THE EXISTENCE MODUS IN THE NOVEL «CHAD» («FUMES») BY YURI KOSACH: THE PROBLEM OF LIFE AND DEATH

There has been analysed the literary originality of philosophical reflection «Chad» («Fumes»). It is proved that in the context of different influences and philosophical orientations, the prose writer managed to asset his own identity. Creative and philosophical thinking of Yu. Kosach has been studied in the context of the European and national existentialism. The thesis author has interpreted the suicidal motives stated in the novel of «Chad» («Fumes») on the ground of psychoanalysis. She presents the problems and difficulties of an emigrant and gives two different existential views. There is a focus on the originality of the novel and presentation of the vital problems of the 20th century that brightly reflect the era of existential emptiness among the Ukrainian emigration. In the novel of «Chad» («Fumes»), two different existentialisms, religious and atheistic ones, come across. The collision of these views creates a dialogical concept with the essence that a person himself can take the only right decision and make his own choice. In privacy of one’s own mind, being deprived of the idea of God, the person becomes lonely. Thus, he realizes the absurdity of existence, undergoes the transcendence, and finds out the death as the only solution. The atheistic existentialism is represented by hero Sokil, who chose the suicide as a way out of the personal crisis. The religious existentialism is embodied in Apostol, who served faithfully and did not conceive the human existence without God. Keywords: existentialism, death, existence, suicide, emigration, borderline situation.

Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance

The Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance was created by lay intellectuals who found rationalism, positivism and Marxism inadequate as explanations of the world or guides to life. They were deeply engaged in finding solutions to the problems of their time, which they saw as moral or spiritual/cultural in nature. Some were already devout Christians; others became so later on. Collectively known as the God-seekers, they propounded their ideas in numerous publications and in the Religious-Philosophical Societies of St Petersburg and Moscow. The meetings of these societies attracted capacity audiences and helped disassociate religion from reaction. Branches were founded in Kiev and Vladimir. The founding members were mainly Symbolist writers and idealist philosophers. Both groups sought a new understanding of Christianity, but the Symbolists emphasized psychological and literary/aesthetic issues and the idealists focused on ethics, epistemology and political and social reform. The Revolution of 1905 was a watershed for all of them. The hitherto apolitical Symbolists perceived it as the start of the apocalypse and championed anarchistic political doctrines. The idealists continued to champion reform. After the revolution, some of them called for a new religious intelligentsia that respected culture and the creation of wealth, spiritual/cultural and material. Both groups began to talk about national identity and destiny. The Bolshevik Revolution signalled the end of the Religious-Philosophical Renaissance. In 1922–3, over 160 non-Marxist intellectuals were forced into exile, where they continued their work. Inside Russia private religious-philosophic study circles carried on illegally. The Religious-Philosophical Renaissance had a profound impact on Russian thought and culture. It inspired attempts to ground metaphysics and political doctrines in Christianity, demands for church reform, visions of a new culture, sophiology, religious existentialism and new interpretations of Orthodox ritual and dogma. Its proponents made people aware of the needs of the ‘inner man’, the soul or the psyche, and the importance of art and myth. Symbolism became the dominant aesthetic, shaping literature, poetry, painting and theatre. Theorists of Symbolism tried to make it the basis of a new cosmological worldview. The Religious-Philosophical Renaissance was rediscovered by Soviet intellectuals in the 1960s, nourished the dissident movement from then on, and is extensively discussed in Russia today.

Shestov, Lev (Yehuda Leib Shvartsman) (1866–1938)

A major though atypical figure of the Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance, Shestov taught that reason and science can neither explain tragedy and suffering, nor answer the questions that matter most. A maximalist, a subjectivist and an anti-dogmatist, Shestov regarded philosophical idealism as an attempt to gloss over the ‘horrors of life’ and attacked morality and ethics as inherently coercive. He maintained that science ignores the contingent, the unique and the ineffable, that philosophy cannot be a science, and that necessity depersonalizes and dehumanizes the individual. Philosophy and revelation are incompatible because God is not bound by reason, nature or autonomous ethics. To God ‘all things are possible’, even undoing what has already happened. God even restored Job’s dead children to him – the same children, not new ones, Shestov insisted. In Dobro v uchenii gr. Tolstogo i Fr. Nitshe (The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche) (1900) and Dostoevskii i Nitshe (Dostoevsky and Nietzsche) (1903) Shestov attacked philosophical idealism and attributed his subjects’ philosophies to a defining personal experience: Tolstoi’s horror at urban poverty, Nietzsche’s illness, and Dostoevskii’s Siberian exile, respectively. These books established Shestov as a major literary critic and interpreter of Nietzsche. Around 1910 he turned to philosophy and religion. In his magnum opus Athènes et Jerusalem (1938) Shestov preached a religious existentialism centred on the living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and argued that evil came into the world with knowledge. Adam and Socrates were fallen men because they opted for knowledge over life and faith. Socrates, Aristotle, the Scholastics, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and Husserl were all faith-destroying. Shestov preferred the anti-rationalism of Dostoevskii, Nietzsche, Tertullian, Luther, Pascal and Kierkegaard. He wanted to restore the primordial freedom of Adam before the Fall. Although Shestov quoted the Gospels and certain Christian theologians approvingly, he was not a Christian. Neither was he an adherent of traditional Judaism. A brilliant stylist, Shestov used reason and knowledge to combat reason and knowledge. He distinguished between the empirical realm where they applied and the metaphysical realm where they did not. But since he philosophized only about the metaphysical realm he comes across as an irrationalist.

Merold Westphal’s existential theology as the development ideas of Soren Kierkegaard in age of Postmodern

Serhii Shevchenko Merold Westphal’s existential theology as the development ideas of Soren Kierkegaard in age of Postmodern. The article reveals the problem of Merold Westphal’s understanding the specific of S. Kierkegaard’s religious existentialism. To analysed the basic statement of the books by M. Westphal «Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1996). It was studied thoroughly the problem of explication of S. Kierkegaard’s ethical and religious ideas in the post-existential and postmodern context. To investigate the phenomenon of «religiousness “C”», introduced by M. Westphal’s in the modern existential phenomenology of religion.

Specificity of Shestov’s interpretation of existentialtheological views of Kierkegaard

Specificity of Shestov’s interpretation of existentialtheological views of Kierkegaard. This article reveals the problem of understanding of Soren Kierkegaard’s specific religious existentialism by Lev Shestov. The author argues that Shestov failed to adequately understand the Kierkegaard’s indirect discursive method. Therefore, Shestov is inadmissible interpretation of Kierkegaard of canonical Christianity.

The Sleep of Christ: Incarnation and the Queerness of Heresy in W. H. Auden’s “For the Time Being”

This article explores the circuitry between queerness, heresy, and materialist theology in a major literary work by W. H. Auden from the 1940s. Rather than banking on flights of erotic or ecstatic transcendence, Auden’s “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” (1944) intimates queer sexuality as a heretical form of immanence bound to theologies of the creaturely body. For Auden in the early 1940s, queerness is corporeal enough to organize a theological materialism—or, more spiritedly, a theo-corporeal-ism—whose roots lie in his considerable exposure to Søren Kierkegaard’s religious existentialism. This article reads Auden’s persistent elisions of Christ’s body in “For the Time Being” vis-à-vis the oratorio’s implicit investment in queer sexuality as theologically corporeal (i.e. theo-corporeal). Notwithstanding the paradox this implicitness poses for Auden’s queer exegetes, the article maintains that “For the Time Being” is hermeneutically compatible with Marcella Althaus-Reid’s key work on queer theology.