Received 12.02.2019

The paper is the first one to consider previously unknown A.F. Losev’s ideas articulated in 1933 during his term at White Sea – Baltic Canal labor camp on three J.W. Goethe’s works: the treatise on color, the tragic play “Faust” and the novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther”. The author discovers the connection of A.F. Losev’s ideas with O. Schpengler’s cultural morphology, philosopher’s own thoughts on the problems of phenomenological dialectical method and his teaching on literary style. New material is analyzed with regard to A.F. Losev’s commentary on Goethe of various years. This includes A.F. Losev’s 1920s views that were articulated in his lecture delivered in the State Academy of Artistic Sciences, as well as in his works “The Dialectics of the Artistic Form”, “Music as a subject of logic”, “The Dialectics of Myth”. A.F. Losev’s 1970s works are also considered (“Lectures on the History of Early Modern Aesthetics”, “The Problem of Symbol and the Realistic Art”, “Theory of Literary Style”, “The Problem of Variative Functioning of the Poetic Language”). The ideas of 1933 are also relevant to A.F. Losev’s fictional prose that he wrote during his labor camp sentence (the novel “From conversations in Belomorstroy”). The paper posits that the literary text artistically embodies not only philosophical ideas, but also the real labor camp life, which also survived in the memories of A.F. Losev’s contemporaries like N.P. Antsiferov and D.S. Likhachyov. Thus, the question is raised concerning the possible connection between A.F. Losev’s ideas and works of other White Sea – Baltic Canal labor camp prisoners, which were inspired by the memorable date of Goethe’s 100 years of death in 1932. Among them are philosophers A.A. Meyer (“Thoughts on reading Faust, Goethe’s perception of color”) and A.K. Gorsky (“‘Light, more light!’ On Goethe’s 100 years of death”).