Abstract
<jats:p>The article examines the ego-documents from the archive of the poet, philosopher, aesthetician, art and literary critic Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky. The research lies on his notebooks of 1900–1912, each of which is an independent entity in terms of content and composition, united by cross-cutting themes and plots. In the spirit of the life-creating strategy of the Silver Age, Gorsky seeks to self-define himself in the face of modernity, to embrace with thought and word the social, political, literary events of the epoch, paying special attention to the fate of Russian symbolism and the question of the ways of Christianity. He puts his reflections in the form of fragments and aphorisms, saturates texts with allusions to literary and philosophical texts, and experiments with quotations. Emphasizing the gap between reality and the ideal, he uses the irony technique. The publication presents fragments of 4 notebooks — “A Thousand and One Conversations,” “At the Threshold,” “At the Crossroads,” “Hidden Words.”</jats:p>