The article considers the poetic heritage of B.L. Pasternak in the paradigm of the unity of philosophy and literary creativity as a peculiarity of Russian culture. The author demonstrates that dominant feature of Pasternak’s works is “syncretism of the picturer and the pictured” and argues that the basis of this syncretism is in the unity of thought and feeling, of reflection and mental mood, metaphors and artistic associations, poetic language and symbolic forms; and each time this unity takes its own special, unique forms. This aesthetic polyphonism has its own meaning and value basis. Early Pasternak was influenced by Russian symbolism, by its interpretation of creativity as knowledge and by the interpretation of knowledge as creativity as well as the idea of harmony between these two manifestations of human spirit. The author demonstrates that the foundation of this poetic credo is in the recognition of life as the medium of beauty and harmony, this credo allowed him to see universal meanings that unite people in a torn world, to save “his face as a poet” in spite of all the misfortunes of his personal fate and the tragic events of his time.

In the article, we analyze the features of B.L. Pasternak’s creative self-consciousness. From our point of view, Pasternak’s works should be reviewed in philosophy as a problem of the reception of Russian culture within the framework of inheritance of its tradition. According to our idea, creative continuity is an interiorization of the ethical and aesthetic ideals of culture. In this context it may be relevant to use the philosophical and cultural approaches to discuss the problem of continuity. This article focuses on Boris Pasternak’s ethically motivated philosophy of creativity. The writer again appealed to the “eternal” moral issues of Russian literature. On the one hand, for the modernist Pasternak, the individually unique way of life is important, even it is a weird lifestyle, which is incomprehensible and follows its own internal logic. On the other hand, he is concerned with the compilation of images and meanings of world literature and art. In this case, the appeal to the Christian tradition of Russian and European cultures as well as the practice of the translation of literary texts becomes an important tool for dialogue with the past, its philosophical and spiritual cognition. Therefore, when we identify the features of the poet’s creative self-consciousness, we should note the combination of radical innovation and protective traditionalism as well as the special way of synthesizing the new and the old. These peculiarities create a unique artistic style of utterances of Pasternak as a modern writer. His poetry and prose reaches a high literary and philosophical generalization level, and it can claim to be an author’s version of the philosophy of creativity, which has its own aesthetic language expression.

The article analyzes B.L. Pasternak’s Safe Conduct. In this work, the poet comprehends the crisis events of his own life in the trinity of professional aspirations: music, philosophy, and poetry. Conceptual ideas, an attempt to create an aesthetic theory, a theory of culture, political journalism permeate both the poetic and prosaic works of Pasternak. The autobiographical work Safe Conduct is a kind of legal document certifying a person’s individual right to his own past or present life, protecting them also from the state. The Marburg period of Pasternak’s life, marked by his studies with the famous neo-Kantian H. Cohen, contributed to the formation of his inner personal experience, his interrogative attitude to the world. Pasternak’s philosophical position is the desire for liberation from any requirements of environment, for metaphysical freedom, for staying in a state of vision of the whole. The leitmotif of his poetry and his philosophy in poetry is an appeal to the beginning. At the point of beginning, where there is nothing yet, one has to find logic, at this point one cannot consider himself either a poet or a philosopher. Here is stored the moment that poetry longs for, the poetry can only be “random” poetry, the poetry that is only now arising, that is “inhibited in the speech of herbs or in the slip of the tongue of an unexpected conversation.” The idea of the beginning allows Pasternak to understand life as the life of a poet as well as to identify this beginning in each person. This suggests that the truth itself is a lyrical truth, the uniqueness and foundation of that truth are “immeasurable greater than myself and than the poetical conceptions surrounding me,” this truth contributes to the process when a person in his life impulse turns into an image.

The article discusses the problem of a literary method that was used by B.L. Pasternak in the novel Doctor Zhivago. The author examines the relation of this method with the ideas of symbolism and post-symbolism. In the novel, symbolist motives take new forms. Pasternak establishes a “live” connection between heroes and events, which symbolize “prime causes” of the taking place events and destinies. They belong to two worlds that are not separated from each other by borders between essential levels (from the lowest to the highest). The reality of life stops being a shadow of the highest reality, but the former is penetrated by the latter. Symbols do not indicate “prime causes” and “prime senses,” but become their “live” mediums. In space of the novel there is a “Candlemas” of the reality that shows itself through symbols and the reality of life, with all its secrets and solutions, happiness and grief, absurdity and clear sense. The literary method that make possible such Candlemas can be determined as “symbolist realism.” The Candlemas does not create harmony, it leaves all contradictions not resolved, all questions – without answer, expectation – without hope. His heroes symbolize the highest realities, and at the same time they live and die. It allows the reader simultaneously to be both the contemplator of game of the highest forces (as envisioned by symbolism) and the compassionate participant of vital tragedies of heroes of the novel (as in realism). B.L. Pasternak created a genre of novel-poem that by the means of poetic prose puts and solves deep philosophical problems of the philosophy of history and philosophical anthropology.

Culture of the 20^th century worked with the opinion of masses. In the Soviet Union, experiments with new forms and styles of art were directed by the state policy in order to spread ideology. After the catastrophe of the Second World War, European intellectuals exposed the way of thinking that inspires fascism. In the Soviet Union, where culture was still closely related to ideology, this critique was maintained by talented writers who turned to the themes of history and the fate of a personality, to the motive of the value of subjective thinking as opposed to mass thinking. Boris Pasternak created Doctor Zhivago between 1945 and 1955 and published it in Europe, despite the threat of persecution, which, unfortunately, came true. On the one hand, the novel is lyrical and full of symbols, on the other hand, it offers a peculiar analysis of the philosophy of history, responding to the ethical question of the time: how to live and act in the situation of impotence of an individual in the face of historical events? The evangelic motive is incomplete, since the life of the protagonist ends with fading rather than resurrection. Victory over death is revealed in Doctor Zhivago as victory over inevitability. The evangelic history is a special space where something “redundant” in relation to the world, something new and therefore changes per se are possible. Art is a natural channel of special “soulfulness,” of the pure closeness of souls that is free of destruction (which anticipates even the most superb forms) and therefore always the opposite of death.

The article (written in the genre of “intellectual area studies,” which allows to organically combine careful tracking of a specific human destiny and an accurate understanding of variable cultural and geographical contexts) examines the circumstances of the first visit to Italy in May-June 1904 by Russian artist Leonid Osipovich Pasternak (1862-1945), the father of the poet Boris Leonidovich Pasternak. Unlike the B.L. Pasternak’s “Italian journey” (1912), well known to literary scholars from the poem “Venice” (in two editions: 1913 and 1928) and the “Venetian chapters” of the memoirs Safe Conduct (1931), the details of Leonid Pasternak’s journeys to Italy (1904, 1912, 1923) remain practically unknown to researchers. The author of the article believes that the surviving materials about Leonid Pasternak’s five-day stay in Venice in 1904 make it possible to reconstruct the peculiarities of the self-identification of the artist Leonid Pasternak. The article provides numerous examples of how L.O. Pasternak, a descendant of a Russian-Jewish family from Odessa, in his memoirs and correspondence with his wife, pianist Rosalia Pasternak, emphasizes his “Odessa” identity, which has numerous parallels with the “Venetian” identity. Modern Venice appears to the “Southerner” Leonid Pasternak as an Italian analogue of his native Odessa. The author demonstrated that such self-identification of L.O. Pasternak is explained not only by the fact of his Odessa origin and long residence in a multinational South Russian city but also by the circumstances of his youth studies at the Odessa Art School, whose founders and teachers were, among others, Italian artists and sculptors, who made a great contribution to the cultural history of Odessa.

In the article, we discuss the views of Theocharis Kessidis, an eminent classical researcher and philosopher of the 20^th century, on the origins of Greek philosophy (on the transition from myth to logos). We define the key stages of his life: studying philosophy at Moscow State University, the impact of political atmosphere on the formation of his outlook, reflection on the discussions about the history of Western philosophy and the origin of philosophical rationalism. According to Kessidis, Homer’s mythopoetic works anteceded and prepared the substantiation of the role of reason in the comprehension of the world, which the ancient Greek philosophers (Milesian schools, Pythagoreans, Heraclitus, and the Eleatics) offered. Kessidis pays special attention to Homer’s epic style and Homeric comparisons. The epic consciousness inherits myth when dealing with the gods, but it also diffuses myth, abandoning the original unity of the image and the thing. There can be found Kessidis’s central thesis -about the “discovery of man,” self-understanding started by Homer and continued by the ancient Greek thinkers. The “discovery of man” by the Greeks made possible the development of democracy. Polis democracy is related to agonality, which is widespread among the Greeks type of social behavior and the main feature of their national character. Philosophy, as opposed to myth and religious belief, created a space for reasoning and rational self-assertion of the individual. But along the same path, abysses of the unconscious in man’s psyche opened up, as the ill-fated Peloponnesian War showed, leading to the historical defeat of logos in its fight against irrational faith. Kessidis’s ideas about the agonal, irrational that concomitant to the reason in its genesis and historical development allow us to take a new look at the transition from myth to logos and stay significant and relevant today.

Among Russian and foreign researchers, there are opposite points of view regarding the existence or absence of personality in classical antiquity. Thus, this article is devoted to the study of methodological aspects of the problem of personality in the period of Greek classics. In particular, the articles examines the views of O. Spengler and A.F. Losev, who reject the existence of a full-fledged personality in classical antiquity. The author argues that neither the first thesis of A.F. Losev that in ancient Greece of the classical period “slave labor was the leading economic factor” nor his second thesis about “commodity production, which replaced the subsistence economy of the old clan community,” are valid. Therefore, a conclusion (that was made by A.F. Losev on the basis of these theses) about a specific understanding of man as a thing and a living body in antiquity becomes also invalid. The development of personality in classical antiquity was inextricably linked with the development of democracy, where a free-born member of polis (city-state) acted as a self-valuable person. This person had its own historical identity, formed by the culture and structure of society. In particular, the ancient Greeks were characterized by one of the main qualities of the personality – the awareness of their own freedom, the right to choose. At the same time, this self-awareness was limited and opposed both to other poleis and the unfree and dependent population within the polis itself – women, metics, and slaves. In answering positively to the question of the existence of personality in the period of the Greek classics, we should avoid the other extreme – identification between the experience of the spiritual life of the individual in the modern era and in the classical period.

The reviewed work presents an attempt to generalize and develop the key ideas of Yu.M. Lotman, an outstanding researcher of the history of literature, culture, one of the founders of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. In the book, S.T. Zolyan, one of Lotman’s students, focuses on the concept of social semiotics and the fundamental role of the text in the formation of semantic complexes of culture as a system for generating, selecting, storing, and transmitting social experience, including the socialization of the individual. Thus, it demonstrates the meaning of linguistic communication, which is structured in texts and narratives. The book’s author convincingly shows that Lotman’s legacy not only retains theoretical interest but also becomes increasingly relevant in the context of expanding interdisciplinary research, convergence of disciplines, in which the concept of text acquires new non-trivial applications and operationalization - from the analysis of neural networks of personality socialization to the analysis of the dynamics of the semantic picture of historical memory.