No death, or ex tenebris lux: apothatic tradition in Apollon Maykov's works

The research object is an apothaticism as a phenomenon of global art culture. The research subject is an apothatic tradition related to the collision between the day and evening light, images-codes “darkness” and “light”. The research material is based on the poetry by Apollon Maykov, and this year it would be 200 years since his birth. A hermeneutic reconstruction applies to the ethos of life and death, a mythologeme of timelessness in the later poetry of the poet, representing the direction of “pure art” in the literature of the 19th century. Much attention is paid to the poem “Ex tenebris lux”, written ten years before the poet’s death. The research methodology is reduced to a holistic ontohermeneutic analysis aimed at highlighting the apophatic paradigm of this text. Parallels are drawn with Persian poetry, the Sufi tradition, in which black color is significant in its ambivalent expression. In Maykov’s works, black color is associated with the threshold state of a speaker and the way out of liminality. The authors also touch upon Russian folklore, aesthetics and poetics of a fairy tale, in which the “three kingdoms” plot is important in this case. The research results are valuable from the cultural-philosophical positions of understanding the apophaticism of the artistic space of culture, but they can also be used in teaching courses on Russian literature of the 19th century and philosophy.