ЭКСТРЕМАЛЬНОЕ НА ПЕРЕКРЕСТКЕ: ФИЛОСОФИЯ — ИСТОРИЯ — ЛИТЕРАТУРА

The article is devoted to the analysis of the extreme as a notion in philosophy, history and literature, as well as the possibilities of delimiting this notion in different areas of humanities. As a concept (metaphor or way of figurative thinking), the extreme begins its functioning in the philosophy of F. Nietzsche, although it has been present in European culture from antiquity. Already in mythology, the extreme was associated with a sense of fear and a state of madness, which was reflected in Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” and studies on the Dionysian mysteries. In history and literary plots, the extreme is also present in situations of scandal, which changes the usual course of history or is the climax of a plot of a literary work. Moreover, the extreme in history is primarily a marker of the end of an old or the beginning of a new historical era. In the 20th century, the extreme as a characteristic of human being (fear par excellence) became the object of interpretation by M. Heidegger in his book “Being and Time”. Image of fear, expressing borderline, extreme situations is also characteristic of literature, for example, A. Akhmatova’s poetry. But if M. Heidegger’s interpretation primarily concerns the fear of death, then the fear of life predominates in the poetry of A. Akhmatova. The extreme in the works of other Russian poets of the 20th century, for example, A. Blok, is symbolically and semantically associated with the problem of Dionysianism.