Dimitar Avramov

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

The theory of "Art for Art's Sake" has been around for more than a century, but the questions it raises and the struggles that surround it have perhaps never been as decisive for the development of art as they are today. What is the essence of art? Should it serve something other than itself? Is "pure beauty" not its only goal, or, in order to acquire social significance, must it submit to the great moral tasks that society sets for it? What is the role of the artist: to become the creator of autonomous artistic values ​​that will be enjoyed by a small elite of spiritual aristocrats, or to be in the vanguard of the great battle for social renewal? The theory of "Art for Art's Sake" has its answers to these fateful questions, and these answers lie at the foundation of the formalist art of the bourgeois world, as it has developed from the last century to the present day. Therefore, to describe the socio-psychological atmosphere in which this aesthetic concept was formed, to reveal its social and theoretical essence, to indicate the problems it posed and solved, and to assess them both in the context of the relevant historical situation and in view of contemporary requirements, is undoubtedly a topical task that our aesthetics and art studies cannot and should not ignore. The present article is an attempt in this regard. It sets itself limited requirements: to examine the theory of "Art for Art's Sake" as it developed in France - its true homeland - and only within the framework of that generation of writers and artists who first gave it the appearance of a specific aesthetic doctrine and first used it as a weapon, or more precisely, as a cover for their hatred of bourgeois society and culture. The representatives of this generation did not form a single school. These were artists, different in temperament, inclinations and tastes, different in the nature of their work and therefore different in their place in the history of new art. What united them was their common understanding of art and its tasks, of its relation to morality, politics, religion, science, nature, to reality in general. This understanding was not the result of a strictly thought-out theoretical work.

This article was conceived and written as a continuation of another one that the author published last year (Literary Thought magazine, vol. 6), under the title "Origin and essence of the theory of "art for art's sake". Both there and here the author attempts to examine the relevant phenomena from a historical point of view, which, taking into account the specific conditions of their emergence and development, seeks to penetrate their complex and contradictory essence, to analyze the struggle of positive and negative tendencies in them and the fatal end of this struggle, in which, by virtue of a whole complex of social reasons, the destructive principle prevails. It is here, in the aesthetics and art of individualism, that the reader will see (if, of course, the author has been able to prove it) that both in the actions of individual human behavior and in broader social and cultural manifestations, subjectively honest intentions often lead to objectively harmful results, or more precisely, that the pursuit of freedom of personal expression in artistic creation is only a positive value when it is guided by the consciousness of public service, when it is restrained by the principles of social discipline.

There is hardly any other view of art that is more unanimously rejected than that of naturalistic aesthetics. According to the general conviction of specialists, art would commit suicide the moment it decided to put its harsh principles into practice. It would lose its soul - creativity. This conviction goes so far that today it is enough for a work of art to be called "naturalistic" to be considered compromised. Unlike other artistic concepts that have aroused sharp reactions at their appearance, but over time have imposed themselves on public opinion or, conversely, have been rejected only when they degenerated into fruitless norms that stifled the free flight of creative imagination, naturalism, both as an aesthetic and as an artistic practice, has been the subject of the most fierce attacks from its birth to the present day. Perhaps the basis of this constant hatred lies in its latent vitality, its comparatively easier adaptation to the criteria of elementary taste, or simply its not always clear distinction from another method of which it became the historical successor - realism. For it is a fact that when it appeared in France in the last century, naturalism was closely related to realism, that these two concepts were often used as synonyms. Their common struggle against the false classicism of official bourgeois art, against romanticism, against the ideal of universal beauty and the glorification of the past, their common cult of nature, truth and science, their love for the prosaic sides of reality, which until then had been considered unworthy and unacceptable as objects of artistic reproduction, quite naturally turned them not only in the eyes of the general public into manifestations of the same aesthetic concept, which is indifferent whether it is called "realism" or "naturalism". No one thought that there was anything essential that could distinguish the art of Flaubert from that of the Goncourt brothers and Zola, or the painting of Courbet and Millet from that of Manet and Degas. All were equally accused of lack of idealism, of vulgarity, of apotheosis of the ugly, of indecency, of blind copying of nature.