On the mythopoetics of the liver in European and Russian literature

The author makes an overview of the mythopoetic semantics of the liver motive in the evolution of literature from ancient to modern times. In ancient philosophy the liver became an intermediary between the intellectual and "animal" side of man - the mind and the stomach, the main repository of sensuality and affects, the preferred source of prophetic dreams and omens. The mythopoetics of the liver included motives of fire and a connection with the plot of Prometheus. Ancient love poetry where the liver is a place of strong emotions (Horace) and satire that verbalized the anger of the author (Juvenal) stably localize these "fire" affects in the liver. The closest analogue of the liver is the spleen, the source of black bile and the corresponding mood. In modern European medicine and literature it is reflected in the representation of the melancholic type of character and spleen as a type of emotional state that gained popularity thanks to the works of Byron, who reunited the Promethean semantics with the Juvenal bile. Such a complex of motifs was widely represented in the Russian literature of the classical period. It determined the type of the "bilious" character of M. Lermontov (poems-invectives, "medical" discourse of A Hero of Our Time), became the source of the poetic formula of the "embittered" poet of N. Nekrasov and Ya. Polonsky, was a part of the theo-machy complex of F. Dostoevsky's characters (Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment). The latter, in turn, followed A. Herzen's motivation from "Superfluous Men and Bilious People" (1860) directed against N. Dobrolyubov and his entourage. In literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, the main aspect of the liver mythopoetics was the story of Prometheus, a poet who fell under the persecution of critics (N. Aseev on V. Ma-yakovsky) or state (J. Brodsky, M. Eremin, V. Krivulin, V. Sosnora). The Promethean motives are also seen in the process of the role self-identification of the modern poet V. Emelin, where the myth becomes ironic or grotesque. Emelin reassembles the myth of Prometheus, using components of his own poetic legend (a poet-alcoholic for many years dying from cirrhosis in verse, a fighter with gay poetry, a Russian national poet, an epatage proletarian poet).

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