художествено

Literature reflects life in a more multifaceted and profound way, the brighter the creative individuals working in it - with rich life experience, with a penetrating ideological outlook, with a unique way of artistic perception and depiction. Without the creative self-image of individual authors, the artistic wealth of literature as a whole is unthinkable. Reality is infinitely diverse. It is, according to Dostoevsky, both unexpected and fantastic, and sometimes even incredible. (Russian Writers on Literary Work. Leningrad, 1955, vol. III, p. 151). It seems to me that these words are especially suitable for our contemporary reality, with the miraculous transformations that take place in it. And what a deep meaning, what beauty in this vital "fantasy" of ours. As long as the writer knows how to penetrate it.

The literature on Leo Tolstoy shows that each era has approached the assessment of his work with its own criterion. What seemed to the democratically minded representative of realistic literary thought of the second half of the last century, N. N. Strakhov, in Tolstoy's work to be of undeniable value, was precisely what the reactionary decadent D. Merezhkovsky considered the great writer's artistic impotence. They make no exception to this general approach to the study of L. Tolstoy's work and his late works. However, compared to the vast literature devoted to the brilliant writer, there are few publications on his late work. Nevertheless, they very clearly outline the main trends in pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russian science, which, with few exceptions, are reduced to denying the creative potential of the old Tolstoy and the artistic significance of his works - The Kreutzer Sonata, Father Sergius, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, After the Ball, etc.

Art is a specific type of knowledge, which is significantly different from any other type: sensory, scientific (theoretical and historical) knowledge. Some authors characterize artistic knowledge as emotional, i.e. as knowledge formed and developed in the emotional sphere of the subjective reflection of reality. According to some of them, aesthetic feelings themselves and directly appear as sources of certain knowledge about the external world and about man, and according to others - within the framework of this specific subjective phenomenon, a process of continuous "overflow", "transformation" of emotional into cognitive information takes place. However, whatever the differences and nuances, what unites the mentioned views is the thesis about the possibility of aesthetic feelings playing the role of independent cognitive subjective reflections, on a par with perceptions, representations, concepts and judgments.