Philosophical and aesthetic meaning of the image / title of O. Dovzhenko’s film story “Enchanted Desna”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28925/2311-259x.2023.2.2Keywords:
art, beauty, film story, mirror, modernism, problems, truthAbstract
The Subject of the study is the philosophical and aesthetic aspect of the title of the film story “Enchanted Desna”. The purpose is to find out the author’s intention, clarify the problem and idea of the work based on deciphering its title. The established interpretations of “Enchanted Desna” in Dovzhenko studies need to be revised. The widespread understanding of this text in a populist way contradicts or at least does not include the interpretive possibilities provided by the author’s poetics. The need for its re-reading in the context of today makes the study relevant. Linguistic, aesthetic-typological, comparative, and phenomenological methods were used in the research. The novelty of the research lies in the original interpretation of the key image of the famous work.
The Results. The starting point in the interpretation of Dovzhenko’s title is the semantics of the passive participle “enchanted” in connection with the image of the mirror and the motive of self-discovery. This story cannot be adequately understood outside the context of H. Skovoroda’s philosophical heritage. Indirectly through Skovoroda, Dovzhenko learns and develops Plato’s aesthetic ideas and the concept of calokagatia. He modernizes the ancient idea of beauty in the realm of creativity. Knowledge turns out to be identical to self-knowledge, the discovery of beauty is its creation. In accordance with the latest utopias, man is assigned the role of demiurge. If we take into account that beauty in this concept is identical to truth, then man (humanity) is also recognized as the creator of truth. Dovzhenko’s new humanism was nourished by the atmosphere of national Renaissance, Marxist and Nietzschean ideas. It is claimed that the central problem of the film story is the role of art in the formation of personality. “Enchanted Desna” is an image of art that immerses the soul in the processes of purification, personalization, self-knowledge and knowledge of the world, comprehension / creation of beauty-truth. The artist’s mission was to awaken in each person their alternative self, or, according to Skovoroda, the inner man with the help of art.
In the future, it is necessary to find other versions of the image of the mirror of self-recognition in Ukrainian and foreign writers and to trace the influence of the magnum opus of the novelist Dovzhenko in the 60s.
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