A. F. Losev and GAKhN’s “Encyclopedia of Artistic Sciences”: to the history of an unrealized publishing project

Abstract

The publication covers an obscure episode from the scientific biography of the great Russian philosopher Alexei Losev related to his work in the 1920s at the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN). For the first time, Losev’s thirteen articles from Research Department of manuscripts of the Russian State Library [f. 81 (State Academy of art studies), inv. 26, item 1] are put into scientific circulation: “Antiquity”, “Apollinism”, “Harmony”, “Dionysism”, “Callistics”, “Calocagathia”, “Catharsis”, “Cosmic feeling”, “Cosmos”, “Logos”, “Mania”, “Mathematics and art”, “Melos”. This articles were written in the second half of the 1920s and were intended for a publishing project of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences – the first volume of the multi-volume “Encyclopedia of Artistic Sciences”, conceived in 1922 as a “Dictionary of Artistic Terminology”. The project was never realized. The topics of the articles reflect the range of the scientific problems that interested Losev in the 1920s as well as his special attention to the study of terminology, which found its full implementation in the 1970 – 1980s during the work on “The History of Classical Aesthetics”.