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Abstract:

The 1920s were a time of intense discussions about the subject and nature of literary studies, including the principles of literary evolution. The teaching of the word by A.F. Losev stands among the Symbolist philologists, M.M. Bakhtin, and P.A. Florensky, who are similar in nature and objectives of their research. Losev’s method is a dialectical construction of a scientific subject. Losev based this construction on the tetractyde principle, familiar to the Silver Age, combining the antinomies of “one” and “the other”, “mobility” and “rest”, “identity” and “difference.” This principle allows us to formulate verbality and the work of literary creativity as scientific subjects. The application of the tetractyde principle to the material of literary evolution allows us to create a model for the development of Russian literature. This model includes four stages, the sequence of which is the same in the Middle Ages and in Modern Times. Axiological antinomies of writing and folklore, poetry and prose, which replaced each other in Russian literature, guided its development in the Middle Ages and in Modern Times, respectively. The novelty of the article is due to the fact that dialectics is presented in it as an adequate tool for self-description of antinomic modernist culture. Russian verbality’s dialectically constructed development model explains the Dionysian priorities of Russian modernism. The features of A.F. Losev’s own artistic work also correspond to the logic of this model.