Understanding as a problem of hermeneutics: gustav shpet'S methodological approach (based on archival materials)

In 1918 Gustav Shpet finished work on the manuscript «Hermeneutics and its problems», which initially was seen as a sequel of his fundamental book in philosophy and methodology «History as a problem of logic». For evident reasons, Shpet could not publish the manuscript in that years and it went out of print only in the late XXth century. There are drafts in his archives, containing his hermeneutical studies that are important for understanding both his intellectual dynamics and modern epistemological problems of humanities and natural sciences. The author of the article shows the importance of Shpet's treatises on two possible ways of contemporary hermeneutics and on historical method of dialectical interpretation of concepts. A fragment of Shpet's handwritten «Notes on understanding» from his family archives is published in the appendix of the article.