Valentin Angelov

With this article we set ourselves the goal of examining those problems of genre that are directly related to the question of the content and form of art. Because - let us emphasize this at the very beginning - genre is a category that has a bearing on both the content and the form of the work of art. There are three ways of literary depiction: lyrical, epic and dramatic. The interaction between them, the manifestations and originality of creative individuality, the impact of historical reality, etc. have not taken away their essential features - they have remained stable and unchangeable in their essence. In connection with these three ways of literary depiction, the corresponding literary and artistic forms have also arisen - lyrical, epic and dramatic. It is customary in literary studies to call these forms genres. Genre, in turn, is a specific concept in relation to the literary genre. For example, the epic, the novel, the short story, etc. are genres in relation to the epic. In contemporary aesthetics and literary studies, the view that genre is a special type of artistic form still prevails. At first glance, there seems to be nothing to object to such a view, since genre is related to one or another element of the form, which in its totality can be considered as a type of artistic form. We do not dispute that there is much truth in the view in question; genre could indeed be considered a special type of artistic form, but only on one hand, from one aspect. At the same time, on the other hand, it has a direct relationship to the content of the work of art and is itself a specific artistic content. (We will clarify the term “specific artistic content” below.) So the above view, according to which genre is a type of artistic form, absolutizes only one of its sides, and, to the extent that it does so, it is one-sided and limited.

Science studies the objective essence of reality independently of human evaluative attitude towards it; its element is this: to reveal the nature of things and phenomena - their objectively real signs and the connections, dependencies and regularities to which they obey, without being interested in the subjective attitude of man to the reality being studied. Art, on the contrary, reflects the world unconditionally through the ideological-emotional assessment of the artist. Therefore, the problem of expressing the ideological-emotional sphere of the artist and his individual vision of the world is directly related to any artistic creation. Without the manifestation of the artistic attitude towards the object, there is no art; but expression is not yet art at all. For Marxist aesthetics, the latter is an organic unity of knowledge and expression, a reflection of the world in its objective significance and an expression of the subjective evaluative attitude and vision of reality on the part of the creative personality.

The final result of the creative process is the creation of an artistic image, which has a tangible, sensory-perceptible body thanks to the material characteristic of the type of art (words, sounds, stone, clay, wood, body movements, etc.) and which begins to exist outside the creative consciousness that created it. Today, the process of artistic creation is viewed as a duality of a kind of reflection of reality and objective, creative activity, through which the artistic image is created as a "new object of the objective world." And this duality is indicated as the most characteristic feature of the image, by means of which all its other features could be explained. It is indeed impossible to speak of the artistic image only as the content of consciousness. In the head of the writer, painter, sculptor, etc. There is only an idea, which in the creative process is developed and transformed into an artistic image - into a special reality (called by some theorists "aesthetic reality"), into an object that already opposes any aesthetic consciousness, because it exists independently of it (in what sense and to what extent, this will be clarified below). Thus, the idea, transformed into an artistic image, receives its own existence - the existence of the artistic image. The latter seems to live its own life (sometimes with a very changeable and strange fate - Hamlet, the Mona Lisa), which often transcends centuries and millennia and remains an immortal possession of humanity.

There are journalistic and popularization articles that argue approximately like this: art is not an end in itself; once created, it is imputed to have a duty to influence public consciousness. These arguments seem very convincing and seem to admit of no doubts or objections. And yet, an unacceptable simplistic tendency is apparent in them. To claim that art is a phenomenon that renders itself meaningless if it proves incapable of aesthetic influence on a certain social collective or part of it is an axiomatic truth (at least for our aesthetics), but to think that the problem of this influence arises only after it has been created and exists as a fact is an unsatisfactory statement that does not take into account its inherent specificity. This problem - whether the individual artist is aware of it clearly enough or not - is immanent to art, it should not be understood as something that is subsequently, completely placed before him as a result of didactic tasks, conjunctural circumstances, etc. No, it is its organic component. For art is an artistic value not in some metaphysical isolation from society, but only in its relation to the aesthetic consciousness of a certain social community (group).

Much has been written about associations, especially in psychological aesthetics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Translating what has already been published, one would be left with the impression that nothing more could be said. And in fact there is a problem directly related to associations, which is quite modern, and at the same time undeveloped: to study the associative flow - its "layers" and character - but with a view to certain changes in the structure of the artistic image. For even such major aestheticians as T. Lips and J. Folkelt think about associations at all, without taking into account that they - in their nature and type - depend too much on certain changes occurring in art. Such a dependence exists and some artists (more or less consciously) perceive it, striving to take advantage of it with a view to achieving a certain aesthetic effect. Below, of course, we will deal with this dependence between associations and the artistic image, but here we must guard against the possible assumption that every work is associative-potential, i.e., that it is capable of associating in the perceiving subject one or another ideas, feelings, etc. subjective states. On the contrary, such states may not arise at all. The reasons for this may be of a different nature: subjective, rooted in the low artistic culture of the perceiver, in his inability to "decipher" the conventional language with which the image is created, etc.; objective, inherent in the work of art itself.