The Main Myth in Thomas Mann's Novel Doctor Faustus (On the 150th Anniversary of the Writer's Birth)

The ideational structure of “Doctor Faustus” is examined in the article amid the humanism crisis problem, which came to a head during the fascist dictatorship period. The saving of humanism was conceived by Thomas Mann and his contemporaries as a cultural task solution that was outlined but not solved by either the Renaissance or the era of Goethe: overcoming the gap between cultural creativity and socio-political practice. The author includes T. Mann’s novel in the field of anti-fascist humanistic discourse of the twentieth century’s thirties and forties, proving that the correlation between the tragedy of the hero’s life and the tragedy of Germany does not mean their equivalence, their identicalness. The novel dual temporal structure, which ensures the two plot lines connection – the biography of the artist and the history of Germany – finds its correspondence in the doubling of the mythological hyperplot: the counterpoint of the hero’s theme and the theme of Germany is incorporated by T. Mann into the semantic space of the Faustian myth of German literature, which, in turn, is actualized in the light of the myth of the “third humanism” aesthetic culture. In the utopian perspective of total synthesis (of God and the world, spirit and life, art and politics, individuality and society), fascism is metaphorized in the image of world’s evil, and the hero’s alliance with the demonic forces of hell appears as a negative phase of the apocalyptic “outcast–chosen” dialectic and a redemptive sacrifice in the name of saving Germany and humanity.