On some questions of realism

Until recently, there was still a popular view that the entire artistic development of mankind represented a pyramid, at the top of which stood realism. I would not say that the period of the cult of personality with its pronounced tendency to hierarchical thinking was without merit in creating such a pyramidal idea of ​​the development of art. The fact that realism is one of the most significant achievements of human artistic thinking, that it arose on the most valuable conquests of all literatures and schools before it, was turned into an absurdity by this theory, which generalized it to all the more significant manifestations of art. This impoverished the entire picture of artistic development to an incredible extent.