The mythologeme of day and night: aesthetics of metamorphoses

The Night, the mythologeme of the Night is currently one of the most popular themes of art, going far beyond the trivial thematic series. The range of connotations that Night acquires in the language of culture varies extremely widely. Being one of the ontological foundations of anthropogenesis, it occupies an important place among the universal values of human existence. The article examines the evolution of this phenomenon, the metamorphoses that Night acquires in the language of culture in various periods of European history. The phenomenon of Night, extremely rich in its semantic diversity, has traditionally been associated with sacred religious practices, with magic and witchcraft, with mysterious esoteric knowledge inaccessible to rational logical procedures. In modern times, the Night creates its own cultural space - nightlife with its special rituals, symbols, representations. The specificity of the perception of the Night allows us to talk about it as a predominantly emotional, creative phenomenon. Aesthetically, the Night was traditionally reflected as a landscape or symbolic phenomenon: it was associated with a concrete sensory perception of nature, with the experience of lyrical emotions, or was perceived as a symbol of Eternity, transcendent being. The phenomenon of Night also becomes a phenomenon of the intellectual plane: the variety of metaphorical meanings, the richness of the associative-semantic series led to interest in the Night from not only art, literature, but also philosophy, psychology.