Heidegger as a Fictional Character. Part I

The research is dedicated to literary reception of Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. His life and his work still produce the keen interest both coming from the community of professionals and from the most unbiased audience. After the publication of the “Black Notebooks”, Heidegger’s cooperation with the Nazi authorities in 1933 no longer seems an unfortunate episode, which can be attributed to political short-sightedness. The dependence of Heidegger’s views on collective and social prejudices falls into the space of literature long before becoming the subject of a philosophical judgement. In a variety of literary works, the philosopher persona has been developed in quite a surprising way. On the one hand, the familiar concept of fundamental ontology gets looked at, critically and uniquely, through a lens of fiction. On the other hand, Heidegger’s biography itself perfectly fits into literary self-reflexivity, which was never designed to differentiate one’s actions from one’s theories. Represented by this paper, the first part of the work has several objectives: 1) to justify the legality of writers and poets to make judgments about complex philosophical constructions – on the material of the texts, where there are reminiscences of famous Heidegger themes (works of S. Lem, S. Bellow, J. Améry, J.-P. Sartre, O. Paz, G. Benn, R. Queneau, B. Hrabal, T. Różewicz are attracted); 2) to reproduce a biographical component of Heidegger’s philosophy through the prism of various literary experiences (C. Magris, A. Skidan, J. Semprún, D. Barthelme), chronologically covering the period of his life from birth to regular professor at the University of Freiburg; 3) to demonstrate the epistemological resource of fiction: it combines mental, verbal, temporal, as well as intersubjective and political dimensions in its narrative, and thus gives not only a multifaceted portrait of the thinker in the cultural and historical decorations of his time, but also an idea of changes in the general spiritual climate caused by social transformation in the postwar world.

Keywords: Heidegger; literary character; fiction; philosophy; narrative; intertext