between Lévi-Strauss and Losev include the historical, linguistic, and social elements in myth. Losev’s philosophy of language differs in many ways from that of Ferdinand de Saussure, however, and especially from the latter’s distinction between langue and parole, on which so much hinges in Lévi-Strauss’ analyses. On the other hand, Lévi-Strauss’ conviction that myth is ‘objectivated thought’, which spontaneously expresses human spirit in an intimate contact with the world, echoes Losev’s realistic and objectivist symbolism. Further still, Lévi-Strauss’ remark that ‘myths oper- ate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact’ could stand as an epigraph to many passages in The Dialectics of Myth.79 And finally, Lévi-Strauss’ eloquent meditations on music and myth vividly remind one of Losev’s Romantic belief – kindled as it was by Nietzsche – that myth and music arise from a common element.80 When Mircea Eliade defines myth as mostly tales about the origins of the world, he approximates, in a certain sense, both Losev’s and Cassirer’s positions.81 According to Losev, myth is rooted in the immediate encounter of consciousness with reality. But this initial encounter is nothing other than the emergence of the world for consciousness: prior to this moment the world does not exist as something separate from consciousness, something that opposes it. Thus Eliade is right, by Losev’s lights, when he says that myth’s tale is about the origins of the world, although not exactly in the sense in which he intended. It is not the content of myths that matters most, for they do not necessarily need to narrate about the gesta of the gods and heroes, living in the hoary illud tempus. The most important thing is that, whatever its story is about, myth is itself the emergence of the world before the enchanted gaze of the human mind. Although its importance constantly grew throughout the twentieth century, the question of myth acquired a special urgency in post- structuralist thought. It emerged primarily as the problem of master

[46] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH narratives of culture that legitimise its various aspects. Among the numerous post-structuralist writings that address the problem of myth, Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘White mythology: Metaphor in the text of philosophy’ is perhaps one of the most vivid examples and readily lends itself to a com- parison with Losev’s view of myth.82 Losev understood the merging of mythology and dialectics not only as a task that he set himself but also as something that had been prepared by the previous evolution of philosophical thought. Thus, he found in Plato’s doctrine of ideas an early case of such fusion.83 In his History of Ancient Aesthetics he stated, for example, that ‘Plato’s Ideas are gods – not the gods of naive mythology, of course, but those translated into the language of abstract universality’. Through the cosmic elements of the Presocratics and the mystical numbers of Pythagoreans, the memory of the old gods was carried over into the ideal forms of Platonism. ‘Whereas earlier there were numbers and shapes’, Losev maintained, ‘now, upon a new interpretation, these are evidently gods’.84 Plato’s ideas, in other words, grew out of, as well as absorbed, the mythological context of Antiquity, which can still be discerned within them through the veil of their universality. Plato’s ideal forms are mythical-dialectical formations, rather than purely abstract, myth-free entities. Like Losev, Derrida argues for the identity of myth and philosophy, although in his hands the relation between mythical and philosophical thought turns into the problem of metaphorical and conceptual expression: What is metaphysics? A white mythology which assembles and reflects Western culture: the white man takes his own mythology (that is, Indo-European mythology), his logos – that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that which it is still his ines- capable desire to call Reason. … What is white mythology? It is metaphysics which has effaced in itself that fabulous scene which brought it into being, and which yet remains, active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible drawing covered over in the palimpsest.85

Philosophy is caught, according to Derrida, in the enchanted circle of meta- phors that underlie all conceptual thinking and continue to live in it, even constituting its hidden substance. The concept, derived from Latin, and the

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German Begriff both connote a grasping movement and a thirst for power; the Greek theoria and eidos are both rooted in the act of seeing; and the metaphor of light informs the entire western tradition of metaphysical illu- mination. Thus, drawing on the etymology of philosophical terms, Derrida concludes: ‘Concept is a metaphor, foundation is a metaphor, theory is a metaphor; and there is no meta-metaphor for them.’86 When Derrida speaks about metaphor as a ‘white mythology’ at the bottom of philosophical thought, it may seem that he comes close to Losev’s idea that philosophical concepts retain, in their depth, a mythical substrate (Plato’s ideas are the ancient gods). But this similarity is quite superficial. In contrast to Derrida, Losev has no inclination to reduce philosophy to mythology. Losev wishes to show something else: not the futil- ity of philosophy’s claim to objective knowledge and not the impotence of philosophical thought, incapable of breaking the magical spell of meta- phors, but the dialectical unity of philosophical and mythical thinking, their mutually enriching communion with each other as two kinds of intelligent activity. Losev is captivated by the picture of the continuity of cultural tradition in which, it turns out, concepts do not trample down a withered mythology, but soak it up – in which philosophy absorbs the intuitions of mythology. And at the sight of this grandiose continuity, he disdains the conceit on the part of modern consciousness to shake the dust of myth off its feet. There is no limit to Losev’s contempt towards the ‘salon chatter’ of the French Enlightenment and its faith in rational understanding free of prejudice. Derrida, on the other hand, perceives the unity of mythical-metaphorical and philosophical thinking as evidence of the latter’s weakness and even perhaps falsehood, thereby revealing the Enlightenment roots of his attitude towards myth. By contrast, Losev sees in this unity testimony to the equal vitality and strength of both mythology and philosophy. The above remarks merely suggest the large and complex issue of the place that Losev’s theory of myth occupies among its modern counterparts. The distinctive mark of his approach is the striving towards a holistic explanation. The truly adequate theory must show comprehensively, Losev believed, how myth stems from the (apophatic) essence of the whole person and manifests itself in all aspects of her being rather than in her separate, isolated faculties and functions. The Dialectics of Myth laid the foundation for Losev’s further work in which he sought to realise this goal.

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Since most of its first edition was destroyed shortly after publication, The Dialectics of Myth remained largely unknown both in Russia and in the West, except, of course, through the acrimonious appraisals by the party officials and their ideological stooges.87 The books that came out prior to 1930 were more fortunate, and it is worth recalling their reception outside Russia. Had The Dialectics of Myth reached Losev’s colleagues in the West (who alone could freely express their appreciation of it), it would, most likely, have been commented upon in a similar manner. Among these early comments are Natalie A. Duddington’s reports about current events in Russian philosophy, published between 1927 and 1930 in the Journal of Philosophical Studies. In 1927, Duddington mentioned Losev’s two books published that year, The Ancient Cosmos and Modern Science and The Philosophy of Name.88 In subsequent issues she added The Dialectics of Artistic Form to her list and remarked on the favourable impression these books had made among Russian philosophers abroad. Duddington noted both the courage of the author and the fact that his works were hailed by émigré Russian reviewers ‘as a token that the Bolshevik oppression of free thought has not succeeded in breaking the spirit of the people’.89 She wrote about the appalling state to which philosophy was reduced in the Soviet Union (the only courses in the history of philosophy at Moscow University, she observed, were taught in the ethnological department) and the ‘astounding ignorance’ of Soviet Marxists. Censorship was carefully rooting out all ‘idealist’ philosophers, with Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant heading the list. ‘That any serious philo- sophic research should be carried on under such conditions’, she observed, ‘is nothing short of a miracle – and the appearance of A. F. Losev’s works is a striking testimony to the power of the Russian mind to rise superior to the tyranny of circumstances.’90 Mention of The Dialectics of Myth is likewise absent from Losskii’s and Zenkovskii’s books on the history of Russian thought, but the overall tone of their reviews of Losev’s early writings was highly positive. ‘In the person of Losev’, wrote Zenkovskii, ‘Russian philosophical thought displayed a strength of talent, a subtlety of analysis, and force of intuitive insight that clearly testify to the significance of the philosophical direction that was first distinctly marked by Vladimir Solovyov.’91

[49] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH

Serious commentary and analysis began only when the book reap- peared in the 1990s. Losev’s essay on myth evoked a broad response and was mentioned in numerous publications of both popular and academic nature. It became one of the symbols that heralded the re-emergence of non-Marxist Russian philosophy after sixty-odd years of underground existence. There were also less numerous but more thoughtful attempts at evaluating its philosophical significance. Among these, the leading role belongs to Ludmila Gogotishvili’s perceptive analyses, many of which were included as commentaries in editions of Losev’s works. Sergei Khoruzhii’s essay, already mentioned above, and Sergei Averintsev’s article ‘Mirovozzrencheskii stil’: podstupy k yavleniyu Loseva’ (The style of a worldview: Approaches to the Losev phenomenon) were contributions by two leading figures in contemporary Russian philosophy.92 Vitaly Kovalev wrote a contemplative Hegelian homage to the two equally important creative impulses within Losev’s philosophy: dialectical and mythopoeic.93 A. A. Takho-Godi’s article ‘Ot dialektiki mifa k absolutnoi mifologii’ (From the dialectics of myth to absolute mythology) provided a detailed survey of Losev’s grandiose dialectical-mythological project.94 Losev’s work was discussed at conferences and seminars, both local and international, held in various parts of Russia. The overall friendly tone of discussion was interrupted in 1996, when the historical journal Rodina published a selection of materials from Losev’s OGPU case file.95 The materials that emerged from the vaults of the FSB included a report by the investigator Gerasimova and a compilation of excerpts from the Addendum to The Dialectics of Myth. The excerpts were selected in order to show that Losev was ‘the ideologue of the most reactionary (Orthodox-monarchist) and actively anti-Soviet cir- cles of clerics and the intelligentsia’.96 Among the most scandalous statements in these selections were those dealing with the origins of modern liberalism, socialism, and Communism in Jewish culture. ‘Jewry’, declares one, ‘with all its dialectical-historical consequences, is Satanism, the bas- tion of world Satanism’.97 And: ‘Israel wishes to achieve salvation by its own hands and the Israelite element lies, therefore, at the foundation of modern European culture.’98 Other statements are both anti-Semitic and misogynist: ‘Just as a woman has no real dignity, even so is the notion of Jewish dignity impossible.’99 World history is depicted as the struggle between God and Satan, with Christianity on the side of the former and

[50] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH

Judaism on the opposite side. In a nutshell, Gerasimova’s compilation ful- filled its stated goal admirably: the author of the quoted texts could be nothing but a reactionary, religious bigot, and anti-Semite. The statements ascribed by the OGPU to the widely revered scholar and philosopher sparked a controversy in the press. The newspaper Segodnya published a salvo of three closely coordinated articles by Konstantin Polivanov, Leonid Katsis, and Dmitrii Shusharin.100 The authors accused Losev of complicity with the Stalin regime. Losev’s monarchism was help- ful to Stalin, they argued, at a time of transition from the dictatorship of the party to his personal rule. The reward for Losev’s services was, according to Polivanov, his speedy release from the labour camps. Losev’s antiliberalism was also in league with Stalinism, while his anti-Semitism was of the same variety, Katsis proposed, as that of Alfred Rosenberg, whose writings influenced Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.101 According to these authors, Losev was responsible for the ‘erosion’ of Russian philosophical thought and promoted a ‘half-culture’. Finally, Polivanov concluded that the statements made in the excerpts could not have come from a sound mind, but what else could one expect from a monk who married twice in his life? Responses to these accusations included an article by Olesya Nikolaeva in the Orthodox newspaper Radonezh and A. A. Takho-Godi’s publication in Russkaya mysl’ of Losev’s letter to the censors.102 Nikolaeva called the Segodnya publication a pogrom and reproached its authors for using the same logic as that of Losev’s Bolshevik prosecutors. Against the charge of collusion with the Stalin regime, she suggested that it was giving the latter, perhaps, too much credit to claim that it could appreciate Losev’s philosophy of history. It was a perpetuation of Stalinist mythology, she imputed, to picture, after the manner of the Segodnya authors, ‘the leader of all epochs and nations’ as an accomplished thinker, who plumbs, pipe in hand, the depths of philosophy and ethnic psychology, while plan- ning the next wave of repressions in the quiet of his Kremlin study. For fairness’ sake, it must be noted that the passages quoted in the OGPU report were not intended for a subtle mind but appealed to the least illu- minated layers of the human psyche. Nikolaeva was correct, however, to point out that the Segodnya authors’ argumentation presumed the mythology of a Macchiavellian leader, endowed with devious prophetic vision. At the sight of the enormous tragedy that Stalinism visited upon

[51] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH the Soviet people – a sight that in the 1990s was unfolding before the public in its full scope – this mythology could be quite seductive, as Naftali Prat’s later contribution to the debate demonstrated. In her introductory note to Losev’s letter, Takho-Godi called Gerasimova’s report a fabrication and an informer’s denunciation. The letter has already been quoted above. In it Losev tried to impress upon his censors the idea that the harsh criticisms of various religious views that one finds in The Dialectics of Myth and the Addendum to it are the result of his attempt to ‘depict individual mythological types’ in their fullness. This involved representation of ‘how a given mythological type views all others’.103 ‘From the standpoint of Christianity’, Losev wrote, ‘Judaism is Satanism, and from the standpoint of Judaism, Christianity is a fleshless, fantastical invention.’ He offered to add to each passage representing a mythical subject the words: ‘This is not my view, but of such and such mythical consciousness.’ ‘The only thing that I claim as my own’, he insisted, ‘is the dialectical sequence of the types of mythology.’104 It goes without saying that, as arguments go, Losev’s explanation is hardly satisfying. To say that Judaism is Satanism from a Christian point of view is to give anything but a full representation of Christian mythical consciousness. The relations between the two systems of religious beliefs cannot be boiled down to mutual exclusion and enmity. Losev himself certainly understood this in his less defensive moments. Takho-Godi’s publication also contained two interrogation reports from Valentina Loseva’s OGPU case file. The philosopher’s wife admitted that she had anticipated problems from the Addendum, especially with regard to such sensitive issues as the conjunction between ‘the Jewish spirit’ and the ideology of socialism. While such a conjunction was not, in her opinion, an attack against Jews, she had feared, nonetheless, that ‘anti-Sem- ites could use Losev’s theoretical constructions for their crude, dirty, “pogrom” purposes’.105 In the meantime, the Segodnya publication attracted international attention. Repeating the three authors’ accusations, Felix P. Ingold informed the western public of Losev’s ‘double life’, ‘intellectual oppor- tunism’, the Meisterdenker’s current sectarian cult in Russia, and his ‘cryptofascism’.106 Ingold presented Losev as yet another example in the series of collaborators with Communist regimes, both in Russia and in the West, who were exposed after the opening of secret police archives in the

[52] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH former Soviet bloc. Ingold’s article was, in turn, rebuked by Alexander Haardt, a German scholar and student of Losev’s philosophy, who averred in an indignant letter to the newspaper that the anti-Semitic statements in the OGPU material could not have come from Losev himself.107 He proposed that the assessment of Losev’s views in the 1920s should be based on the sum of his early work rather than on a compilation of quotations from unpublished texts prepared by the Soviet secret police with a particular purpose in mind.108 Of all those who responded to the Segodnya articles, Leonid Stolovich gave the matter of anti-Semitism, perhaps, the most thorough treatment. In his rebuttal, entitled emphatically ‘Losev should not be handed over as a gift to the Black Hundred followers!’, Stolovich hazarded the guess that the original text of the Addendum was destroyed by the OGPU because it did not support the accusations made by Gerasimova in her report. He also drew a distinction between anti-Judaism as objections to Judaism as a religion and anti-Semitism as hatred of ethnic Jews.109 While Losev was, regrettably, an anti-Judaist, Stolovich argued, he was not an anti-Semite, and even his anti-Judaism was not always consistent. Further, some of the offensive statements about Jews in the OGPU compilation, he observed, were almost verbatim quotations from Otto Weininger’s writings, and thus did not belong to Losev himself.110 Stolovich also pointed out Losev’s reverent attitude towards Jewish thinkers, ancient and modern, whose list included Philo of Alexandria, Georg Cantor, Edmund Husserl, Hermann Cohen, Henri Bergson, and Ernst Cassirer. Finally, Stolovich appealed to his own personal friendship of many years with Losev, which testified to Losev’s religious tolerance and condemnation of nationalism. The Segodnya attack, he concluded, was an undeserved gift to neo-Nazis. To sum up the episode, anyone who would wish to draw inferences from the materials prepared by the OGPU investigators on Losev’s case will have to deal with the question of the compilation’s authenticity and fidelity to Losev’s views in the 1920s. It would be either gullible or biased to assume, in the excessively eager manner of the Segodnya authors, that Gerasimova and her colleagues provided an accurate synopsis of Losev’s ideas. Anti-Semitism was a crime. The state was framing Losev as a crimi- nal. Naturally, evidence was manipulated and ‘composed’ in this area as in others. Until the full text of the Addendum is found – if it is ever found – it would be pure guesswork to try to interpret the statements quoted in the

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OGPU report. And even then, Haardt’s suggestion that Losev be judged by the sum total of his work would still be valid. Naftali Prat apparently realised this when he almost completely avoided allusions to the OGPU files in his paper ‘Losev i totalitarizm’ (Losev and totalitarianism), unkind as his comments were. Building on the Polivanov– Katsis–Shusharin idea that Losev conspired with Stalinism against liberalism and free thought, Prat briefly surveyed Losev’s early writings with a view to highlight the notes of religious intolerance and political conserva- tism. He concluded by drawing the wild inference that Losev approved of Stalin’s state terrorism: Losev is a convinced advocate of Orthodox Tsardom, enemy of free science and free art, hater of liberalism and capitalism, vicious critic of Catholicism and Protestantism, and principled anti- Judaist (not to say anti-Semite). He allows himself bold attacks against the ideology of Communism but can one call him a genuine opponent of Communist totalitarianism? He fully approved, in essence, of the latter’s methods, even as he con- demned its ideology.111

Such a conclusion was made possible by equating the holistic thrust of Losev’s outlook with political totalitarianism. The dialectical concept of the whole equals a totalitarian political system equals the politics of terror: such is Prat’s line of reasoning, more or less. It is noteworthy, however, that, in order to identify Losev’s philosophy of the whole with Stalin’s totalitarianism, Prat had to sweep aside all differences in their respective contents. But the crux of the matter is precisely in these differences of substance. Communist totalitarianism was based on the reduction of the whole human being to its socio-economic and political dimensions. Religion, philosophy, science, art, and culture in general were denied any substantive, independent meaning of their own but were mere derivations from the political-economic order. Prat’s logic, likewise, abridges philosophy to ideology – the operation made painfully familiar thanks precisely to the influence of Marxism. People like Losev demonstrated with their own lives the falsehood of the Marxist reduction. They showed that one’s life can be guided by ideals which, in Duddington’s words, ‘rise superior to the tyranny of circumstances’ and thus cannot be confined by economics,

[54] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH politics, or ideology. All these are, in the final analysis, only the external conditions, not the substance, of philosophical thought. In order objectively to appreciate its significance, Losev’s theory of myth must be examined in its manifold relations to the preceding, contemporaneous, and subsequent theories. The work of such authors as A. A. Takho- Godi, L. A. Gogotishvili, S. S. Khoruzhii, S. S. Averintsev, Elena Takho-Godi, and Alexander Haardt lays a solid foundation for further discussion. Annett Jubara’s perceptive and well documented study is another step in this process.112 From a discerning analysis of philosophical discourse in the Soviet period, she deduces the continuity of Losev’s philosophical evolution and argues that his views did not undergo any fundamental change as he adapted to the conditions imposed on him by the Soviet regime.113 The uninterrupted nature of Losev’s philosophical evolution throughout the Soviet period is historically significant. His philosophical and scholarly accom- plishments have acquired a unique standing in the history of twentieth- century Russian thought and culture in large measure because, like a handful of other survivors from prerevolutionary times, he was a symbol of the continuity of the Russian intellectual tradition – the continuity that the Soviet regime purposefully sought, and ultimately failed, to demolish. As we try to make sense of Losev we must beware of clichés. As though striving to embrace the Solovyovian All-Unity, he cast his intellectual and spiritual net over a bewildering range of phenomena. ‘Refined modern subjectivism – modified, of course, in a certain way,’ remarked Ludmila Gogotishvili, ‘is just as weighty a constant in Losev’s thought as medieval ontologism’.114 This is quite true: ancient cosmologism and medieval ontological personalism lived in Losev side by side with the almost over- wrought sensibility of a Romantic and Symbolist. He revelled in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art and in Schopenhauer’s vision of the acosmic Will for sheer intellectual delectation; was transported by Symbolist poetry, which he himself admitted to be ‘decadent’; eagerly imbibed the strains of Rich- ard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and the discordant flames of Skryabin’s Prometheus (which he anathematised in the same breath); and even wrote Romantic-cum-Symbolist prose with a good measure of dark and tangled eroticism in it.115 There is little that resembles ascetic self-restraint in such a ravenous appetite for ideas and emotions. How the Palamite monk in Losev could exist side by side with an inexhaustible thirst for the richness and intricacy of the Occidental experience is one of the mysteries

[55] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH of Losev’s personality.116 True, Losev’s critical gaze ultimately discerned the fundamental flaw of the overexpanded human ego in all things modern. But the intensity with which Losev peered into this ego is equally characteristic. It attracted him at least with the same force as it repelled him.

VIII

It was in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I first became aware of Losev. I began to catch glimpses of his intellectual world through the youth magazine Studencheskii meridian where Yurii Rostovtsev published interviews with the elderly scholar, his short essays, and reminiscences. There was an unusual tone in Losev’s words, unfamiliar horizons in his thought that I could barely discern at the time. This curious survival from the irretrievable past, as it seemed then, was, nonetheless, vaguely but persistently relevant to my own world. As I explored Losev’s writings further, I realised that I was undergoing a metanoia: the world around me began to change. There have been few things in my life that I recall with as much fondness and wonder as that transformation. ‘If you wish to think, jump into the bottomless abyss of thought’, urged Losev, and the words had a strangely stirring effect on me. I did want to leap into the ocean of thought and to find out what sort of beasts swam in it. Incidentally, he was aware of the effect he had on young and impressionable people: As I would enter the classroom, I sometimes saw a sleepy and tired expression on the students’ faces – dejection and cheerless boredom. But when I stepped up to the rostrum and started speaking, I often noticed that the students’ faces became more alive and alert, and their melancholy changed to a smile. Dull silence would give way to a creative buzz in the room, there would flare up among the students a desire to share their thoughts, to ask a question, and there arose among them vigor- ous and cheerful thought.117

Only someone who possesses a lively mind can share it with others. One of the authors in the sadly memorable issue of Segodnya demanded that we judge Losev ‘by his fruit’. The demand is easy to comply with, because this fruit is the experience of what Losev called ‘living thought’. If there is anything that can bring together for us the many faces of Losev’s enigmatic

[56] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH individuality, it is this constant movement of thought, at once restless and concentrated. A. A. Takho-Godi is right in suggesting that Losev’s aspira- tion towards the ultimate synthesis of All-Unity was motivated by the philosopher’s wish ‘to understand everything’. The Dialectics of Myth is one of the most important contributions to the twentieth-century philosophical debate on myth. It is a matter of adverse historical circumstances that the essay has not yet taken its proper place among classic works by Ernst Cassirer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mircea Eliade. This situation is changing, however, and through multiple editions in its homeland, as well as the growing number of translations into other languages, Losev’s study is reaching readers inside and outside Russia. Its theoretical depth and originality, vivid treatment of the subject matter, and pithy yet elegant argument all guarantee it a prominent place in the literature on the theory of myth. In addition to its own merits, the continued relevance of Losev’s study is assured by the continued relevance of the problem it addresses. For we are surrounded today by an incessant mythopoeia on a scale that Giordano Bruno could not have imagined at the dawn of the modern era, when he composed his treatise on the magic of symbols. Some of the more murderous ideological mythologies of the twentieth century have, thankfully, receded into the past, but they have been replaced by others, among which fundamentalist and globalist come most readily to mind. Nor have the imperialist and nationalist myths of modernity been completely buried. Written with a clear apprehension of personal and historic catastrophe and hidden for decades from the broad public, The Dialectics of Myth has re-emerged to remind us that, for better or worse, we are not only autonomous rational subjects but also creatures who make and live our own myths. In fact, the book belongs among those works that have made this idea a sociopsychological truism. But Losev’s thought reached even farther. He was driven by the desire for wholeness, for bridging the divide between ratio and fabula, and thus for breaking beyond the modern frame of mind so tragically marked by this divide. Many today will not be satisfied with his proposed solution. Absolutes of all sorts have fallen out of fashion, and the notion of absolute mythology, let alone one based on the Eastern Orthodox tradition, may seem grotesquely out of place in an era when the ‘master narratives’ of our civilisation have been summarily, if inconsistently, dismissed. However,

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Losev’s greatest achievement – and the likeliest to have universal appeal – is as a philosopher, not as a theologian. True, Losev the theologian of Onomatodoxy inspired Losev the philosopher, and in many instances it is impossible to separate the one from the other. Nevertheless, they are not completely identical. Above all other powers that animate Losev’s world is the love of wisdom. This is the enduring lesson of philosophia perennis, whose tireless servant Losev was and wished to remain in our memory: As I recede into the abyss of history and sum up my life, I can say what was the most interesting thing I have seen. The most valu- able thing for me is the living intellect and living thought – the thinking from which the body becomes healthier and livelier, the soul rejoices, and the intellect likewise becomes wise and simple at the same time.118

The living thought that Losev is referring to is the opposite of hollow abstractions. It is the sustaining centre of concrete life filled with joy and suffering. It helped Losev retain sanity after his arrest, when he cried from despair for forty-seven days in his cell at Lubyanka. ‘Never before had I been made to feel so helpless and abandoned by God and people’, he wrote about those days to his wife from one camp to another. And added: ‘Trained to oppose the distorted forms of thought and life, my intellect behaved in an exemplary manner, trying to bring peace to my soul’.119 It helped him overcome ‘the hateful and angrily boiling rebellion’ against Heaven and the ‘merciless helplessness’ that assailed him in labour camps. At the time when separation from his wife and the news about the loss of his library made him question ‘everything that [he] believed in and lived by’ (‘Isn’t this the triumph of evil over us, rather than some “Divine Provi- dence”?’ he brooded), the dignified awareness that he was ‘a Russian philosopher’ kept him from succumbing to desperation.120 Living thought filled his lonely nights as he guarded the Belbaltlag timber yard, composing philosophical and mathematical treatises in his head. The insatiable reach of this thought held together the otherwise irreconcilable impulses in Losev’s intellectual persona. ‘My worldview synthesises’, he wrote in another camp letter to his wife, ‘the ancient cosmos with its finite space, and Einstein; mon- astery and marriage; the refinement of western subjectivism with its mathematical and musical element, and eastern Palamite ontologism’.121 When zealous adherence to a particular mythology tended to separate him from

[58] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH other human beings, his forever-searching thought reunited him with them. The light of philosophical quest sustained Losev throughout his life. But the converse is also true. In her journey from the Athenian agora to the global marketplace, philosophy’s lantern was carried through some of the darkest passages by the philosopher and mythologist Aleksei Fyodorovich Losev. October 2002

Most of this translation was done from the Russian edition of Dialektika mifa published in A. F. Losev. Iz rannikh proizvedenii (A. F. Losev. Early Works), Moscow, Pravda, 1990, pp. 391–646. In the last stages of my work I also consulted the most recent edition of 2001, which I have refer- enced above. Losev’s own footnotes are retained in the main text with slight alter- ations of style. They are marked in the usual way, by superscript Arabic numerals. Notes at the end of the book, by contrast, are marked in the main text by superscript Arabic numerals in parentheses. For many of these notes I used commentaries from the two Russian editions mentioned above, adapting them for the English-speaking audience.

Notes

1 Of the numerous versions of Losev’s biography existing in Russian and written mostly by his widow, Professor Aza Alibekovna Takho-Godi, I have used primarily three sources: the Preface ‘Aleksei Fyodorovich Losev’ to the collection of his early writings in A. F. Losev, Bytie. Imya. Kosmos (Being, Name, Cosmos), Moscow, Mysl’, 1993, pp. 5–30; Losev’s biography by the same author, Losev, Moscow, Molodaya gvardiya, 1997; and the Preface to the most recent edition of the book: ‘Filosof khochet vse ponimat’’. Dialektika mifa i dopolnenie k nei (‘A philosopher wants to understand everything’. The Dialectics of Myth and the Addendum to it), in A. F. Losev, Dialektika mifa. Dopolnenie k ‘Dialektike mifa’ (The Dialectics of Myth. The Addendum to The Dialectics of Myth), Moscow, Mysl’, 2001, pp. 5–30. Publication dates were confirmed according to the most recent and complete bibliography, Spisok pechatnykh rabot professora A. F. Loseva, opublikovannykh v 1916–2000 gg. (The List of Professor A. F. Losev’s Works Published between 1916 and 2000, compiled by S. V. Yakovlev, Moscow, Losevskie besedy, 2001.) 2 ‘Stadzhi’ is the transliteration of the Russian version of his name. The original Italian name was, possibly, spelled Staggi. I have not been able to find any additional information on this musician who appears to have had an uncommon pedagogical talent. Among his students of note, A. A. Takho-Godi mentions Cecilia Hansen who eventually became a well known virtuoso violinist and lived in Heidelberg, Germany (Losev, pp. 20–1). 3 Vladimir Solovyov, Moscow, Mysl’, 1983; the second edition of this book was printed in 1994; and Vladimir Solovyov i ego vremya (Vladimir Solovyov and His Time), Moscow, Progress, 1990; the second edition was published by Molodaya gvardiya in 2000. [59] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH

4 In his reminiscences recorded in 1985 by Viktor Erofeev, Losev called Ivanov his teacher and reflected: ‘He was the one I felt the closest to. I felt close to him because of his attitude towards literary criticism as an art. His approach to criticism was not academic. Literature was a lofty feast for him. He always discerned something deep and significant beneath even the most inconsequential images’ (PD, pp. 19–20). 5 The infamous ‘Philosophers’ Steamboat’ carried a large number of Russian scholars and prominent intellectuals who were expelled from the country in November 1922 by Lenin’s special decree. About two hundred intellectuals became the initial victims of this act of mass ostracism, although not all of them, despite the later legend, left the country on one particular ship. 6 On Florenskii, see note 24 on p. 211. 7 These eight volumes were: Antichnyi kosmos i sovremennaya nauka (The Ancient Cosmos and Modern Science, 1927) (550 pp.), Filosofiya imeni (The Philosophy of the Name, 1927) (254 pp.), the already mentioned Muzyka kak predmet logiki (Music as the Subject of Logic, 1927) (262 pp.), Dialektika khudozhestvennoi formy (The Dialectics of Artistic Form, 1927) (250 pp.), Dialektika chisla u Plotina (The Dialectics of Number in Plotinus, 1928) (190 pp.), Kritika platonizma u Aristotelya (Aristotle’s Critique of Platonism, 1929) (204 pp.), Ocherki antichnogo simvolizma i mifologii (Essays on Ancient Symbolism and Mythology, 1930) (912 pp.) and Dialektika mifa (The Dialectics of Myth, 1930) (250 pp.). All these were published in Moscow by the author. 8 OGPU, Ob’edinennoe gosudarstvenno-politicheskoe upravlenie (Unified State Political Administration), later renamed the NKVD, Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), still later renamed the KGB, Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security), the Soviet secret police in charge of suppressing political dissent and antigovernment activities. 9 Writing in Great Britain in 1928, Natalie Duddington, for example, noted that for Losev to publish books that openly challenged the official Marxist doctrine was ‘to quarrel with one’s bread and butter’. Like most people outside Russia at the time, she could not have foreseen, of course, how much more dangerous philosophical dissent would become in just two years and that it would endanger not only one’s living, but also one’s freedom and life. (Cf. ‘Philosophy in Russia’, Journal of Philosophical Studies, 1928, vol. 3, p. 516.) 10 Some copies survived – one of them, miraculously, in the Lenin Library in Moscow where it was available to readers without restrictions. Some copies even made it to the West: Takho- Godi points out that Professor George Kline of Bryn Mawr College purchased the book in Munich in 1969 (DM, pp. 26–7). 11 Aesthetics was the least important discipline in the unofficial Soviet hierarchy of the humanities and social sciences, the most venerated of them being, of course, political economy and social philosophy. The latter two had to do with ‘real’ life, the ‘base’, as opposed to the philosophy of art which is preoccupied with what was for Soviet Marxism among the least significant elements of the ‘superstructure’. 12 Uchenye zapiski MGPI im. V. I. Lenina (Scholarly Transactions of the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute named after V. I. Lenin), 1953, vol. 72, pp. 1–209. 13 DM, pp. 13–26 and 505–10. 14 DM, p. 17. 15 DM, p. 21. The Addendum that is published in the 2001 edition of The Dialectics of Myth consists of material that was found in Losev’s archive returned by the FSB. 16 I. Bachelis, ‘Bessmertnye ot mertvykh idei. Akademiya Khud. Nauk v plenu u reaktsionerov’ [60] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH

(The immortal with dead ideas. Academy of Artistic Sciences captive of reactionaries), Komsomol’skaya pravda, 1929, no. 42. Quoted from DM, p. 12. 17 As Takho-Godi notes, however, The Dialectics of Myth was not mentioned in this article (DM, p. 17). 18 XVI S’ezd VKP(b). Stenographicheskii otchet [Sixteenth Congress of the All-Russia Communist Party (Bolshevik). Proceedings], Moscow and Leningrad, 1930 (DM, p. 17). 19 The article was published in the two main national newspapers, Pravda and Izvestiya,on12 December 1931 (DM, p. 18). 20 Takho-Godi relates the interesting story of this character. Gerasimova grew up in Ekaterinburg and was on friendly terms with the daughter of Yakov Yurovskii, who in 1918 would become the executioner of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. One of Marianna’s brothers, Boris, served as a general in Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak’s White Guard Army, was arrested by the Bolsheviks after the Civil War, and then vanished. Marianna’s second brother, Sergei Gerasimov, went on to become a prominent Soviet film director. In the late 1930s, Gerasimova was herself arrested in one of the purges and sent to labour camps. After rehabilitation during Nikita Khrushchev’s reign, she tried to re-enlist in the NKVD but was turned down. ‘She went straight home’, writes Takho-Godi, ‘and hanged herself’ (DM, p. 25n). 21 A. F. Losev. Iz rannikh proizvedenii (A. F. Losev. Early Works), Moscow, Pravda, 1990, pp. 391–646; and in Novyi zhurnal (The New Review), 1990, issue nos. 180–1, pp. 289–342 and 244–95 respectively. 22 DM, p. 21. 23 Ibid. 24 A. F. Losev, Mif. Chislo. Sushchnost’ (Myth. Number. Essence) Moscow, Mysl’, 1994, pp. 263–98. 25 DAF, p. 9. 26 History of Russian Philosophy, p. 292. 27 For a comparative discussion of dialectics and other types of logic, see Errol E. Harris, Formal, Transcendental, and Dialectical Thinking: Logic and Reality, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1987. 28 The simultaneous cancellation and preservation of antinomical terms in a dialectical synthesis was what Hegel sought to express through the concept of Aufhebung, translated into English variously as sublation or supersession. Incidentally, it is precisely against the cancellation of opposites in a dialectical synthesis that Losskii raised objections in his discussion of Losev’s method. (This passage is omitted in the English edition of Losskii’s History but can be found in its Russian editions.) Losskii insisted that opposites, as well as the contradiction between them, are preserved in a synthesis, and thus showed that in this instance he was thinking dialectically himself, even though he rejected the method in name [cf. Istoriya russkoi filosofii (History of Russian Philosophy), Moscow, Progress, 1994, pp. 314–16]. 29 DAF, p. 133. 30 DAF, p. 134. 31 F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, transl. Douglas Stott, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, § 39, pp. 45–50. 32 For further comments on Losev’s concept of person see notes 35 and 38 below on pp. 212– 13. 33 For a summary of the debate between iconoclasts and venerators of icons that has a direct bearing on the problem of divine energy, see Chapter 3, ‘The Iconoclastic Crisis’, in John [61] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH

Meyendorff’s book Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, New York, Fordham University Press, 1979, pp. 42–53. 34 Cf. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s influential essay Dialectic of Enlightenment, transl. John Cumming, New York, Herder and Herder, 1972. 35 V. V. Zenkovskii, A History of Russian Philosophy, vol. 2, authorised transl. George L. Kline, New York, Columbia University Press, 1953, p. 835. 36 N. Duddington, ‘Philosophy in Russia’, Journal of Philosophical Studies, 1928, no. 3, p. 516. 37 DM, p. 500. 38 George Kline, for example, has found the passages in question ‘baffling’. See his article on Losev in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London and New York, Routledge, 1998. 39 ‘Il’ich’s lamp’ (lampochka Il’icha) was the name, derived from Lenin’s patronymic, for the electric bulb used by the Soviet propaganda as it glorified the successes of the electrification campaign in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s–early 1930s. 40 Kline, op. cit. 41 S. S. Khoruzhii, ‘A Rearguard Action’, Russian Studies in Philosophy, transl. Stephen Shenfield, 2001–2, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 30–68. 42 DM, p. 275. 43 A. F. Losev, Absolutnaya mifologiya = absolutnaya dialektika (Absolute mythology = absolute dialectics), Imya: izbrannye raboty, perevody, besedy, issledovaniya, arkhivnye materialy (Name: Selected Works, Translations, Conversations, Studies, and Archival Materials), ed. A. A. Takho-Godi, St Petersburg, Aleteiya, 1997, p. 146. 44 DAF, p. 150. 45 DAF, pp. 150–1. Losev refers to Schelling’s Lectures from the Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology) (cf. Schellings Werke, vols 5- 6, ed. Manfred Schröter, Munich, C. H. Beck and R. Oldenbourg, 1928). For a rare overview of Schelling’s theory of myth in English, see Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson (eds) The Rise of Modern Mythology. 1680–1860, Bloomington and London, Indiana University Press, 1972, pp. 315–20. 46 In his 1964 encyclopaedia article on mythology, Losev thus summarised Schelling’s definition of myth: ‘If the formal cause (the shape and appearance) of a thing is understood literally as its material cause, then this form will at once become a living being – it will turn into a miracle or a fairy tale. Now if this miraculous ideal form is further understood as an efficient cause and, furthermore, an efficient cause that acts towards a certain end, i.e. is teleological, then there appears a miraculous being that acts of its own accord and towards its own goals. This is what myth is’ [‘Mifologiya’ (Mythology), in Filosofskaya entsiklopediya (Encyclopaedia of Philosophy), vol. 3, Moscow, Sovetskaya entsiklopediya, 1964, p. 461]. 47 DAF, p. 151. 48 For a discussion of this idea in early German Romanticism, see Manfred Frank, Der Kommende Gott: Vorlesungen über die Neue Mythologie, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1982, Lecture 7, pp. 188–217. 49 Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Talk on Mythology’, in The Rise of Modern Mythology, p. 309. 50 Ibid., p. 310. 51 Schellings Werke, vol. VI, pp. 242–3 (my translation – V. M.). 52 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, transl. Douglas Smith, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 17–18. 53 DM, p. 263. 54 See, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s defence of this Romantic view in his short essay [62] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH

‘Mythos und Vernunft’ (Myth and Reason), in Kleine Schriften, vol. 4, Tübingen, Mohr, 1977, pp. 48–53. 55 DAF, p. 152. Losev refers to Hegel’s Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, §§ 236–7. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, transl. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris, Indianapolis and Cambridge, Hackett, 1991, pp. 303–4. 56 EASM, p. 26. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, transl. T. M. Knox, Oxford and New York, Clarendon Press, 1998, pp. 437–8, 441, 476; and Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, pp. 45–50. Losev further argued that Hegel’s division of the history of art into symbolic, classical, and romantic phases coincides in many ways with Schelling’s division of artistic representations into schema, symbol, and allegory respectively (cf. DAF, p. 229). 57 ‘Hegel provided a vivid description of Oriental, ancient, and European mythology in his doctrine of symbolic, classical, and romantic artistic forms’ [‘Mifologiya’ (Mythology), in Filosofskaya entsiklopediya, p. 461]. 58 Cf. also DM, pp. 263, 377, 471, and 474. 59 DAF, p. 152. 60 Cf. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 2: Mythical Thought, transl. Ralph Manheim, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1955, pp. 35–8. 61 DM, p. 513. 62 Ibid. Cf. Ernst Cassirer, op. cit., pp. 233–61. 63 Cassirer, op. cit., p. 261. 64 Op. cit. 65 DM, p. 513. 66 P. A. Florenskii, U vodorazdelov mysli (By the Watersheds of Thought), Moscow, Pravda, 1990, p. 344. 67 Cf. Khoruzhii’s Preface to the above book ‘Obretenie konkretnosti’ (Attaining Concreteness), ibid., p. 4. 68 Ibid., p. 8. 69 Cf. Florenskii’s essay ‘Imyaslavie kak filosofskaya predposylka’ (Onomatodoxy as a Philosophical Premise), ibid., pp. 329–30. See also note 24 on p. 213 below. 70 Khoruzhii, op. cit., p. 9. 71 Pavel Florenskii, The Pillar and Ground of Truth, transl. Boris Jakim, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1997, pp. 231–83. 72 In accordance with his conviction that ‘all thought, including philosophy, is consciously or unconsciously guided by myth’, Losev sought to uncover the most characteristic underlying mythology of Platonism and found it in the Eleusinian phallic mysteries. ‘Phallus is, as far as I can perceive’, he wrote, ‘the basic intuition of Platonism, its original protomyth’ (EASM, pp. 674, 677–8). 73 ‘Mifologiya’ (Mythology), in Filosofskaya entsiklopediya, p. 463. 74 PD, pp. 50–1. 75 Ibid. 76 Carl Jung, ‘The psychology of the child archetype’, in C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1969, pp. 70, 73. 77 Ibid., p. 75. Cf. also Jung’s statement to the effect that ‘a symbol remains a perpetual challenge to our thoughts and feelings’ in his essay ‘Relation of analytical psychology to poetry’, in The Portable Jung, transl. R. F. C. Hull, New York, Penguin Books, 1971, p. 315. 78 ‘The psychology of the child archetype’, p. 76.

[63] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH

79 C. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, transl. John and Doreen Weightman, New York, Harper and Row, 1969, p. 12. 80 Lévi-Strauss, ibid., pp. 14–32; A. F. Losev, ‘Muzyka kak predmet logiki’ (Music as the Subject of Logic), in A. F. Losev. Iz rannikh proizvedenii (A. F. Losev: Early Works), Moscow, Pravda, 1990, p. 257. 81 Cf. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, transl. Willard R. Trask, New York, Harper and Row, 1963, pp. 5–6. 82 See J. Derrida, ‘White mythology: Metaphor in the text of philosophy’, in Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist (eds), Postmodernism: Critical Concepts, vol. I: Foundational Essays, London and New York, Routledge, 1998, pp. 235–99. 83 EASM, 487–9. 84 HAE (vol. 2), Sofisty, Sokrat, Platon, (The Sophists, Socrates, and Plato), Moscow, Iskusstvo, 1969, p. 151. 85 J. Derrida, ‘White mythology’, p. 240. 86 Ibid., p. 249. 87 These were circulated on a vast scale. V. P. Troitskii notes, for example, that the proceedings of the Sixteenth Party Congress, which contained Kaganovich’s invectives against Losev, came out in two-and-a-half million copies, not to mention other Party publications (DM, p. 509). Maxim Gorky’s article was published, as was mentioned above, in the two main national newspapers, which means that it was likewise available in millions of copies. 88 ‘Philosophy in Russia’, Journal of Philosophical Studies, 1927, vol. 2, p. 552. (I thank Robert Bird for sharing this material with me.) 89 Ibid., 1928, vol. 3, p. 229. Duddington was referring in particular to Semen Frank’s ‘enthusiastic review’ in the journal Put’ (The Path) of Losev’s book The Philosophy of Name, where the latter is compared to Hegel’s Phenomenology ‘for its brilliance and subtlety of abstract reasoning’. 90 Op. cit. 91 A History of Russian Philosophy, vol. 2, p. 839. 92 Sergei Averintsev’s article appeared in Voprosy filosofii, 1993, no. 9, pp. 16–22. 93 Vitaly Kovalev, ‘Mimoletnosti chuda: Sorazmyshleniya s Losevym’ (The Fleeting moments of miracle: Thinking along with Losev), Transactions of the Association of Russian– American Scholars in the USA., 1992–3, vol. XXV, pp. 139–54. 94 Voprosy filosofii, 1997, no. 5, pp. 167–79. 95 Anonymous editor, ‘Tak istyazuetsya i raspinaetsya istina...’ (‘Thus is truth tortured and crucified...’), Istochnik. Vestnik Arhkiva Prezidenta RF (Source. Herald of the Russian Presidential Archive), 1996, no. 4, pp. 115–29. 96 Ibid., p. 116. 97 Ibid., p. 122. 98 Ibid., p. 121. 99 Ibid., p. 122. 100 L. Katsis, ‘O novom tekste’ (About a new text), K. Polivanov, ‘O starom kontekste’ (About an old context), D. Shusharin, ‘Bez teksta, ili Po plodam’ (Without text, or According to their fruit), Segodnya, 1996, no. 192, p. 5. 101 This dubious credit goes particularly to Rosenberg’s book Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: eine Wertung der Seelischgeistlichen Gestaltenkämpfen unserer Zeit (The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Assessment of the Spiritual Image Struggles of Our Time), Munich, Hoheneichen Verlag, 1930. [64] ALEKSEI LOSEV AND HIS THEORY OF MYTH

102 Olesya Nikolaeva, ‘Chekistskaya logika’ (The logic of the Bolshevist secret police), Radonezh, 1996, nos. 29–32, p. 12; and Aleksei Losev, ‘Ya ot vsekh vse beru i vsekh kritikuyu’ (I take everything from everyone and criticise everyone), Russkaya mysl’, 1996, no. 4150, pp. 11–12. 103 Russkaya mysl’, p. 11. 104 Ibid., pp. 11–12. See also DM, pp. 501–2. 105 Ibid., p. 12. 106 Felix Philipp Ingold, ‘Zerbrechende Mythen’ (Crumbling myths), Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1996, no. 280, p. 33. 107 Among Professor Haardt’s works on Losev is his book Husserl in Russland: Phänomenologie der Sprache und Kunst bei Gustav Spet und Aleksej Losev (Husserl in Russia: Gustav Shpet and Aleksei Losev’s Phenomenology of Language and Art), Munich, W. Fink, 1993. 108 Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1996, no. 300, p. 15; and 1997, no. 52, p. 36. 109 This is, apparently, an important distinction in discussions of anti-Semitism. ‘Antisemitism’, wrote Hannah Arendt in the opening lines of her study on totalitarianism, ‘a secular nineteenth-century ideology – which in name, though not in argument, was unknown before the 1870s – and religious Jew-hatred, inspired by mutually hostile antagonism of two conflicting creeds, are obviously not the same; and even the extent to which the former derives its arguments and emotional appeal from the latter is open to question’ (The Origins of Totalitarianism, San Diego, New York, London, Harcourt Brace, 1973, p. xi). 110 Otto Weininger, Sex and Character, authorised translation, New York, AMS Press, 1975. 111 N. Prat, ‘Losev i totalitarizm’ (Losev and totalitarianism), Voprosy filosofii, 2001, no. 5, p. 83. 112 Annett Jubara, Die Philosophie des Mythos von Aleksej Losev im Kontext ‘Russischer Philosophie’ (Aleksei Losev’s Philosophy of Myth in the Context of ‘Russian Philosophy’), Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz Verlag, 2000. 113 Ibid., p. 43. 114 L. A. Gogotishvili, ‘Losev, isikhazm i platonizm’ (Losev, hesychasm, and Platonism), in A. F. Losev, Imya: izbrannye raboty, perevody, besedy, issledovaniya, arkhivnye materialy (Name: Selected Works, Translations, Conversations, Studies, Archive materials), ed. A. A. Takho- Godi, St Petersburg, Aleteiya, 1997, pp. 572–3. 115 Witness Losev’s musical-philosophical novella Trio Chaikovskogo (Tchaikovsky’s Trio), begun in 1933 (see Losev, pp. 176–7), and published in A. F. Losev, Zhizn’, Povesti, rasskazy, pis’ma, St Petersburg, Komplekt, 1993, pp. 150–271). 116 Gregorius Palamas (ca 1296–1359), one of the chief advocates of the ascetic hesychast movement in Byzantine monasticism. 117 PD, pp. 22–3. 118 PD, p. 22. 119 The letter of 31 December 1931, in Zhizn’, p. 367. 120 The letters of 19 February and 9 March 1932, ibid., pp. 376–7 and 392. 121 The letter of 23 February 1932, ibid., p. 384.

[65]

THE DIALECTICS OF MYTH Aleksei Fyodorovich Losev ABBREVIATIONS

ACMS Antichnyi kosmos i sovremennaya nauka (The Ancient Cosmos and Modern Science). DAF Dialektika khudozhestvennoi formy (The Dialectics of Artistic Form). DM Dialektika mifa (The Dialectics of Myth, 2001). EASM Ocherki antichnogo simvolizma i mifologii (Essays on Ancient Symbolism and Mythology). HAE Istoriya antichnoi estetiki:Sofisty, Sokrat, Platon (History of Ancient Aesthetics: The Sophists, Socrates, and Plato). PD Strast’ k dialektike (Passion for Dialectics). PN Filosofiya imeni (The Philosophy of the Name),in Bytie. Imya. Kosmos (Being. Name. Cosmos). BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andreev,L.,‘The Crushed Flower and Other Stories’,in The Continental Classics,vol. III,transl. Herman Bernstein,New York and London, Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1916. Anonymous,‘“Tak istyazuetsya i raspinaetsya istina …”’ (‘Thus is truth tortured and crucified …’), Istochnik. Vestnik Arhkiva Prezidenta RF (Source. Herald of the Russian Presidential Archive),1996,no. 4,pp. 115–29. Arendt,H., The Origins of Totalitarianism,San Diego,New York,London, Harcourt Brace, 1973. Averintsev,S. S.,‘Mirovozzrencheskii stil’: podstupy k yavleniyu Loseva’ (The style of a worldview: Approaches to the Losev phenomenon), Voprosy filosofii, 1993, no. 9, pp. 16–22. Belyi,A., Poeziia slova (The Poetry of Words),Petersburg,[no publisher], 1922. Cassirer,E., Philosophie der symbolischen Formen,vol. II, Das mythische Denken, Berlin, B. Cassirer, 1925. Cassirer,E., The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,transl. Ralph Manheim, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1966. Dal,V., Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo yazyka (A Dictionary of the Living Great-Russian Language),vol. III,Moscow,Russkii yazyk,1980. Dostoevsky,F. M., Crime and Punishment,transl. Constance Garnett, New York, Random House, 1956. Dostoevsky,F. M., The Brothers Karamazov,transl. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Dostoevsky,F. M., Demons:A Novel in Three Parts ,transl. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Duddington,N.,‘Philosophy in Russia’, Journal of Philosophical Studies,

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