Information about the authors:
Elena A. Takho-Godi, DSc in Philology, Leading Research Fellow, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia; Professor, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Leninskie gory 1, 119991 Moscow, Russia; Head of the Department, Library-Museum “House of A.F. Losev,” Arbat 33, 119002 г. Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6907-8656
E-mail:
Petr V. Rezvyh, PhD in Philosophy, HSE University, Myasnitskaya 20, 101000 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1382-7333
E-mail:
Abstract:
The article raises for the first time the question of scientific contacts between Aleksei Losev and the outstanding German classical philologist Bruno Snell (1896–1986). The analysis demonstrates that the Russian thinker kept a constant interest in the works of his German colleague during half a century, since the mid-1920s. Losev’s attention towards the work of Snell is determined by his interest in the history of ideas and concepts, most evident in his monumental History of Classical Aesthetics. Losev referred to Snell in his study of the terminology of Plato (sophia, epistēmē) and Heraclitus (ēthos, sēmainei), Proclus (aiōn) and Plotinus (sophia), the language of the Homeric epos, its aesthetics and mythology. Both researchers attributed the emergence of the concept of “historical” to the Homeric epos and saw it as the first step to Greek historical consciousness. Special attention is paid to the history of the German publication of Losev’s positive review (1962) of the Lexikon of Early Greek Epos (Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos), launched in 1955 under the editorship of B. Snell.