Tukhto Vera Evgenevna – undergraduate student of the Faculty of Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, the Department of Modern Western European Languages and Literatures
The article is devoted to the investigation of ambivalence as a phenomenon of culture of popular laughter in the satirical encomium The Praise of Folly by Erasmus of Rotterdam. Based on the book The Works Of Francois Rabelais And Popular Culture In The Middle Ages And During The Renaissance by M. Bakhtin, the researcher highlights the duality of wisdom and stupidity, praise and blame, sacred and profane and also the idea of the ambivalence of old age and youth, life and death in the work of Erasmus. It is revealed that examples of ambivalence and carnivalism, “turning the world inside out”, emphasize the possibility of harmonious development of society only through stupidity as the companion of wisdom.
ambivalence; the culture of popular laughter; Bakhtin; Erasmus of Rotterdam; Rabelais; carnival