Methodological aspects of works by Sergey Averintsev

The issue of the article is methodological aspects of work ''Poetics of Early Byzantine Literature'' by Sergey Averintsev. Averintsev is an outstanding Russian scholar and a crucial figure in Russian humanities of the late 20th century. Unlike many other scholars, Averintsev is endowed with the significance far beyond academical matters, so the literature on him largely deals with estimation of him as a social phenomenon rather than with scientific criticism of his ideas. Methodological criticism on him is found in lesser part of papers on Averintsev. As there is practically no works on such a subject as Averintsev's method, this article is one of the first attempts to analyze it. Methodological basis of Averintsev researches, which derives from problems studied by scholars of the 20th century such as Losev, Spengler, Huizinga, and others, lies in the approach to culture as integrity, in which single phenomena can be described as manifestations of more common grounds of this culture. This means that phenomena of culture even diverse on the surface are connected integrally by the conceptual unity of a given culture. Thus, there appears an opportunity of interpretation of these phenomena based on non-formal, substantial correlation. The methodological background of these ideas consists of two points. Firstly, it is the idea of culture as a universum of meanings. These meanings provide culture with some potentials which are realized in its historical being. Secondly it is the idea of a ''key'' to such a network of meanings. Therefore, such a problematics demands search of a certain integral principle, constitutive to culture. Many classical studies by Averintsev present the described approach. There are some methodological points, introduced by Averintsev. 1) Integral principle of culture is regarded as connection between people's mindset and beliefs and cultural phenomena produced by them. 2) Such a connection does not mean simple equality between either parts. 3) Cultural phenomena have a hierarchic structure - from the level of beliefs to the level of concrete products of culture. 4) ''Vertical connections'' between mindset and cultural products do not imply the necessity of ''horizontal'' ones. 5) However, cultural phenomena being source or result of cultural synthesis can be connected. 6) Thus, we can both inductively reconstruct mindset of a given culture deriving it from its concrete phenomena, and deductively interpret these phenomena deriving them from its common cultural mindset.

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