Nikola Georgiev

From the time of Tacitus, when the metonymization of the concept of style began, to the present day, things have happened and continue to happen with it that have hardly happened with other concepts: "style" has expanded and continues to expand its scope in a threatening manner... Modern literary critics rightly complain that in their field style is still an unscientific term, that it still lacks any definite and generally binding content. However, if we take a look at the work of their colleagues - theorists of music, painting, architecture - we come across the same terminological uncertainty, which manifests itself even more sharply in the attempt to elevate the term style from the level of the theory of a type of art to the level of aesthetics. Meanwhile, "style" is also entering the terminology of anthropologists, ethnographers, psychologists (behaviorists, for example), cyberneticists... There is hardly any point in talking about its use in everyday speech and journalism ("colloquial" and "journalistic" style), since the title of this note has also fallen victim to this terminological "miscellany".

There is too much work and talk about the exact methods of describing artistic phenomena in our time. It is quite natural that people talk mainly about their present and even more about their future, while groundlessly self-confident statements about their efficiency are often met with extreme skepticism, with positions that are essentially nihilistic: exact methods will never be able to cope with this or that problem... However, in conversations and polemics, the fact is constantly ignored that the vigorous modern development of exact methods is not a unique phenomenon in the history of aesthetics, as some of its advocates try to suggest. Aesthetics experienced, and not so long ago, a hardly less vigorous fascination with the search for exact methods for describing the work of art, the creative and perceptual process, and the development of art. And although the two periods differ from each other in a number of essential features, interesting analogies with useful, orienting conclusions can be drawn between them.

"Galileo of modern aesthetics!" (A. Richards), "a seer, a teacher who sheds light on life" (J. Mackail), the founder of many modern artistic and literary trends... For our reader, these definitions of the English romantic poet S. T. Coleridge sound strange and lofty. Some bourgeois literary critics also accept that they are lofty, but what is their subtext, what is the reason for bourgeois literary criticism's fascination with Coleridge, and whether he can only be a "progenitor" of the Neoplatonists, the intuitionists, the Freudians, the "stream of consciousness" - this is still a question that Marxist literary criticism has not answered exhaustively.

In his "Prolegomena ad Homerum" published in 1795, Friedrich Wolff, while denying the sole authorship of the "Iliad", notes that in this form the poem is unfinished and that it could be continued with a description of the subsequent events of the "Trojan cycle". Among the many protests and objections that met this idea, Hegel's rebuff was particularly sharp and categorical: "Then... the third question arises about the unity of the completeness of the epic work. I have already pointed out that this thesis becomes very important, since in recent times the notion has begun to be considered permissible that the epic can be arbitrarily completed or continue to develop further, as long as it pleases. Although this view is supported by sound-minded scholars-researchers, e.g. F. A. Wolf, it remains crude and barbaric, since this view actually amounts to denying the best epic poems the true properties of works of art" (Hegel's quote). One hundred and fifty years later, in his study "The Origin of the Novel-Epic," A. V. Chicherin 3 argued that works belonging to the great epic types (e.g., Tolstoy's "War and Peace") were not completed and could not be completed, since the wide scope of artistic reality, the large number of characters, the large number of problems

In the concluding part of his study "The Birth of the Poetic Work," Jean-Paul Weber makes the following self-confident and significant declaration: "In our thematic readings there is nothing reminiscent of the rigid generalizations of psychoanalysts or stylists, of their Oedipus complexes, oral, anal, and genital stages, or of their baroque, classical, romantic, and so on styles."1 Self-confident because, as we will see below, Weber's results differ little from the Freudian ones and because the positive aspects of the "stylists'" concepts are also lightly rejected. Significant because a representative of the latest bourgeois literary criticism is attempting to break with, or at least declaring that he wants to break with, the two most characteristic trends in art and literary criticism's non-historicism in the first half of our century. The stylistism of the formalists and "philologists" and psychologism with all its orthodox and schismatic tendencies are the two poles between which the many nuances of this non-historicism move. What polarizes them is the stylists' transcendence of artistic development beyond the will and peculiarities of the creative personality and the psychoanalysts' complete closure of the determining factors of development within the individual or "collective subconscious." And what connects them is the isolation of artistic development from the class-economic and ideological development of society. In this environment, the French literary critic and psychologist Jean-Paul Weber announced that he had achieved an approach that overcomes the limitations of both stylists and psychoanalysts.