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p Y. Yakovlev

p Aesthetic analysis of art is closely tied up with an understanding of the typology and structure of the personality of modern man. In a socialist society objective conditions exist for the development of universality of the individual, for his integrated and harmonious being. At the same time, under the conditions of bourgeois society the tensions of everyday life filled with social contradictions and the negative consequences of scientific and technological progress can destroy spiritual traditions and lead to the loss of value reference points and, ultimately, to the destruction of the integrity of the individual.

p Man, in contemporary bourgeois society, experiences emotional hunger; his life is rationalised in the extreme and society is for the most part indifferent to his personal life and the more so to his inner world. In bourgeois society psychoanalysis, which aims at compensating for the individual’s emotional and intuitive deformation, seeks to exercise a normalising effect on man’s subconscious. But this provides nothing more than the illusion of restoring the deformed man. Art, however, as an integral representation of the world, is capable of affecting man_s harmoniously and of evoking in him a feeling of completeness and of the universal purposefulness of his existence. A truly significant artistic work embodies these qualities, reflecting the objective processes of society’s social and spiritual life, “embracing” all levels of this life and synthesising them within itself.

p But for these objective possibilities to be realised, the process of affecting man must exert an influence not only upon the ideological and rational structures of the individual (for example, on the level of aesthetic education), but also upon his emotional structures.

p The necessity for intensifying aesthetic effect on man by means 68 of art is confirmed by the actual experience of modern man’s spiritual life: modern man gravitates towards stable, “eternal” spiritual values—national traditions, thinking in folkloric images, etc.—that is, towards spiritual and aesthetic values that link the present with the past and give a stable feeling of the totality and universality of life, rather than of the disconnectedness of “the chain of times”.

p Bourgeois art historians at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries made an attempt to discover those general features of art which would characterise it as an integral aesthetic phenomenon.

p Heinrich Wolfflin, for example, viewed art as a stylistic entity in which the artist’s individuality is dissolved. The general form of artistic vision becomes a universal attribute of art. But Wolfflin’s quests were basically limited to formal characterisations of art, which could not but lead the head of the Vienna school to a formalist resolution of the problem.

p The next attempt to discover the universal principles of art and artistic style was made by Ernst Cohn-Wiener, who defined the features specific to the latter on the basis of three basic factors: tectonic, decorative and ornamental. According to Cohn-Wiener, true style is always functional; therefore true art is always linked to the tectonic and the expedient. Cohn-Wiener was disturbed by the lack of style which, in his view, predominated in 19th-century art. However, inadequacies of general methodology, including CohnWiener’s denial of the influence of spiritual life on the development of art and its styles, made it impossible for him, as for Wolfflin, to resolve the problem of the universal and essential principles of art.

p Although both Wolfflin and Cohn-Wiener point in the most general way to the fact that the aesthetic individuality of art is mediated by the life of society (or, in Wolfflin, by an idea of form which a nationality possesses) and even by material and economic factors, which are perceived through style (Cohn-Wiener), nevertheless neither goes further than a simple statement of this intercommunication.

p It is, thus, still more necessary to discover the specific, particular foundations determining the aesthetic integrity and originality of art.

p In turning to this side of the problem, we should indicate that two basic levels, two basic strata, obtain in the history of art.

p The first of these is the immediate social stratum, in which historical concrete social and artistic problems are realised. In this stratum specific artistic methods and styles arise which most adequately correspond to historical conditions and, accordingly, to 69 developing artistic taste. In this way the drama and plastic arts of the ancients, Gothic and Renaissance art, classicism and romanticism, realism and modernism arose.

p But side by side with this exists another stratum, that of popular creativity, the stratum of folklore in which, moving from age to age, the most universally significant artistic values are preserved. This culture undergoes almost no stylistic changes and its methods of viewing the world in images, once evolved, remain stable and autonomous. Both the popular artistic consciousness, folklore, resting on the more ancient basis of mythological consciousness, and the “carnival” art of the mass of the people in modern times, which in its turn rests on folklore, are preserved and function in this stratum. This art is more symbolic; its figurativeness accumulates the aesthetic merits of the popular artistic consciousness, but sometimes takes in its more routine and torpid aspects as well.

p The true artist attains considerable success only when he embraces the depth of the popular artistic consciousness and combines this with the immediate social problems of life, thus realising the principle of the integrity of art. The specific feature of art as a social and aesthetic integrity is that its parts (strata) exist in a harmonious unity and that it is more stable than other systems.

p In cases when a contradiction arises between the popular mythological stratum and the immediate social stratum, the artistic work ceases to exist as an integrity. A set of formal features of artistic activity may be preserved in this system, but destruction of the organic unity of the parts leads to the destruction of the essence of artistic reflection as consolidated in the work.

p The gravitation of a great artist towards integral reproduction of the world is revealed with especial clarity in the eras of great artistic quests. Many literary critics have emphasised this: A. N. Veselovsky, for example, in analysing medieval culture, wrote that “...the singer ... unconsciously takes up old legends and traditions and song types, which generations of singers and listeners have gradually brought closer to their understanding and the level of the time".  [69•1  “The merging of these generalisations,” notes Veselovsky later, “with the epic, immobile personages of the mysteries pointed to the possibility of further development, to the embryos of dramatic life."  [69•2 

p The process of assimilation and transformation of the folk epos is convincingly shown by N. I. Konrad in an analysis of the 70 Japanese feudal epos of the 12th-14th centuries. This epos was based on the folklore of preceding ages, principally on the folklore of tribal society. This “folklore of cosmogonic myths, legends and fairy tales"  [70•1  was transformed into the “legend” of the feudal class, “...into a folklore of didactic fairy tales drawing their material from everyday life or from history"  [70•2  That is, it took concrete shape in terms of the social tasks which the feudal class of medieval Japan set itself. “Threads from each of the folklores,” Konrad notes, “subsequently stretched into the future. Not one of the literatures of these ... social strata could have emerged without a preliminary folklore stage in the creative activity of the class which produced it.

p “This was the case with feudal literature, too, particularly with the feudal epos, which sprang from just these sources in folklore."  [70•3 

p But this process of assimilation of the folklore stratum must not be superficial and completely subordinated only to the essential problems of the day; at the same time, it must not be confined to an assimilation of only a proximate cultural tradition. A true, fruitful assimilation of tradition has a “global” character, taking from the past that which determines the dialectically infinite prospects of artistic development.

p The problem of “tradition and innovation" was examined by a special section at the Fifth International Congress of Aesthetics in Amsterdam in 1965.

p Two Soviet aestheticians—Mikhail Ovsyannikov, in a paper entitled “The Essence of Innovation in Art”, and Nikolai Goncharenko, in a paper “On the Criterion of the New in Art"—raised the question of the constructive aspects of innovation and showed that innovation depends on the social and economic processes taking place in society. The Marxist-Leninist theory of artistic progress is contradicted by the pluralistic conception of the evolution of art, which is most fully expressed by Thomas Munro in his book Evolution in the Arts. In Munro’s view, no single social factor “holds universal priority as the basic determinant"  [70•4  and therefore reliance must be placed on empirical research, which must seek “to discover which (factors) are present in each case, and in what relative strength and configuration".  [70•5 

p In papers presented for discussion attention was for the most 71 part directed towards the problem of assimilating historically proximate traditions.

p The problem was presented in a more fundamental way by Daniel J. Crowley of California. In a paper entitled “Innovation in African Art" he attempted to show the more deep-rooted popular sources of the processes taking place in contemporary African art.  [71•1  However, trends of another order are also observed.

p In a paper entitled “Tradition and Innovation”, Luigi Pareyson of Turin emphasised that the artist must skilfully combine the new with the legacy of the past in his work; however, preference was given to the innovations of the avantgarde. Pareyson considered that the process of continuity must mainly manifest itself in the sphere of artistic form.  [71•2 

p At the 7th International Congress of Aesthetics (Bucharest, 1972) Mikel Dufrenne (France) delivered a lecture on the subject of art and politics . Dufrenne believes that for the sake of the utmost “revolutionization” of art, which must be turned into a game and a source of pleasure, any kind of heritage, even that of the distant past, must be renounced. He considers that art must smash “oppressive” values, mock ideology that “emasculates” it, liberate vital energy and lead to ecstatic and profound pleasure. Dufrenne also expressed this ultra-anarchistic view in an interview at the congress, declaring that he was concerned about the problem of “how to free ourselves from culture in order to return ... to something primordial, primitive"  [71•3 

p The ex t remely grotesque phenomena of contemporary bourgeois anticulture and all kinds of ephemeral “ultra-revolutionary” experiments find their theoretical justification in such conceptions; and this is to make no mention of the social and political aspects of the latter.

p A position of extreme anarchism similar to that expressed by Dufrenne arouses a negative reaction in many aestheticians. Gianni Vattimo, an Italian delegate to the Congress, for example, in a sense answered Dufrenne and condemned contemporary Nietzscheanism when he said: “...Nietzsche was an intellectual rebel, a petty-bourgeois.... The artist must always maintain a close link with the social atmosphere of his age".  [71•4 

p Research into the most stable and universal bases for art’s existence and development has a fundamental methodological 72 significance and makes it possible to show the insolvency of “pluralist” and anarchist conceptions in bourgeois aesthetics, of modernism. At the same time, an understanding of art as a phenomenon uniting within itself the folklore and the immediate social stratum enables us to discover the criteria of genuine artistic creativity and genuine art.

p Thus, M. M. Bakhtin, in examining the work of Francois Rabelais, wrote: “...Contemporary reality ... broadly and fully reflected in Rabelais’ novel is illuminated by images drawn from popular festivities. In their light even the.best prospects for this reality appear, nevertheless, as limited and far from popular ideals and aspirations...."  [72•1  For this very reason “the most important feature (of Rabelais’work) is that he is more closely and fundamentally bound to popular sources than others, ... these sources determined his entire imagery and his artistic outlook (my italics—Y. Y.)".  [72•2 

p However, this organic and deep-seated link between Rabelais and popular sources in no way prevented him from being a highly contemporary artist and from posing and artistically resolving urgent social questions. On the contrary, this link enabled him to direct a more penetrating gaze on the world around him. “...Urgent political questions,” stresses Bakhtin, “play an extremely vital role in the novel.... Rabelais occupied foremost progressive positions in the struggle of forces that took place in his age"  [72•3 . Y. M. Yevnina, another Rabelais scholar, writes that “this peculiarly Rabelaisian exuberant perception of life ... determined ... the joyous, materialistic quality of his book and the fullblooded and life-affirming character of his realism".  [72•4 

p The importance of an artistic work is also determined by the extent to which, through the synthesis of these two strata, it reveals man as a social creature in his concretely historical being. The uniqueness of the artist’s individuality and the richness of his subjective approach inevitably intermingle in this process. The artistic work is, therefore, the result of the interpenetration of two developing sides of objective reality: social reality and the reality of nature, perceived through the prism of popular mythological and immediate social strata of art, and the essence of the artist in all his aesthetic individuality. Quite often two extremes can be observed here. In some cases art, in placing an absolute value on the object 73 and grasping “the state of the world" (Hegel), “loses” man, his individuality and his personal world and forfeits the social perspective without awareness of which art is inconceivable. But truly great art is able to overcome this, upholding and defending the freedom and beauty of Man as an individual and as a social being.

p In the history of culture this process follows an ascending spiral, facilitating thereby the perfecting of social relations, social progress and the development of a harmonious integrity of the individual.

p Thus, the art of ancient Greece objectivised the popular mythological consciousness and the immediate social aspects of life (civic spirit, heroism, courage, duty), uniting them with man’s physical existence. At the same time the artist and age are organically merged in this art.

p The art of medieval Europe showed new aspects of these developing forces of artistic assimilation. In its religious and mythological forms art revealed the earthly states of man. At the same time this art turned towards man’s hitherto artistically unassimilated feelings, to his inner world. (But this in no way means that medieval artistic thinking was on a higher level overall than ancient art.)

p The art of the Renaissance begins as a synthesis of the ancient and the medieval. “The new age begins with a return to the Greeks. The negation of negation!" observed Frederick Engels.  [73•1  We know that the negation of negation presupposes the assimilation in a synthesis of both thesis and antithesis. Renaissance art combined in a single whole the corporeity and spirituality of the human being and synthesised within itself to the greatest possible degree the popular mythological consciousness and the immediate social problems of its time.

p While itself historically unprepared to reveal completely the social motives of human behaviour, Renaissance art nevertheless paved the way for the rise of the art of critical realism, in which the dialectics of the human spirit are an analogue of the dialectics of social life, perceived through the prism of the artist’s uniquely individual vision.

p In contemporary bourgeois society art is both heterogeneous and multisem antic.

p On the one hand, it is represented by the numerous currents and trends of modernism. Modernism, which distortedly reflects only the external aspects of reality, lacks prospects, since it destroys the integrity of art’s influence on man and also destroys its universality. 74 It inflates either the emotional aspect (surrealism), the volitional aspect (mass culture) or the rational aspect of art (abstractionism, pop art, op art) thereby intensifying the disconnectedness ot consciousness and the disharmony of the spiritual world of man living in the atmosphere of bourgeois culture.

p On the other hand, in its content and aesthetic meaning great art is broader and deeper than the rigid framework into which the ruling class places it. Art is more stable than any other ideology and resists pressure from the bourgeoisie; therefore in original, concretely historical forms it creates images, even under these conditions, going far beyond the bounds of the limited bourgeois consciousness.

p Finally, the art of socialist realism is advancing along the path towards artistic perfection, defined by Engels as “...the complete merging of great ideological depth, of a recognised historical content ... with a Shakespearian vitality and richness of action...."  [74•1  In socialist art the social and class roots of man’s spiritual world and behaviour are laid bare and the revolutionary traditions of the people are organically combined with the goals of socialist and communist construction.

To sum up: the real and actual universality, integrity and perfection of man are clearly expressed in art. Art creates a universal system of values and a picture of life in the form of images that are emotionally convincing. It evolves humanistic principles of behaviour and provides an answer to the innermost problems of human existence (concerning the meaning of life, death, happiness, duty and heroic feat). A fruitful contact with it, therefore, enables man to re-establish or develop the richness of his inner spiritual world.