«HOMO SAPIENS» vs «ΆΝΘΡΩΠΟΣ ΓΡΑΠΤΏΣ»

Abstract

The social status of an author of literary works as a kind of a parallel, fictional reality is the obvious exception in the paradigm of the social roles of any society. Regardless of the time and the place of the literary process, literary works themselves serve primarily as an object for moral, psychological, and aesthetic reflections. Most of the existing pedagogical concepts consider literature precisely as a springboard for didactic, and first of all educational, work. However, the dominant idea of education has always been the achievement of success in life. And here a glaring contradiction between the didactic credo of the “reasonable person” (homo sapiens) and the actual position of the “writingperson” (άνθρωπογ γραπτσ) arises. Most of the writers, from ancient times to moderntimes, were not a model of morality, did not achieve financial success, and did not even strive for it. The list of the dramatic fates of Aesop, Ovid, Byron, Boccaccio, Villon, Voltaire, Verlaine, Hoffmann, Pushkin, Dostoevsky and many other classics of the world literature evokes the idea that the writers, creating an ethical and aesthetic ideal, lived their own biography obviously contrary to what was written . A comparative analysis of the historical and literary material confirms that even the examples of relatively prosperous writers’ biographies (Virgil, Horace, Goethe) paradoxically accompany the idea that “human well-being” is rather contraindicated for a creative person, a “writing person”.