Philosophy of literature and the methodology of studying of poetic texts: In honor of the 80th anniversary of professor V. S. Nikonenko

Abstract

The article deals with the anniversary of an eminent historian of Russian philosophy V. S. Nikonenko (1942–2013), who is the author of well-known works, a member of St Petersburg State University. The author of the article presents the theory of analysis of philosophical content of poetic texts, created in late Nikonenko’s works. Studying Pushkin’s and Zhukovsky’s poetry, Nikonenko asserts that Russian literature reached the new stage of self-consciousness in the beginning of the 19th century. It was not only a literature, but it has become a worldviewing paradigm of Russian thought. A poet thinks not in metaphysical, but in concrete image form. A poetical image is not a concept. It is a symbol expressed in verbal eidetic pattern. Pushkin is a propagandist of the general moral, political and metaphysical ideas presenting in symbolical poetical images. However, it is very difficult to rationalize poetic images at all. Pushkin’s typical heroes are ideal patterns and eidetic images of contemporary men. The specificity of poetic image is the possibility to interpret it in many conceptual dimensions. A poetic image is unknown in rational form: it is understood irrationally. Nikonenko holds the romantic theory of the impossibility of recognizing the essence of poetic image by poets and literal heroes. Pushkin expresses his ideal content in specific symbolic form of the prophecy. He uses verbal poetic symbols which could be analyzed only in a week sense because they are metaphors and not concepts. So poetic truths are not the logical ones. They are sentences having only apparent logical proofs. Shortly speaking, poetic sentences may be certain, but they are not true ones. To sum up, Nikonenko works hermeneutic method of interpretation of poetic texts, according to it philosophical content of poetry can be extracted only from the linguistic textual structure.