The concept of fire in the history of culture and in the Austrian literature of XX - XXI centuries: its expressionistic potential

This article discusses one of the most controversial images in the history of culture - fire. The study focused on the works of G. Heym, G. Tracle, F. Kafka, E. Canetti, E. Jelinek, K. Ransmayr and P. Rosei. In the above work, the fire acts as a kind of code of expressionist attitude and a kind of sign of syncretic art: poetry-music-visual (painting). The symbolic load of the image varies in the paradigm of death, war, Apocalypse, hell abyss, the collapse of the world and its remains, which is also characteristic of the aesthetics of expressionism, the tradition of which is observed in the works of not only poets of the last century, but also in the works of living authors.