Losev's development of themes from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy

Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, and early 20th century Russians' interpretations and embellishments of it, informed Losev's theories of music and myth and his studies of the religions of Apollo and Dionysus. His complex musical aesthetic includes the idea that music is the expression of a fundamentally Dionysian reality structured by Apollonian elements. In The Dialectic of Myth, he argued that myth is a dialectical necessity (not just a necessity), attacked the secular mythologies of the Enlightenment and Marxism, and upheld "Christian mythology" (his term). In The Mythologies of the Greeks and Romans, he traced the religions of Zeus, Apollo, and Dionysus from paleolithic Crete to the end of the Roman Empire.