Поэтика мифа

Gogol's opposition of South and North (Italy and France; fairy-tale patriarchal Malorossia and chilly bureaucratic Petersburg); here the idea of the traditional, mythologically demonized North coincides with the metaphore chill of Petersburg, baneful for a little man, played up in every way in «the Overcoat». The problem of implicit mythology may be justified if mythological reductionism is abandoned and the historical evolution of forms is 'properly taken account of. «Anatomy of Criticism» by Frye is a vital development in the framework of the «new criticism». Frye is right in setting apart an appreciable «collective» stratum in individual creations. This traditional collective stratum is manifested in poetic language and plot, as well as in genre (genre persists long after traditional plots and topics come to an end). Frye appreciated the value of the ritualistic mythological complex in the genesis of verbal art and particularly the role of mythology as a symbolic system and a stock of symbols for literature. He demonstrated some common features of poetic imagery, peculiarities of «metaphorical» imagination oriented in some way or other to the surrounding world of nature. However, mythological reductionism brings Frye to treat literary historic forms as «masks». His genre-myth correlations are unjustifiably strict, even to the point where the evolution of literature becomes the circular movement from myth (origin myth) to myth (modernistic myth). The influence of Frazer's cyclical notion is felt here, as well as an infatuation with the myths about dying and resurrecting gods and Jung's concentration on heroic myths. This often leads him to underestimate the role of creation myths. In reality myths may develop into «art» in different ways, depending on the genre. Frye's opposition between metaphorical identity and analogous structures has many productive ramifications. Several Soviet theorists of the twenties and thirties brought new insights to the problem. They anticipated much of the «myth-ritual» approach and structural-semantic analyses, sticking at the same time to strictly historical (evolutional, diachronic) context, fo-cussing upon the world view (even in ritual analyses), stressing in every way the position of folklore as an intermediate link between myth and literature. The process of myth transformation into various themes and genres in its historical dynamics is best grasped in Freidenberg's works. Of outstanding importance is Bakhtin's discovery of «folk laughter culture» as a specific second (folklore) stream of verbal art permeated by mythological symbolism. The role of rituals and mythological symbols in formation of the language of literature and genres of oral art was appreciated already by older generation Russian scientists – Potebnya and Veselovsky. Soviet scholars – Losev, Lifshitz, Lotman, Ivanov and Toporov, Averintsev, Smimov approve of the problem of mythology in modem literature to be investigated up to uncovering unconscious mythological reminiscences.

The second part contains the general characteristic of archaic and ancient myths focussing upon points of controversy mentioned in the first part (mythology of time, myth and ritual, mythology of personality and social medium, etc.). Some preliminary arguments are followed by the analysis of general characteristics of primeval thought and myth functions, «mythical time> and its «paradigms», and the survey of the typical for archaic mythology culture heroes protoancestors – demiurges and correlated heroes of archaic creation myths.