отражението

The life of a genius is not measured by the average duration of human existence. Every passing day expands the boundaries of his immortality. The works of contemporaries give us the opportunity to better understand the greatness of genius. Genius is contemporary even after millennia. But one is the contemporaneity of Aristotle, another of Shakespeare, a third - of Marx. And hardly has the history of mankind known such a complete manifestation of Man with a capital letter, such penetration into the depths of the future, without leaving the real basis of the present, as was manifested in the work and personality of Lenin. 90 years have passed since his birth and only 36 years since his death, and the ideas of Leninism, the ideas of communism are increasingly becoming ideas of all working humanity, marking the path to the future.

Having become acquainted with the article by Ya. E. Elsberg "Scholastic Concepts", published as a discussion in issue 1 of the journal "Questions of Philosophy" of the current year, the reader cannot help but ask: what, exactly, did the author want to prove with this article? What general epistemological and special aesthetic position does the author of the article take? The article is directed against the "scholastic concepts" of L. N. Stolovich in his new book "Aesthetics in Reality and in Art" (Gospolitizdat, 1959). It goes without saying that there is nothing unacceptable or incorrect in the fact that one Soviet author discusses with another author such an extremely important general epistemological and special aesthetic question. However, from what positions does Ya. E. Elsberg lead this discussion? From what positions does he criticize the "scholastic concepts" of his opponents, in this case L. N. Stolovich? At the very beginning of the article, Ya. E. Elsberg himself gives a fairly clear answer to these questions. Criticizing L. N. Stolovich's book, Elsberg points out first and foremost that L. N. Stolovich transforms aesthetic categories (beautiful, sublime, disgusting, tragic, comic, etc.) into "elements" of reality itself. Below, Ya. E. Elsberg writes: "Of course, it is good that L. N. Stolovich seeks the source (my interpretation - T. P.) of the aesthetic in objective reality, but what is bad is that he mechanically transfers the categories of aesthetics into reality, identifying these categories with the properties of the latter." And even further down, allegedly referring to Chernyshevsky, the author again states: "Yes, the tragic, the comic, the beautiful are contained in life itself, and in it are the roots (my exp. - T. P.) of the corresponding phenomena of art and of aesthetic categories. But to reduce life to them means to pay a tribute to scholastic systematics" ("Questions of Philosophy", No. 1, 1961, pp. 114, 115, etc., my exp. - T. P.).