The article proposes a philosophical interpretation of the poetic heritage of O.E. Mandelstam. The approach to characterizing the artistic experience of the Russian poet, through the prism of the philosophy of creativity and the philosophy of culture, seems to be significant and productive. This position is substantiated by the fact that in modern scientific literature there are still few works in which Mandelstam’s poetry would be elucidated within the framework of the philosophy of Russian culture and the ontology of creativity. In the article, Mandelstam’s creative phenomenon is shown in connection with the aesthetic program of artistic modernism. The philosophical foundations of Russian modernism are rooted in theissue of the spiritual self-awareness of Russian culture. Since Russian modernism reflects the transformation of artistic and spiritual culture that took place in Russia in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the author tries to highlight and analyze the leading philosophical and aesthetic principles of Symbolism and Acmeism, discussed by poets of the Russian Silver Age. Special attention is given to Mandelstam’s theoretical works. The cultural-philosophical analysis makes it possible to trace the internal relationships between aesthetic attitudes and the artistic imagination of Russian Symbolists and Acmeists, to determine the specifics of the aesthetic self-awareness of Russian culture, its practices in selecting ideas, symbols, images of national and world artistic culture in the early 20^th century. The author describes the logic of the continuity of the artistic ideas of Russian and world literature in the aesthetic concept of Mandelstam. In order to demonstrate the close connection of the philosophical and aesthetic ideas of classical culture with postclassics, the research brings together literary, philosophical and memoir sources in the context of the heritage of Mandelstam and the poets of his circle.

The article discusses the problem of cultural and civilizational self-identification in the works of Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam. According to the family legend, the Mandelstam family descended from Spanish Jews who fled from Spanish kings’ persecution, and then moved, in search of better life, further and further to the north of Europe, until they finally settled in the Russian Empire. In our view, young Osip Mandelstam was formed as a poet in the traditions of the literature of the “Russian North,” derived from Gavriil Derzhavin, Prince Peter Vyazemsky, Anton Delvig, and Alexander Pushkin. Mandelstam was a direct literary follower of the Russian symbolist poet of Swedish origin, I.I. Oreus (who published under the pseudonym of “Ivan Konevskoy”). The name of Oreus-Konevskoy, his magical poetic style, the circumstances of his death, and finally, his romantic grave on the steep bank of the Latvian river Aa (Gauja) – became truly iconic phenomena of the Russian Silver Age. Oreus-Konevskoy had a great influence not only on young Mandelstam’s verse (some of his famous poems are direct “literary duels” with the Teacher) but also on Alexander Blok, Valery Bryusov, and early Boris Pasternak. The author of the article analyzes how in the first post-revolutionary years Osip Mandelstam tried to become one of the theorists of the Soviet “Northern” literature. In the author’s view, when the repressive nature of the new regime became obvious and the “NorthernPetersburgian” Russia showed its totalitarian-Bolshevik appearance, there started a radical turn in Mandelstam’s self-consciousness, which led to an attempt to form a new personal identity, as a person belonging to the “cultural South,” who tragically found himself in the “barbaric North.”

The article focuses not so much the poetic and stylistic features of Osip Mandelstam’s work, which are of interest to philologists (these have largely been researched), as its cultural aspects. To fill this gap, it is important to compare Mandelstam’s lyric with his prose, theory, criticism, and journalism. We believe that the poet’s statements in these genres provide many answers to the question of his attitude to culture. In general, a cultural analysis of Mandelstam’s poetry has not yet been undertaken. Meanwhile, a lot of whimsical and rather obscure associations in his lyric can be understood only with the help of his implied statements about a specific culture, with parallels to other cultures. In particular, we investigate the poet’s interest in philosophy and natural sciences, which is expressed both in his poems and in his assessments of modern processes. The theoretical works also shed light on Mandelstam’s poetic experiments. The article is based on an attempt to unravel the meaning contained in his poem Lamarck. This circumstance generated the analysis of the poet’s special interest in natural sciences, in the ideas of Lamarck and other researchers. The references to natural sciences allowed Mandelstam to get around the insolubility of the problem of the fate of culture, if we proceed from the state of the social and humanitarian sciences, characteristic of the post-revolutionary period in the development of science in Russia. The statement is substantiated by the fact that these sciences did not discuss the problems of culture, and if they did, the discussion was subordinate to Bolshevist ideology. At the same time, the poet’s thoughts are consonant with the concept of O. Spengler. Mandelstam also inclines to biologism in his vision of culture. The interest in Spengler’s morphology also explains O. Mandelstam’s attraction to the natural sciences. The article concludes that the poet’s judgments lie outside the methodological disputes that exist in academic science. Mandelstam was more interested in the fate of European and, accordingly, Russian culture, especially the fate of humanism, whose values were challenged in the 20^th century.

In the essay “Conversation about Dante,” Mandelstam described logic, which he defined as the “realm of unexpectedness,” which is unlike any everyday logical construction. Based on the analysis of Mandelstam’s text, it is assumed that we are talking about a tropology that arose in the Middle Ages, the principles of which can be derived from studies of St. Augustine’s treatise De Dialectica and Petrus Сomestor’s Historia Scholastica. It is this triple commonwealth (Augustine – Comestor – Dante, read by Mandelstam) that creates the multilayered logical framework of the work. Augustine created a completely different dialectic than in classical antiquity. Augustine considers dialectics as an art of discussion and describes the real steps that contribute to the emergence of speech, which corresponds to Mandelstam’s concept of conversation. According to Augustine, at the basis of any speech, is a trope-turn. In the article, attention is drawn to the sound nature of creation process. This logic, used in explaining the creation of the world according to the logos/word (tropology), assumes that, at the basis of the speech act, there is no the word as a unit of speech, but the sound itself – the sound, which was considered initially equivocal (ambiguous). In the process of pronounciation, the sound could turn into its opposite and could change the meaning of speech if the context has been changed. Dante expressed the meaning of tropology in practice. Mandelstam wrote that he had chosen Dante for the conversation (between poet and poet) “because he is the greatest and indisputable master of reversible and reversing poetic substance.” Mandelstam saw Dante as the Descartes of metaphor.

It is proposed to consider the main lines of “philosophy of life’s” (F. Nietzsche, H. Bergson, O. Spengler) influence on the poetry and aesthetic theory of the greatest Silver Age poet Osip Mandelstam whose heritage is largely a continuation of Russian “poetry of thought” tradition. As known, the “philosophy of life” ideas formed Silver age culture intellectual background and were actively rethought which can also be traced in Mandelstam’s work, extent). The article sets a task, firstly, to consider “philosophy of life” as integral phenomenon, secondly, to propose conceptual solutions in the framework of which poet's heritage can be investigated as refracting “philosophy of life’s” ideas. This required, on the one hand, relying on existing research, on the other hand, polemicizing with them. Special attention is paid to Mandelstam’s temporal concept. It is shown to what extent it is conditioned by the concepts of the philosophy of life and in what extent by Silver Age philosophical context, namely, by poet's interest in contemporary Russian religious thought. Some “philosophy of life” concepts and constructions in the poet's reception are outlined (the oppositions Apollonian/Dionysian, Aryan/Judaic and the eternal return idea by F. Nietzsche; H. Bergson’s concept of time and memory; the prime symbol and morphology of culture concepts by of O. Spengler, whose influence on Mandelstam’s work has not been studied in this aspect). It is concluded that priority factor that determined poet's attention to “philosophy of life” is its attitude to comprehend time as a derivative of life processes among which the most important place is occupied by culture and cultural creativity.

This articles describes the “neuronal crisis,” the epidemic of psychosomatic illnesses observed all over the world, particularly in the West. The paper looks into the deeper real causes and seeks the most effective kind of cure for this malady. This leads to rational consideration of the metaphysical dimension of the human being and the fundamental problems (those of evil, of freedom, of God, of the soul, and of the body), where lack of sufficiency plays a major part in the etiology of these pathologies, as the desire for the Absolute is the basis of the unconscious. This approach presumes the Freudian model but denies its purely libidinal interpretation that substitutes desire for the Absolute with libido. Hence, an explanatory system applied to increasingly serious pathologies: ailments, neuroses, depressions, and psychoses. Frustration of one’s desire for the Good gives rise to a sublimation of finite goodness. The inevitable desublimation, caused by anguish because of the Evil, intense guilt, and the dramatization of evils, causes neuroses as awkward but inevitable solutions to the existential problem that is still unresolved, due to lack of functional and experimental knowledge. Psychiatry and even medicine must take into account the metaphysical layer, and, therefore, operate within an existential dynamic, aiming to progress in wisdom and to discover man, man’s brain and body, as these are structured around the axis of his desire.

The article is devoted to civilizational issues, which are largely determined by the environment or background, i.e. the socio-political situation in the country and the world as a whole, which has an indirect impact on it. The author considers a new situation, which is characterized by instability in all spheres of planetary life, which is reflected in the position of a person. This situation is characterized in the literature as the end of certainty or “uncertainty,” which is reflected today in the terminology attributed to the word “new” or the prefix “post.” It has been established that, despite its relevance, this concept has a long history in philosophy, from antiquity to modern times. The author of the article states the contribution of the modern Russian civilizational theory to the state of uncertainty in Russia, due to both the terminological ambiguity and uncertainty of the key concepts of this theory, and the ideological and worldview disagreement of its representatives. Three versions of the existence of civilization in the Russian state are presented, which remain in the humanitarian discourse of new Russia for thirty years. Particular attention is paid to the third version as the most stable, according to which Russia has been and remains a part of the West, the reasons for its popularity have been identified. The concept of the Other, which has recently become very relevant after it was discovered that the movement towards the West without taking into account the historical peculiarities of Russia, was unsuccessful, and the West itself directed all its efforts to contain Russia, was taken as the basic methodological basis for the study of this version. It is concluded that a more attentive attitude to the background will help bring the positions of different authors closer and minimize the uncertainty, which takes on more and more alarming features. This can contribute to the development of worldview coordinates and values that determine vital priorities and development prospects, give an image of the future embodied in a civilizational development project that satisfies the entire society.

The article presents reflections on the book Science and Human Dimensionality of Surrounding Reality written by E.M. Babosov, who is a famous philosopher and sociologist, academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. The book was published to the 90^th anniversary of the author’s birth. The reviewed book reveals the nature, features, and trends of scientific cognition. There demonstrates wide panorama of interconnections between scientific cognition and education, religion, culture, political system, management, national and global security. The book’s author describes the challenges, issues, and prospects of the 21^st century. In his research, E.M. Babosov searches the answer to the question: Will science save humanity? The author’s meditations in the book is the result of his thoughts and concerns of recent decades. The academician acknowledges that scientific cognition, comprehension, and interpretation have eventually become his vocation. According to the book’s author, the progress of science is always a challenge, when the right and the wrong are equal, and new ideas change the usual world-picture. E.M. Babosov provides his vision on relevant modern issues in the light of the government practice of the Republic of Belarus, its diverse manifestation under the global instability condition as well as emphasizes the most relevant problems in the areas of cyber and media spaces, network society formation, largescale digitalization of all human activity spheres. The author analyzes the issues of the development of Belarusian statehood, national identity, national system of government management, personal and public security, political system advance.