Creative sincerity and poetic fiction

Those who deal with aesthetics know that one of the most talented representatives of French materialism of the 18th century - Denis Diderot - was also a brilliant defender of realistic art. He hated the otherwise skillful artist François Boucher for his sweet, romantically-influenced allegories and pointed to the crude but truthful art of Chardin as a measure for young artists. And just when he opposed creative "hypocrisy" to naive fidelity to nature, Diderot simultaneously claimed that "exaggeration and falsehood lie at the foundation of the arts." Indeed, at first glance, the contradiction is obvious, and the surprised reader instinctively seeks to restore the broken monolithicity in Diderot's views, declaring the quoted thought to be a random thought or a "pen error." But here is the creator of socialist realism - Maxim Gorky, whose aesthetic concepts were incomparably clearer than those of Diderot, considers exaggeration and fiction to be inevitable aspects of the artist's work. Obviously, here the theory of art is faced with a real antinomy, which must be clearly stated and explained: how to combine the principle of the truthful reflection of reality with the inevitability of exaggeration and fiction? Are not the latter an attempt on the sincerity of the artist, which we in any case solemnly demand of him? These questions - interesting in themselves - have a direct connection with one of the most vividly treated problems of our aesthetic science: the problem of the reflection of reality, undoubtedly in art. It is precisely