“Literary work” and a literary work: about “the special meaning” of the terms from literary studies in lectures by M.K. Mamardashvili

The article is devoted to the topic of “literary works” (“texts”) in the “Psychological topology of the path” (“Lectures on Proust”) by M.K. Mamardashvili. The literary terms “work” and “text” have received a new understanding in the lectures of the philosopher: as a way of thinking, the “path” of coming to meaning. Moreover, the “work” and works (literary, artistic, philosophical) which can serve as its “record” were distinguished. The article raises the question about the status of the “work” as a unit of the philosophical language of Mamardashvili: this is not a concept in the strict sense, it includes the features of a symbol and an image. The philosophical idea of the “work” and the images explaining it (“machine”, “organ”, “telescope”, “job”, “The Path”, etc.) have been analyzed. The poetic features of texts able to “contain” the “work” have been described: an essential incompleteness, fragmentation, a special subjective structure (the multiplicity of “Selves” in one consciousness, among which one is “empty” and “absolute”, and all the others are his points of view on the world at different times), characteristic of the modernist novel, as well as attention to the form (the word as a “thing”, beyond its meaning; the artist’s subordination to the style as an “inner harmony”) and the musicality of literature (the poetics of motifs, “encounters” and symbolist “correspondences”). The “work”, therefore, is not identical to a work, but the understanding of this philosophical idea is derived from the concepts of literary and artistic creativity, and it, in turn, is projected onto writing and reading practices as particular cases of thinking.