Mikhail Aleksandrovich Lifshits’s Logomythia as overcoming the “historical nonsense”

Abstract

The article discusses the original concept of myth, created by the Soviet philosopher
aesthetician Mikhail Lifshits, presented in the comparison with many classical and modern
theories of myth. The logic of myth, called Logomythia, is analyzed not only from the standpoint
of Marxism, but also resting on the traditions of the Western and Russian Enlightenment, and
on Levi-Strauss’s ideas. The overriding feature of myth, from his point of view, is not practice
and labour, but the ambivalent, dual principle, manifested in art, where archaic myth dies as
historical nonsense and is resurrected as a human sense.