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This article is timed to coincide with the 140th anniversary of the birth of the Russian writer B. Zaitsev and it is devoted to the apophatic dimension of Russian artistic culture, namely, the phenomenon of color in the stories "Mist" and "White Light", which are included in the collection "White Light" (1922). The works are analyzed from a cultural-philosophical point of view. The research object in its widest sense is the apophatic dimension of verbal culture, manifested through a thanatological discourse and liminal states of the heroes, expressed by the author through a special color. Death is a priori apophatic, but this does not mean that its meaning cannot be approached. The focus is on the colors "white" and "black", which are used by Zaitsev in a dominant and symbolic sense: white correlates with Light, and black – with Darkness. Both colors are considered from cultural-philosophical positions not only as achromatic, but also as apophatic: black enters into a paradigmatic relationship with white, spiritualizing it – to use the terms of the anthroposophical teaching, known to the writer. The ontogermeneutical reconstruction of the ethos of life and death in these stories allows us to approach the apophatic horizon of Russian verbal culture. This study gives the reader a holistic cultural and philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of color in the stories of B. Zaitsev. The main images, their nature and functions in the work are discussed. The results obtained may be of interest both to cultural scientists for the subsequent social and philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of color, and to philologists studying the poetics of B. Zaitsev.

The paper presents a coherent analysis of the famous poem by Alexander Blok «A Girl Was Singing in a Church Choir...» in an extensive historical and cultural context. Much attention is paid to the poetics of color, the colorative «white», which is characterized by semantic tension and brings the reader into the ontological space of the text. In the poem, the image of the girl is associated with white color and light, which shows that the heroine belongs to the higher, heavenly world and is opposed to «everyone» from the temple, which is in darkness. The play of light and shadow acquires a sacred nature and makes it possible to raise the question of the apophatic tradition, the appearance of «evening light» and «unfading light». The image of the heroine is also viewed from the perspective of the teaching on Sophia by Vladimir Solovyov, whose legacy was addressed by the poet. Blok draws parallels with the Russian folklore tradition, analyzing the last stanza, the image of a crying child. The appeal to folklore is fruitful, since Blok was well acquainted with oral folk art, as evidenced by the fact that he was the author of the article «Poetry of Conspiracies and Spells», written in the same period as the object of the current study, the poem «A Girl Was Singing in a Church Choir...». However, the authors of this paper interpret folklore not narrowly, but include in its field rituals, ceremonies, and pre-genre formations. The work is based on a holistic analysis of the artistic text using structural-typological, comparative, and systematic-comprehensive (culturological) research methods. These methods allow highlighting the ontological dimension in the poem, revising the views on the images of the girl and the child that have established in literary studies, avoiding unambiguousness in interpretation.