The Phenomenon of the Horrific in the Life-creating Activity of M. Gogol: a Philosophical-anthropological Analysis
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The article is devoted to the investigation of the cultural-anthropological aspects of structuring the human lifeworld, with a particular focus on the role of the horrific in the ontological structures of the personality. Special emphasis is placed on the social modifications of the phenomenon of the horrific in historical retrospect and in the framework conditions of contemporary Ukrainian society, where the horrific acquires an ontological status in models of life-creating activity during the wartime period. The study of the phenomenon of the horrific, carried out within the landscapes of the life-creating activity of a Ukrainian existential-anthropological philosopher, and the overcoming in the public consciousness of Ukrainians of the dogmatic understanding of Gogol exclusively as a Russian writer, occurred only during the era of independence. The inner drama of M. Gogol, which revolved around the torment of searching for his own identity, is today actualized by the military aggression of the Russian Federation, directed against the statehood, freedom, independence, and the right to free choice of Ukraine, which displays all the characteristics of overt ressentiment. Gogol's opposition of the living/the dead, the beautiful/the horrific, becomes ever more relevant in present-day practices, as a confrontation of the Ukrainian living world against the Russian dead world. The phenomenon of the horrific is comprehended and interpreted by M. Gogol as a complex sociocultural formation, rooted in the deep layers of ethnonational being and possessing a specific way of experiencing the horrific. Gogol's philosophy of horror presents several invariants: horror as an aesthetic effect – the fear of the “revelation” of the Other within oneself or the acquisition of “forbidden knowledge”; horror as a transgression of the boundary between the living/the dead, the corporeal/the sacred; fear as the core of human experience; fear as a mechanism of marginalization, etc. The phenomenon of the horrific is explored by the author on several levels – the mystical (“Viy”), the social (“The Government Inspector”), the existential (“The Overcoat”), and the metaphysical (“Dead Souls”). The horrific appears not only in literary creativity but also in the artist's life project, as evidenced by his epistolary legacy, religious quests, and life crises, as well as attempts at selfcreation, preserved in his spiritual biography and autobiographical texts. It is established that the dialectic of the beautiful and the horrific in Gogol's works is presented as the coexistence of the world of “living” and “dead” souls within the ontological perspective of the postcolonial elevation of the Ukrainian world and the personal-existential search for one's own identity. For Gogol, the comprehension of the horrific is not only a means of philosophical and literary cognition of reality but also the result of personal existential work within the practices of his own life-creation.
Source: HUMANITIES STUDIES
Author: NATALIIA RADIONOVA
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4413061728