p The artistic image embraces an organic unity of objective and subjective elements. The objective elements in an image are understood as everything which is transposed directly from the real world; subjective elements are understood as that which is added to the image by the artist’s creative thought. The objective elements are those real phenomena which can be reproduced—pictures of life itself, characters, conflicts, circumstances, man’s inner world, in a word everything which exists outside the artist’s consciousness. Subjective elements are the experiences and reflections of the artist, his relationship to the phenomena described, his assessment and his own particular visiori of" them. Every artistic image represents not only a reflection of specific “slices” of life, but in a certain sense a kind of self-portrait of the artist. Behind the image there always stands its creator. The subjective factor is an indication of the originality and freshness of an artist.

p Deviations from realism can find expression both in disregard for objective elements or in belittling what is subjective in the image. Distortion of objective elements, reluctance or inability to come to terms with the logic of material drawn from real life lead to various manifestations of formalism. Vagueness, or, still more so, lack of a subjective position leads the author to a naturalistic preoccupation with facts. In the first case, as in the second, the image disintegrates, and its ideological and aesthetic significance disappears or is weakened.

p Formalist aestheticians counter the materialist theory of reflection with the view that art is not a reflection of 95 life, but self-expression for the artist. In its extreme form this position found expression in the aesthetics of decadence which proclaimed that art was utterly independent of life and that thought expressed in images was a completely independent entity.

p Materialist aesthetics resolutely refutes this subjectiveidealist interpretation of art. The image is not simply “self-expression”, not the artist’s "stream of consciousness", which exists independently of the external world, but first and foremost an artistically reproduced picture of objective life. It is clear that an artist’s self- expression does constitute part of the content of a work; without it a work of art would be unthinkable. Furthermore a work frequently includes even autobiographical elements. This does not however imply that the social meaning and implications of a work can be reduced simply to such elements. This approach limits the essence of a work to a large extent, impoverishing it and in fact distorting that essence. The hero of Fellini’s famous SVa (Otto e mezzo], is approached by certain critics as a self-portrait of the author. In the film there are of course a good number of details which do coincide with events in Fellini’s own life, and there are grounds for regarding the film as something in the way of a confession made by its director. However, Fellini is quite right when he protests against identification of the hero with himself. This film is ideologically and aesthetically significant in view of the fact that it has more general implications than purely autobiographical ones, that it focusses attention on questions which torture and disturb the artist, hemmed in as he is by a contradictory world outlook. The film is a profound portrayal, of the spiritual crisis which sooner or later confronts every artist of integrity at work in the context of a contradiction-ridden and inhumane society. The valuable elements in this film are of course attributable precisely to the artist’s capacity to make generalisations concerning important phenomena of life, to broaden his experience and to grapple with general issues. The critic who reduces the whole content of SVa to a 96 personal confession of Fellini’s is doing not only the artist but also his audience a disservice.

p The subjective factor in an artist’s work, his ideological and aesthetic standpoint and his creative activity are shaped by his world outlook. In the final analysis the subjective factor in an artist’s work represents a fruit of the age, the social structure of his immediate world and his particular psychological make-up and ideology. Ultimately, the artist’s world outlook is aesthetically refracted in his subjective approach.

p Talented artists always adopt an individual approach in their work. Pushkin, for instance, after turning to the subject of the famous Don Juan legend, which had already inspired a number of outstanding works of world literature, used only a selected number of elements from the story for his verse tragedy, The Stone Guest, creating as he did so an utterly new and original character. While Moliere, for instance, treated this subject in a satirical comedy, Pushkin wrote a tragedy whose hero is concerned above all with the everlasting quest for that unattainable ideal of the Beautiful. An example from quite a different domain would be the art of the two great Russian ballerinas, Anna Pavlova and Galina Ulanova. Both of them danced Saint-Saens’ Cygne but surely we find a reflection of their attitude to life in the fact that Pavlova expressed a sense of doom and the inevitability of death, while Ulanova protested against death, struggled against it, asserting life forces as she did so.

p The British theatre critic Harold Hobson in a review of the Moscow Art Theatre production of The Cherry Orchard performed in London in 1958 used a characteristic headline in The Sunday Times, namely The Orchard in Full Bloom. He went on to point out that British production bewailed the eclipse of the old world while Soviet ones looked forward to the advent of a new one. The optimistic mood of this particular theatre’s Chekhov productions was a real eye-opener for British audiences, and moreover not for them alone. The difference between the Weltanschauung of the men and 97 women involved in these productions accounted for the different types of artistic thinking found in them.

p The subjective factor in an artist’s work finds its expression in his individual creative style. At a rehearsal in the Moscow Art Theatre the leading Soviet director M. Kedrov drew an interesting comparison between Shakespeare’s and Chekhov’s characters. He reminded those present that both dramatists shaped realistic characters and that one and the same logic of events was to be found in the works of both; the difference lay in the intensity of action, in the speed at which events unfolded. In Shakespeare’s plays decisions were taken and acted upon at lightening speed: while Shakespeare’s heroes required but a moment to take decisions, Chekhov’s characters would need a whole act, when faced by the same issue. An amazing amount of action is concentrated in Shakespeare’s characters, while in Chekhov’s all is a question of implication and nuance.

p “Style," wrote Stendhal, "is the particular manner adopted by each master peculiar to him alone, to say one and the same things. Each great artist has sought means for making a particular impression on men’s minds, the impression that appeared to him as the main task of his painting.”  [97•*  Stendhal was right when he went on to say that to feel, for example Raphael’s style meant to find in his light and shade effects, his drawing technique and use of colour the special chords of his soul.

p These special chords of the soul are to be found in the creations of any artist: this is also true of artists who adhere to a single ideology, one set of political views and philosophical convictions, in other words artists whose world outlooks coincide in all fundamental’ respects. Yet there are not and indeed cannot be artists, who apprehend the world in exactly the same way. This apprehension embraces the whole of an artist’s experience of life and art, his moral attitudes, his aesthetic predilections, 98 his emotionality, his interests, tastes, ideals, in a word all that is realised in his creative work. It is precisely this which lends a work of art its unique originality.

p If we compare Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet with Hamlet by Sir Laurence Olivier, it is clear that the differences stem from the director’s world outlooks. In the finale of Olivier’s film, Hamlet is even seen for a brief moment on the throne of the Danish kingdom with the court paying homage to him, implying that the conflict between Hamlet and the real situation in which he finds himself has been resolved. The whole ideological timbre and image structure of the Soviet film make such a scene impossible. Smoktunovsky’s Hamlet and the castle of Elsinore, representing humanism and an inhuman society respectively, are incompatible and mutually exclusive. In these films we are confronted not merely by two separate artistic treatments of the same subject, but by two philosophies of life, two ideologies.

p Yet when we compare Tovstonogov’s production of The Three .Sisters in Leningrad Drama Theatre and the celebrated Moscow Art Theatre production, the background to the two different approaches should not be sought in the world outlooks of Tovstonogov and Nemirovich- Danchenko respectively, but in the talent and apprehension of the world of these two directors in the sense referred to earlier—in their varying experience of life and art, in their disparate psychological make-up and emotionality, etc. Indeed, without the experience accumulated in our country during the years of the struggle against nazism and our historic victory in that struggle, the conception behind Tovstonogov’s production in which the themes of man’s destiny in the world and of human dignity ring out with so much force, would have been for all intents and purposes unthinkable.

p It is to Tovstonogov’s credit that there are no echoes of the previous—albeit magnificent—treatment in his production in which he unfolds and upholds a new ideological and artistic conception.

p This example illustrates how the subjective elements 99 in artists’ work are determined above all by differences in their world outlook: when however we compare works by artists who share a common world outlook this serves to bring out the diversity and inexhaustible wealth inherent in artistic talent, to disclose the many facets and nuances implicit in an artist’s attitude to the real world.

p The subjective factor in an artist’s work has nothing whatever to do with subjectivism. The Bulgarian art critic Khristyu Goranov pointed out that there are no grounds whatever for such a view, for identifying the subjective factor in art with subjectivism as an insurance against the subjective element run wild. To confuse these concepts is inadmissible, the subjective factor and subjectivism are mutually exclusive. Subjectivism is creative anarchy on the part of the artist, distortion of life’s, truth perpetrated by him, his reluctance or inability to come to terms with the objective laws of the real world and with the inner logic of material drawn from life. Subjectivism leads to false generalisations, it attempts to constrict life within a preconceived scheme of things. Subjectivism has no time for the characters of the dramatis personae, or for the circumstances of any particular environment. Conflicts are not the fruit of the artist’s study of life, but, on the contrary, life is artificially adapted to fit in with preconceived schemes. Subjectivism is the result of false ideas which annihilate art in their disregard for art’s objective laws and the objective correlations within the real world.

p Even an artist of profound and forceful talent, once he has become subject to the influence of subjectivism risks ruining altogether, or at least undermining his work, by disrupting the artistic wholeness of his image and finding himself at the mercy of insoluble contradictions. Not even the works of great writers and artists are exceptions to this rule, as can be seen, for example, in a work as significant as Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed, which reflects the crisis tearing at Russian society in the late sixties and early seventies of the last century. It contains characters whose psychological delineation is most 100 interesting, yet there is a false note in this novel stemming from the representation of the revolutionary raznochintsy, drawn from the lower middle class, as devoid of principles or ideals, as vehicles of social evil. This novel rich in contradictions and abounding in false and one-sided generalisations, which the finest representatives of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia regarded as a slander on its service to society, shows how when an artist substitutes false and subjective ideas for an objective picture of life, it is to the considerable detriment of his work.  [100•* 

p It is essential for an artist to free himself from false, subjectivist ideas. Art does not tolerate falsehood: art and subjectivism are incompatible. The power of artistic talent lies in the artist’s ability to free himself from false subjectivist conceptions, to attain a heightened sense of truth, and ability to follow the logic of material drawn from real life, even if at times this means that the artist has, as Mayakovsky put it, to "tread on the throat of his own song”.

p Useful lessons in this connection can be gleaned from the words of great artists, such as Pushkin’s jest to the effect that he, Pushkin, had been taken completely by surprise when his heroine Tatyana married (Yevgeni Onegin—Chapter VIII, Verse 20). Tolstoy, when referring to these lines, added in his turn that his characters too were not always, or in all respects, obedient to his will. In particular Tolstoy commented that when Vronsky took a shot at himself after his conversation with Karenin this had been completely unexpected for him, the author. This thought led Tolstoy to conclude that the characters of his novels did with their lives what was logical, even when their creator had envisaged their course of action differently.

p The degree of an artist’s talent is reflected in his capacity to heed the voice of truth, to avoid thrusting upon his images and characters development out of keeping with their essential nature or dealing in artificial structures, and finally to be a sensitive barometer in relation to the life of his character or image in the process. Asked whether the actions of his characters were the result of the manifestations of his subconscious feelings, William Faulkner said he would prefer to think that the characters he had created were sufficiently true to life to direct and predetermine their own deeds and actions. He admitted that their behaviour was of course a result of his experience of life, but he suggested that the characters of his novels shaped the plots and acted independently, and that in such cases all that was required in addition was someone to note down what was said by the characters.

p Characters act independently, the artist merely notes down their words. What does this mean? This means that the logic of characters’ lives cannot be subordinated to subjectivist whims.

p Yet investigation of real life, the transformation of phenomena found in it into artistic characters and images demands a good deal of complex work on the part of the artist. It is in the subjective elements of his work that an artist’s creative activity comes to the fore, his aesthetic individuality and his social attitudes. This means that the subjective factor is an intrinsic part of the objective content of the image or character.

Not only the artistic image but also its appreciation is shaped by the unity of the objective and subjective factors. This goes a long way towards explaining the fact that in artistic practice images and characters are not always delineated with complete clarity and precision. In a work of art there are often a good number of gaps, sometimes the picture of life provided is not sufficiently detailed; sometimes the artist poses questions rather than supplies answers to them. He hopes, however, that man’s imagination, which the work of art has stimulated, will 102 enable him to become its co-creator. While an image created by the artist is being apprehended it is, as it were, being supplemented by the imagination of reader, beholder or listener. He introduces to it those aspects which are still absent, adding his vision and thereby extending the limits of the reflection of life and supplementing the subjective element contributed by the artist with his own. True apprehension and appreciation of art are always of an active, creative nature.