The paper is devoted to anthropological writings of Frenchman Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), an initiator of European research on creative imagination. The following publications are discussed: La psychanalyse du feu (1938); L’eau et les rêves (1942); L’air et les songes (1943); La terre et les rêveries de la volonté (1948); La terre et les rêveries du repos (1948); La poétique de l’espace (1957); La poétique de la rêverie (1960); La flamme d’une chandelle (1961), read in the palimpsest manner, as a semantically multi-layered text. The adoption of this perspective has enabled the finding of an extensive personal document under the surface layer of scientific discourse as Bachelard uses two plans of presentation in his anthropological writings. The first one, written in the scientific style, in the form of the discourse of ‘a meditating philosopher’, is a presentation of Bachelard’s conceptual system which paved the way for phenomena known in the humanities as: ‘new anthropology’, ‘post-Bachelardism’ or ‘Durandism’. The second presentation plan is part of the autobiographic trend, known in literary studies as the journal intime, and the researcher’s story becomes autonarration.
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