Freidenberg’s work might still be of relevance, not just in relation to more recent theories of metaphor, but also as a heuristic device in the study of archaic Greek poetry. Almost half of a century earlier than Lakoff and his circle Freidenberg’s researches of metaphor anticipated the emergency of the common interest in cognitive function of metaphor. Unlike contemporary cognitivists Freidenberg treated metaphor (as well as any kind of allegory) diachronicaly. She asserted that metaphoric images originate from their mythic predecessors while their rhetorical function in the archaic literature appears to be projections of the earlier cognitive one. Relics of primitive thought Freidenberg treated as “cultural survivals” of a collective belief.

The article deals with the cuneiform sources of o.M. Freudenberg’s hypothesis of Jesus as young donkey, who was the fertilizer and the savior of Jerusalem and its inhabitants. It was found that the young donkey in the Sumerian and Akkadian literature associated with the fertility god Dumuzi (Semitic Tammuz); donkey was seen as a symbol of male power and could be used as a holy sacrifice for the establishment of a peace treaty; deified Sumerian kings also were called “young donkey”. As the authors of the Gospels spoke Semitic languages, it is necessary to recognize a significant fact that in the Akkadian texts originating from the cities of Syria and Palestine, homonymy or similar words that marked the young man, the groom, the month of the sacred marriage and the young donkey could be established. Dictionaries also reflect the semantic shift “to ride > to copulate”.

The aim of the article is to examine how a speech act is applied in old Norse literature in order to save the poet’s life or to take revenge on an enemy (in Olga Freidenberg’s terminology, a “salvational” and a “chthonic” function of the word). As is shown by the author on the basis of Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, the chthonic function of a speech act depends on belief in runic magic and in the magic effectiveness of the skaldic poetic form. Although runic magic is essential to the functioning of salvational texts, Egil’s “Head-ransom” is shown to achieve the effect through the use of other means: performative formulas, highly formalised meter (runhent) and unusual semantics (concentrated on the personality of the author rather than the addressee).

The theoretical frame as it is described by O.M. Freidenberg in the seventh Chapter of her book “Image and concept” anticipates the ideas of the structuralism concerning the Greek tragedy. M.L. Gasparov was the first Russian classicist who analyzed the “plot construction of ancient Greek tragedy” (M., 1979) in terms of structural poetics. Although O.M. Freidenberg could not adopt the later terminology? In her conclusions it was forshadowed and the ideas of intertextual poetics were foreseen.

The article juxtaposes the views of O.M. Freidenberg on the archaic thought, with its “duality”, and the concept of opposites and “reflections” in Plato. Freidenberg believes that this unification of opposites is an unconscious relic of the archaics in Plato. I examine Plato’s views in the context of his disputes with the Sophists and Eleats, trying to show that he actually comes to the idea of interacting and coexistent opposites that are also “images” of each other. This idea appears to be similar to archaic ideas about opposing doubles, but it is based on the reflection of thought and speech and on the concept of the “other”, representing a totally new region for the Greeks, the dialectics.

The author treats as a consistent theoretical system the corpus of Freidenberg’s basic ideas which she has first formulated in the beginning of 1920-s and then developed for another 30 years - mainly on the classical material. Though widely known as Marr’s follower Freidenberg in fact went her own way. She created a scientific discipline that differed from any of those of the time. She used to call it ‘semanthology’. Her then unpublished books anticipated modern approaches in cognitivism, theory of culture and the classical studies proper.

The article elaborates some of the key insights drawn from olga Freidenberg’s analysis of Attic tragedy in Image and Concept, focussing on the implications of her notion of primitive spectactorship for research into other forms of literature. Freidenberg’s categories are put into dialogue with those of Walter Benjamin and György Lukács and, in the concluding section, employed in a contrastive analysis of Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers and Valentin Kataev’s time, Forward!, works that display opposite attitudes to the descriptive (and scopophilic) impulse in European realism.