The article traces the changes in S.L. Frank's religious views after his expulsion from Russia, during his emigration. It examines the pre-revolutionary period of Frank's work, with his orientation toward I.G. Fichte's concept of true Christianity, based on the idea of the immanent presence of the God-Absolute, who lacks personal definition, in the human soul. Frank's philosophical system, as expounded in The Object of Knowledge (1915) and The Soul of Man (1917), is presented as an original version of the philosophical tradition of mystical pantheism. An analysis of Frank's early émigré views shows that the philosopher revised his religious worldview and truly deeply embraced Church Orthodoxy, which led to the contradictory nature and far less substantive character of his first émigré works, The Fall of Idols (1924) and The Meaning of Life (1926), in comparison with his earlier writings. A careful analysis of his reasoning suggests that this critique of the ideals of inner spiritual development and the creative construction of culture in The Fall of Idols is merely formal, and that in reality Frank's views changed little. Obvious contradictions are noted in The Meaning of Life regarding Frank's explicit condemnation of Tolstoy's position of “moral idealism” and his simultaneous implicit repetition of this position in his own views. It is concluded that, having recognized these contradictions, Frank, in his later religious and ethical works God with Us and Light in the Darkness, returns to the views of his youth, including a sharp critique of ecclesiastical Christianity.
The article attempts to clarify the possibility of contacts between Yuly Aykhenwald and Vyacheslav Ivanov in the 1910s. The lack of documentary evidence (letters, diary entries) necessitates the reconstruction of the picture based on different types of materials (memoirs, publications in periodicals) that indirectly confirm the participation of both the poet and the critic in the same literary activities, debates, publications, as well as in institutions of both official and unofficial nature, from the pre-revolutionary period or the early post-revolutionary years, such as courses at the Literary Department of the “Palace of Arts”. This allows for the hypothesis to be put forward regarding the reality of their personal interaction during this time. Additionally, based on indirect data (an ironic comment by Valery Bryusov), there is a suggestion about the possibility of a published response from the critic to Ivanov's work, although it remains undiscovered to this day. The interest of Yu.I. Aykhenwald and V.I. Ivanov in the work of the emerging poetess Feiga Kogan (1891–1974) is emphasized, while the list of their mutual acquaintances is also specified and supplemented with a new name. The question of the possibility of Yu.I. Aykhenwald's speech at Ivanov's Pushkin Seminary on 11 February 1920 is being considered.
The article presents the first analysis of the aesthetic views of Vladimir Vasilievich Gippius (1876–1941), a poet and literary critic at the origins of Russian decadence. The subject of the study is the “musical principle”, examined as a fundamental category of his aesthetics reflected in his historical, literary, and critical works. The study traces the evolution of Gippius's aesthetic views from the 1890s to the 1910s. Special attention is paid to the system of antitheses (“logos” and “melos”, “intuition” and “rationality”, “hearing” and “vision”) that underlie his interpretation of the creative work of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Aleksey Koltsov, Nikolai Nekrasov, Vyacheslav Ivanov. It is established that the “melodiousness” of the poetic word, contrasted with the prosaic, serves Gippius as a universal criterion for the authenticity of poetry, allowing him to distinguish live “singing” from rational “verse-making”. The author's transition to a religious-philosophical interpretation of music and singing as a way of cognition and communion with God is analyzed. It is concluded that in Gippius's aesthetics, the musical principle is endowed with an ontological status. In this system, visual perception can only provide a distorted representation of “phenomena”, whereas hearing allows penetration into the existential essence. The “gift of singing” acts as a mediator between the created world and the Divine, and true poetry is conceptualized as a form of “yearning for God” and involvement in the “singing will of the world”.
Vyacheslav Ivanov's tragedy “Prometheus” is one of the least studied works of the “classic” of Russian modernism. The current research covers only some aspects of Ivanov's tragedy (composition, specifics of the conflict, etc.), but it says little about the most relevant of them, in our opinion, the intertextual field of the work, the understanding of which allows us to penetrate deeper into the author's intention. The Goethean substrate of the multilayered Ivanov's text is analyzed using comparative, hermeneutic, motivic-thematic methods. Goethe's “presence” in Ivanov's tragedy is justified. Goethe's unfinished drama “Prometheus” is characterized in the context of the German poet's work and the development of the Promethean theme. A comparative analysis of the works of Goethe and of Ivanov is carried out, as a result of which a conclusion is drawn about the similarity of their compositions, characterized by symmetry, and similar motifs of the demiurgy and theomachy of Prometheus, the images of Nereus and Epimetheus, and the theme of death as one of the gifts of Prometheus. During the analysis, it was shown that both poets define the nature of Prometheus in a peculiar way: in Goethe, the ancient titan is close to the Nietzschean superman, in Ivanov, to the God-man Christ. It is concluded that echoes of Goethe's Prometheus resound in Ivanov's philosophical journalism of the 1930s, where Prometheus is interpreted as an expression of the humanistic rebellion of the human personality against the transcendent principle.
