A guide to the artistic reality
Russkaya literatura XX veka: ucheb. posobie: V 2 ch. 2nd ed., corr. and comp. /
Ed. by T. A. Nikonova. Voronezh: Izd-vo VGU, 2016. Ch. 1: Chelovek
i khudozhestvennaya real’nost’ v literature 1890–1940-kh godov. 484 p.
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The analysis evaluates not only the concept of the history of the literature presented in the
textbook, with the Silver age and 1920–1930s considered, but also the proposed principles
of material selection (directions and authors), correspondence between facts and interpretation
of the literary text. The authors of the book proceed from the tradition of examining the literary
process in connection with sociocultural and historical events. Special attention is paid to the
change of mentality – formation of the non-classical worldview and its influence on the aesthetics,
ethics, and the prospects of maintaining national cultural tradition. Half a century of a literary
history reveals a search for the new supporting coordinates and transformation of the Russian
idealism in its claims for the universal prevalence.
The literary process is shown in the light of the aesthetic universals – models of ontological
and value-based self-consciousness of a person. These are the universals of culture (second sensegenerating
reality), time (driving energy), animated life (all-encompassing process, indisputable
force, demanding uninterrupted self-renewal). A historical succession of different eras manifests
itself in the maturation of the national philosophy of life – force of nature, waves of history, and
persistent epic origin. The delivery of the material combines conceptual chapters reviewing the
directions (central cultural tendencies, Russian symbolism, Acmeism, Russian futurism, neorealism,
emigration, dynamics of the revolutionary literature in the 1920s and 1930s) and creative
portraits of their representatives – poets, writers, and playwrights. The methodology of unravelling
the literary process combines humanistic literary studies with aesthetic analysis of artistic
systems. It is expressed in the subtitle of the textbook – «A man and the artistic reality». Writer’s
plights (I. Bunin, A Kuprin, A. Tolstoy, M. Gorky, M. Sholokhov, A. Platonov, M. Bulgakov) are
viewed not from the point of ideology (or conjuncture), but from the point of authors’ ideals, so
the literary history is presented as a personified tragedy. A remarkable quality of the textbook is
its lively, emotional, scientific, expressive, and contagious mode of thinking-deliberation on literature.