The Apophatics of Alexey Vitakov’s Artistic Thinking: Meeting with the Other

The relevance of this study is due to the growing interest in the ontological issues of art and literature, which today allows us to resist the global processes of digitalization of society. The poetry of the famous bard Alexey Vitakov, namely his poem from the winter cycle "Lose me in a birch grove ...", served as material for studying this issue. The purpose of the study is to show the phenomenon of apophatic culture, manifested in Russian artistic verbal culture, in poetry, at the ontological (thanatological) level of the text. To achieve this goal, theoretical works devoted to the apophatic paradigm in world culture were analyzed, opening up opportunities for onto-hermeneutic analysis of the artistic text. In modern cultural studies, the phenomenon of apophatic artistic culture is considered through the manifestation of the thanatological code. Within the framework of the onto-hermeneutic, cultural approach to the text, figurative implementations of this phenomenon in modern poetry, namely in the work of A. Vitakov, associated with the thanatological code, were studied. Additionally, the analysis extends to the typological level of the texts of Russian classics, the poem by A. S. Pushkin “Winter Road” and the poem by A. A. Blok "Russia", in which apophatics is expressed as a cultural phenomenon. A cultural examination of the concept of apophatics in its artistic cross-section requires research attention to the figure of the Other, a figure endowed with apophatic qualities and inscribed in the "text of fate", whom the lyrical hero of the poem meets in the conditions of a winter plain. . The ontological significance of the figure of the Other for me (the lyrical Me) is determined: to what extent is the Other important for me, how ready am I to approach him. A. Vitakov presents an artistic formula for meeting the Other in a threshold situation, in which his lyrical hero is on the verge of life and death. The results of the study consist in identifying the cultural and philosophical potential of modern poetry for further study of the problem of apophatics as a phenomenon of Russian artistic culture, a manifestation of national existence in Russian literature. The analysis of poetry makes it possible not only to outline new approaches to works of art in literary criticism, but also to treat differently the issue of studying apophaticism as a phenomenon of Russian literary culture. The results of the work may be of interest to philologists who include literature in the space of the great Bakhtinian dialogue of cultures, and can also be used in teaching courses on cultural studies and philosophy.

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