The linguistic aporias of Alexei Losev’s mystical personalism Gasan Gusejnov Published online: 28 April 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 Abstract Alexey Losev’s concept of ‘personality’ was developed in his writings from the 1920s, ‘‘The Dialectics of Myth’’ and ‘‘The Philosophy of Name’’. In his later works (e.g. on the aesthetics of the Renaissance and in his book about Vladimir Soloviev) Losev also understood the ‘personality’ outside of the boundaries of philosophy and theology. For him, the mystical dimension of personality in the end dominates logical and cultural structures of the subject. Losev’s concept of ‘per- sonality’ as a myth, a symbol, rather than an abstract theory was an attack on the European individualism seen as a principle of the self-affirmation of the isolated subject. Keywords Personality Á Person Á Mystical personalism Á Anti-liberalism Á Myth Á History of Soviet philosophy Á Losev Á Solov’e ¨v The multifaceted theme of the ‘‘European personality’’ whose disintegration he thought to witness is woven into the entire work of Alexei Losev. Reflections on the concept of personality permeate his writing to such an extent that it can rightfully be called one of the central categories of his thought. However, for scholars this categorical apparatus remains difficult to fathom, largely because it arises from different sets of linguistic contexts. The first is the sphere of foreign languages, mainly Greek, Latin, and German, in which the author develops much of his thought. The second context is Russian. His own linguistic arsenal grew out of his attempts to translate concepts from different foreign languages into Russian, a process from which he derived many impulses for his own conceptual tools. G. Gusejnov (&) Department of Classics, Moscow State University, Sassstrasse 34, 04155 Leipzig, Germany e-mail: gusejnov@gmail.com 123 Stud East Eur Thought (2009) 61:153–164 DOI 10.1007/s11212-009-9083-1