The Genealogy of Ancient Comedy in the Representation of Olga Mikhailovna Freidenberg (Russian Translation)

Abstract

The article discusses the concept of genealogy and the cultural significance of the ancient comedy in the view of O. M. Freidenberg. For Freidenberg, the ancient comedy was a form of metaphorization of reality. The metaphor, like the symbol in Cassirer's philosophy, was interpreted by Freidenberg as the immanent product of the human spirit. Recognizing the similarity between the ideas of Cassirer and the reflection of Freidenberg, this study attempts to indicate the relationship between the literary concept in the context of Freidenberg and the theory of culture, which was the work of Cassirer. As with Cassirer, the original thinking was, in the Russian researcher's view, concrete, indivisible and figurative. The development of literature is the development of conceptual thinking, which became more and more abstract. The structure of ancient comedy was, therefore, the result of the development of human thought, the evolution of which Freidenberg saw, like Cassirer. The concept of the genealogy of comedy by Freidenberg, seen from the perspective of the Cassirer's theory of symbolic forms, is an original, consistent and logical hypothesis about the cultural significance of ancient comedy. Most of the interpretative problems it presents arise from the attempts to consider it in isolation from the cultural theory endorsed by Freidenberg, of which Cassirer was the author. The article is addressed to philosophers of culture, literary critics and historians.