This essay is an attempt to come to terms with the scholar Aleksandre. V. Mikhailov’s place and function in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet humanities. This place and function is actually “between-the disciplines”, at the points of intersection of particularly philology, philosophy and history of culture in their most acute contemporary problems. In this sense Mikhailov’s creative activities as a literary critic, a theoretician, and a translator – thus, as a philological thinker – represent a rare but very important function within the humanities. In Mikhailov’s later writings what seems to be most topical and productive is his critical stance in relation to “modern–centrism”, as well as his stress on the “historicity” of all the scientific and ideological phenomena and tradition which transform their meaning in the incessant movement of time and history.
philological thinker; historical experience; tradition; historicity; historisation (of knowledge and the world); modernocentrism.