Woman's place in Edvard Munch's worldview - based on his texts

This article considers a woman's place in Edvard Munch's individual creative universe, where she is attributed a very specific role of an intermediary between different worlds, connecting life and death, chaos and cosmos. This universe can be studied not only on the basis of the artist's visual works, but also on the basis of his extensive written legacy. Studying Munch's written oeuvre from the point of view of his individual style and conceptual content seems well-timed, since this topic has not yet been addressed by any Russian scholars. Key concepts in the corpus of Munch's texts - for instance, the concepts of free love and woman 's ambivalence - can be discerned with the help of both inductive and deductive methods, moving from the language material towards the concept and vice versa - from the concept to the language material. Studying Munch's worldview on the basis of his texts makes it possible to draw conclusions not only on his individual worldview, but also on the key concepts that defined the content of the fin-de-siècle period in European art, which had a considerable influence on his world outlook. However, the reverse influence was also present: being a strong linguistic personality, Munch himself played an important role in forming the cultural thesaurus of this age, when a woman was seen as a mysterious, ambivalent creature, existing between civilization and nature.