The category of Nothingness as a factor in the aesthetics and poetics of modernist literature

The article defines the specifics of the influence of ideas about Nothingness on the artistic philosophy and aesthetics of modernism. It is stated that the feeling of the "liminal" time created an ambiguous perception of the world: the mystical fear of "sinking into Nothingness" together with the "dying" world, the bitterness of the loss of the "former" world were combined with the expectation of an inevitable revival. Nothingness becomes a system-forming factor in the artistic philosophy and aesthetics of modernism. Modernism objects both to Nietzschean concept of the "death of God" and to the rational-pragmatic understanding of being. Modernist reflection on Nothingness means striving for a classical value attitude to the world, manifests the salvation of culture, the human and the divine in man, asserts the idea of the highest (in the ontological and value sense) being. Therefore, the defining position of modernist aesthetics is the assertion of the presence of the Supreme and the Sacred, one of the representatives of which in the text is Nothingness. Theoristsof modernism show interest in various traditions of understanding Nothingness in culture and master them in aesthetics and poetics. The heterogeneity of inherited traditions gives rise to a variety of poetic and philosophical concepts: the focus on cognition of the Unknowable through symbolic imagery, mytho-theurgic constructions as the basis of the “negative aesthetics” of the 20th century were combined with the ontologization of Nothingness in the chronotope of a work of art based on the convergence of archetypal oppositions and theaffirmation of the value of spiritual effort aimed at comprehending the highest meaning of existence. Thus, the category of Nothingness in the aesthetics of modernism acts as the embodiment of the ontological problematic nature of the incomprehensible world, a sign of its epistemological uncertainty, correlating the Absolute and the Incomprehensible with the Beautiful.