“Faces” and “Disguises” of V. Rozanov’s SolitaryThoughts and Fallen Leaves

An intensive study of V. Rozanov’s work naturally actualizes the question of the reasons for the contradictory assessments that have accompanied it for more than a century. The author explains their polarity by the prevalence of subjective or stereotypical ideas about the fundamental novelty of V. Rozanov’s approach to the psychology of literary creativity and to the aesthetics of “secluded nudity”, which the creative subject of his books invariably followed. The article examines the space of “solitude” as a sphere of creative realization of Rozanov, where the main attention is paid to the intuition of “intimacy”, interpreted by the writer as a genuine spiritual act underlying the true creativity of life and literature. In “solitude” the author’s intuition of intimacy penetrates into the phenomena and objects of life, endows them with related intimate meanings, is reflected in them and contributes to the creation of a mythopoetic picture of the world, filled with a variety of subjective and personal ideas of V. Rozanov about God, the world, cultural and literary values, about to yourself. In the above examples, V. Rozanov’s “faces” appear in the process of intimate rapprochement with the Absolute and revealed in ontological insights. “Disguises” are figurative dialectical projections of the “intimate faces” of the author, opposed to the traditional views on the writer’s personality. These are polar, familiarly traversed projections of his “intimate faces” designed to enhance their ontological and aesthetic significance. The philosophical concept of “detachment” in myth and literature, developed by A.F. Losev in Dialectics of Myth , served as a methodological basis for the study of the phenomenon of “solitude” and unity in V. Rozanov of the myth-maker and writer.