Aleksei I. Zherebin, DSc in Philology, Professor, Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia (RGPU), Moika River Embankment, 48, 191186, St Petersburg, Russia. Russian Christian Academy for Humanities named after Fyodor Dostoevsky (RHGA), Fontanka River Embankment, 15, 191022, St Petersburg, Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2216-6461
Acknowledgements: The research was supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation No. 25-28-00319, https://rscf.ru/en/project/25- 28-00319/; Russian Christian Academy for Humanities named after Fyodor Dostoevsky. The article examines the place and role in the ideological structure of the final Doctor Faustus of the anti-fascist concept of the “third humanism”, formed in the minds of Thomas Mann and a number of his contemporaries in response to the aggravation of the crisis of humanistic thought caused by the temporary victory of fascist ideology in Germany. In the extensive literature on the issue, the content of the writerʼs final novel has often been considered as an artistic study of the degeneration of modernist art, in which the search for new aesthetic forms turned into subordination to the perspective of historical evil. The author revises this assessment, proving that the correlation between the tragedy of art and the tragedy of Germany does not mean their identity. The counterpoint of the theme of the dying heroartist and the dying Germany is built by T. Mann into the semantic field of the Faustian myth of German literature, which, in turn, is actualized in the light of the aesthetic utopia of the third humanism. It is precisely this that provides the key to understanding the novel, and is its main myth. The heroʼs alliance with the forces of evil is conceived by T. Mann as a transitional, liminal phase on the critical path to organic culture, to the revival of humanism under the sign of overcoming the tragic gap between humanistic thought and inhuman socio-political practice, between spirit and flesh. Their coming synthesis is the main theme of the novel – the theme of a “breakthrough” to art, understood as the creativity of life.
Thomas Mann; Doctor Faustus; ideological structure; modernism; main myth; third humanism; organic culture; aesthetic utopia.
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09.09.2025
Zherebin, A.I. “Thomas Mann’s Novel Doctor Faustus and the Aesthetic Utopia of the Third Humanism”. Literaturovedcheskii zhurnal, no. 4(70), 2025, pp. 9–19. (In Russ.)
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