Principles of V.S. Solovyov's Positive Aesthetics in I.B. Rodnyanskaya's Literary criticism

Zakharova Elizaveta Mikhailovna ORCID: 0000-0002-2087-6072 PhD in Philology Researcher, Maxim Gorky Institute of World Literature 121069, Russia, Moskva oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Povarskaya, 25 a Elizakharova2019@gmail.com Other publications by this author

V.S. Solovyov as a literary critic

The influence of the personality and the complex of ideas of V.S. Solovyov is extensive not only from a geographical point of view (so, thanks largely to representatives of Russian emigration in the XX century, the ancestor of Russian philosophy ^[3] was learned in the West), but also in thematic terms. The influence of the thoughts expressed in Solovyov's works extended to the field of law, philosophy, and literary studies. In addition, the philosopher became both a theorist and a practitioner of literary criticism.

       Fundamentally new in Solovyov's views on art was what would later be called theurgy. Art in this approach is defined as a source of transformation: the artist is obliged to change being through his creativity. In this regard, poetry appears "as the embodiment of the objective beauty of the world and the human soul," which determines the value and "aesthetic approach to the evaluation of literary creativity, expressed in a number of articles about Russian poets of the 60-90s of the XIX century." ^{[1, p. 30]}.

       Researchers, relying on the totality of cross-cutting motives linking the articles, as well as on the common position of the author in them, divide Solovyov's literary and critical works about Russian poets into two cycles. The first is devoted to the period of the Silver Age, the second is focused on revealing the motive of fate in the works of A.S. Pushkin, M.Y. Lermontov, A.B. Mickiewicz and other authors of the XIX century. It is essential that both cycles have an immanent view of the poetic worlds.

       One of the most important features of Solovyov's literary criticism is the emphasis on the artist's self-reflection. Poetry about poetry serves as a source for the study of the lyrical "I". First of all, attention is paid to the poet's worldview, as well as his philosophical views, and the works are evaluated by how poetic the form and content are.

       Solovyov's theoretical arguments about poetry are distinguished by universalism: in an effort to provide an exhaustive analysis, the critic relies on data from both humanitarian knowledge (psychology, philosophy, theology, aesthetics) and natural sciences. In a generalized form, it can be said that Solovyov's critical method consists in "sacralizing poetry as the highest, divine kind of art", as well as "a high level of moral and aesthetic requirements of the critic to the poet" ^{[1, p. 35]}.   

       The purpose of this article is to present the principles of Solovyov's "positive aesthetics", which significantly affected Rodnyanskaya's philosophical criticism. It should be noted here that it was Solovyov who became the founder of this literary and critical direction. Thus, he defined his task when analyzing a work of art as follows: "to disassemble and show what exactly from the fullness of the universal meaning, which elements of it, which sides or manifestations of truth especially captured the soul of the poet and are mainly expressed by him in artistic images and sounds. The critic should "reveal the deepest roots" of creativity in this poet not from the side of his psychic motives – this is more a matter for a biographer and a literary historian - but mainly from the side of the objective foundations of this creativity, or its ideological content" ^{[6, p. 530]}. Thus, poetic activity was asserted "as a beautiful object, representing in one form or another the truth of life or the meaning of the world" ^{[6, p. 533]}.

       Rodnyanskaya, as a follower of Solovyov, was already interested in philosophy at the dawn of her creative career. In the future, research and literary-critical activity will develop in close conjunction with the ideas of the largest Russian religious thinkers and philosophers: S.N. Bulgakov, A.S. Khomyakov, K.E. Tsiolkovsky, E.N. Trubetskoy, N.A. Berdyaev. And the analysis of works of fiction will not do without a complex of ideas of classical aesthetics: fundamental categories of beauty are attached to the phenomena of art: "Truth-Goodness-Beauty" ^[4].

       Apart from the sphere of interests of the critic, there is a steady attention to Solovyov's creative path. Rodnyanskaya is the author of articles about the thinker in the Philosophical Encyclopedia (sections: theory of the world process, aesthetics of philosophical eros), the compiler and author of introductory articles to the collection, which combined works on the philosophy of art literary and critical works, in collaboration with R.A. Galtseva, a collection "To portraits of Russian thinkers" was prepared, where Solovyov's creative activity is considered in the aspect of the "socio-spiritual role of the Christian educator" ^{[2, p. 568]}.

       In a joint article with Galtseva, "The Real Work of the Artist", Solovyov's positive aesthetics receives a detailed description: "In this frame of reference, aesthetics correlates with the highest meaning of life, being included in a person's striving for the ideal" ^{[6, p. 9]}, and the creator's mission is reduced to a prophetic function. Inspiration, according to Solovyov, is a category that the artist is doomed to protect both from his own motives and from external influences. The same work also emphasizes that Solovyov is "the coryphaeus of Russian philosophical criticism, moreover, its true founder. <...> it was he who demonstrated that philosophical analysis does not subordinate a work of art to a scheme within which it is doomed to serve as an illustration of a thesis, but goes back to its objective semantic basis" ^{[6, p. 38]}.

       The purpose of the philosophical analysis, which Rodnyanskaya later resorts to, is to find out "which side of true Being the artist's soul responds to as a native idea, which ray of real Beauty illuminates the world of his creations" ^{[6, pp. 28-29]}. Solovyov's literary and critical heritage itself, Galtseva and Rodnyanskaya note, contains "a saving energy that returns art to the world of spirit" ^{[6, p. 29]}.

       Following the confessions of Rodnyanskaya herself, researchers have repeatedly called her a follower of Solovyov's methodological system. As particular examples, many works can be cited, where the starting point for independent reasoning becomes what Solovyov did. Thus, the article "Deep Furrow: Konstantin Sluchevsky" directly correlates with the work "Impressionism of Thought": it is said about Solovyov: "an astute expert, the author of an article about Sluchevsky <...>" ^{[5, vol. 1, p. 222]}.

       In a number of other critical studies, reliance on Solovyov's concepts of artists is methodologically important. In this regard, it is impossible not to say that the views of Rodnyanskaya and Solovyov on poetry have similar features. The identity can be seen in the peculiarities of genre systems: the dominant form for both Solovyov and Rodnyanskaya is a literary and critical study of personality, where preference is given not to the literary process, but to observing the specifics of the holistic artistic world.

       In the article "Poetry of Pause: Premonitions and Memory", Rodnyanskaya, following Solovyov, classifies poetic creativity as the highest of the arts.  However, the essential difference between the methods of Solovyov and Rodnyanskaya is that the latter chooses as an object of consideration only works that are close from an aesthetic point of view. For Rodnyanskaya, in addition, it is typical to rely on information from literary studies in discussions about modern and classical. Thus, almost artistic maxims can coexist with poetic observations: "a meter is something introduced into speech, into a tangle of words designed to express a thought" ^{[5, vol. 2, p. 373]}; "A lyrical poem is a metrized verbal utterance, the members of which acquire the opportunity to enter into other, in addition to logical, relationships also generate figurative meaning" ^{[5, vol. 2, p. 418]}; "The poetics of the Block is the poetics of the trembling of the world in an air jet" ^{[5, vol. 1, p. 201]}.

            If we talk about articles representing a more practical perspective, then it can be noted that both authors tend to concentrate on the study of the writer's personality, as well as the complex of his ideas: "The personality of Blok is expressed in his roles, but it is given to them, given away" ^{[5, vol. 1, p. 203]}. In many ways, the same tasks explain the fact that Rodnyanskaya in most texts uses the technique of literary parallels in order to include a creative reputation in a certain context: "It's time to say that the Block is equal to Pushkin for us" ^{[5, vol. 1, p. 183]}; "The phenomenon of the Block showed that the harmonious Pushkin balance between a man and a poet, when the spheres of the human and artistic are intelligently divided among themselves and indirectly correlated in a single supreme truth that nourishes an integral personality" ^{[5, vol. 1, p. 210]}; "The hero of Blok's lyrical "legend" is closest to the "Lermontov man", and he was created by a similar spiritual situation: a failed "theurgy"symbolists are akin to the failed life-building of romantics" ^{[5, vol. 1, p. 61]}.

       Common to Solovyov and Rodnyanskaya should be considered the plot, which consists in solving a problem related to the sphere of spirituality or, in a narrow sense, with the study of the artist's soul: "All the poetic roles of Blok <...> are the meeting of his soul with one or another trend of the era, culture, spirit" ^{[5, vol. 1, p. 204]}; "it was precisely the intellectual and artistic "groundlessness" and "instability" that made Blok's inner life "a place where all spiritual threads converge, where all sounds reach" (from his diary), and in combination with a huge gift both in breadth and depth - a platform for the unfolding of the world cultural drama" ^{[5, vol. 1, p. 205]}.

       According to Solovyov, "artistic activity ... serves the common life purpose of mankind" ^{[6, p. 95]}. It is at the moment of creative realization that the personality carries out the most "penetration into the divine reality" ^{[7, p. 283]}. The key to success in this immersion was called human subordination of "thoughts and actions to moral dictates" ^{[7, p. 283]}. Moreover, Solovyov insists that art is not free from ethical categories: "Good, separated from truth and beauty, is only an indefinite feeling, an impotent impulse, abstract truth is an empty word, and beauty without goodness and truth is an idol" ^{[6, p. 76]}. In another work, the philosopher notes that the construction of positive aesthetics begins when it is recognized: "artistic activity does not have any special higher object in itself, but only in its own way, by its own means, serves the common life goal of humanity" ^{[6, p. 95]}.

Poetics of philosophical criticism

At the end of the review of the basic principles of Solovyov's positive aesthetics that affected Rodnyanskaya's literary criticism, it can be noted that this influence was not only internal, but also external. Thus, typological convergence is found in the poetics of literary and critical statements of the philosophical direction. The structure of the literary-critical judgment of the philosophical direction invariably includes generalizing judgments of an aphoristic nature: "Living in many times at once, the poet is always with someone far away, watching someone invisible" ^{[5, vol. 1, p. 48]}; "Lyrical feeling fits within a certain canon of feelings" ^{[5, vol.2, p. 410]}.

It is impossible not to say that the works of representatives of the philosophical direction of criticism differ in the presence of two time layers. Both Solovyov and Rodnyanskaya, turning to modernity, rely in their judgments on universal, timeless categories, which is expressed, first of all, in the use of biblical images. This approach helps to identify the timeless nature of the phenomena and problems under consideration in their connection with the Gospel and Old Testament events.

The image of the author in the texts of Rodnyanskaya is most accurately characterized by the words: sincerity and frankness, emotionality is achieved not least thanks to the expressive intonation of exclamations ("<...> adults do not try to play with any toys – in vain, to no avail!" ^{[5, vol. 1, p. 72]}) and defaults. The author poses problematic questions to himself: "How does Dostoevsky risk introducing into this darkened and catastrophically heated environment the idea that "life is paradise" – here and now?" ^{[5, vol. 2, p. 219]}. At the same time, the question-and–answer form is a favorite form of presentation of the material, the beginning of the article: "does he [Dostoevsky] need an apology?"; "love is the best way to cognition of personality" ^{[5, vol. 2, p. 233]}. So, the author's image appears deeply personal, but at the same time striving for solidarity with the whole generation: "My generation, who got acquainted with his poems due to historical circumstances with considerable delay, for some time was puzzled by the miracle of Zabolotsky, the miracle of his instructive fairy tale about the world - what is it: stylization, mystification, irony, pathos?" ^{[5, vol. 2, p. 369]}.

The researchers note that a kind of duality can also be observed in Solovyov's works: "The image of the author in Solovyov's articles is characterized by certain features: this is an omniscient author, with teacher's, mentor's intonations, as if the bearer of absolute truth, allowing himself to speak sometimes on behalf of Providence"; "The language of Solovyov's critical articles is characterized by a combination of two stylistic principles: analytical-discursive and lyrically-figurative, brilliant critical analysis with metaphysical reflections <...>" ^{[1, p. 34]}.

In the most complete collection of works In the Rodnyansky "Movement of Literature", Solovyov's name is found more than fifty times in different contexts. Reliance on the philosopher's concepts is contained in the works about Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Mandelstam and many other authors of the XIX–XX centuries.. It can be said that the lack of a holistic teaching about aesthetics in Solovyov did not prevent the fact that the basic principles were used by Rodnyanskaya in private literary and critical observations.