On the essence of poetic creativity in the understanding of V. Solovyov and Yu.N. Govorukha-Otrok

Zakharova Elizaveta Mikhailovna ORCID: 0000-0002-2087-6072 PhD in Philology Researcher, Maxim Gorky Institute of World Literature 121069, Russia, Moskva oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Povarskaya, 25 a Elizakharova2019@gmail.com Other publications by this author

The research was carried out at the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences with the financial support of the Russian Science Foundation (RNF, project No. 23-28-00800). The research was carried out at the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IWL RAS) funded by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (RSF, Project No. 23-28-00800).

The origins of the philosophical method of literary criticism

"What does V.S. Solovyov teach?", - such an ironic title in its mode is one of the articles by Yu.N. Govorukha-Otrok (1851-1896), where the topic was the analysis of the journalistic and philosophical creativity of V.S. Solovyov (1853-1900). Belonging to the same generation, engaging in literary criticism, and adherence to the philosophical method could not have a rapprochement effect on the relationship between the two authors. On the contrary, it was precisely the intersection of interests (ontological, religious and state issues, the ideological basis of Russian classical art, new trends in poetry) that led to new episodes of printed polemics. So, the name of Solovyov in the two-volume collection of works by the Talker-Boy "What did Russian writers believe in?" occurs more than fifty times.

The purpose of this work is to identify and analyze the views of Solovyov and Govorukha–Otrok as representatives of philosophical criticism on the essence of poetic creativity based on the material of works on the lyrics of A.A. Fet. Paradoxical today seems to be the simultaneous attention to "pure poetry" on the part of largely polar critics. After all, this period was marked by a significant drop in general interest not only in Fet's work (the circulation of the collection "Evening Lights" was not sold out completely, and the poet's admirers were becoming fewer), but also in lyrics in general. The origins of the identical attention of Solovyov and Govorukha-Otrok are determined by many factors: for example, both personally knew Fet-Shenshin. But the underlying reason is determined primarily by the similarity of critics' views on the method of understanding literary works and the essence of poetic creativity.

About the essence and content of lyrical poetry

The emergence as a separate and independent field of Russian philosophy, where the common feature was an appeal to L.N. Tolstoy and F.M. Dostoevsky, begins with the name of Solovyov, who began "to write not about what Western thinkers think, but about those subjects that they also think about, giving their point about them vision" ^{[5, p. 767]}. Unlike literary sociology, which had exhausted itself by the end of the 19th century, the interest of philosophical criticism was not even in the poetics of the utterance, but in its meaning, in the fate of ideas, not in the author's style, but in the author's position; the philosopher-commentator is convinced that an artistic work is an aesthetic self-disclosure of history in culture. Therefore, the conversation about the text was both a discussion of the leading problems of the century and a dialogue around eternal values ^{[2, p. 9]}.

Fundamentally new in Solovyov's views on art was what would later be called theurgy. In this approach, art is defined as a source of transformation: the artist is obliged to change being through his creativity. In this regard, poetry appears "as the embodiment of the objective beauty of the world and the human soul," which determines the value and "aesthetic approach to evaluating literary creativity, expressed in a number of articles about Russian poets of the 60-90s of the XIX century." ^{[6, p. 30]}.

Researchers, relying on the combination of cross-cutting motives linking the articles, as well as on the common position of the author in them, divide Solovyov's literary and critical works about Russian poets into two cycles. The first is devoted to the period of the Silver Age, the second is focused on revealing the motif of fate in the works of A.S. Pushkin, M.Y. Lermontov, A.B. Mickiewicz and other authors of the XIX century. One of the most important features of Solovyov's literary criticism is the emphasis on the artist's self-reflection.

First of all, attention is paid to the poet's worldview, and the works are evaluated by how lyrical the form and content are. He defined his task in analyzing a work of art as follows: "to disassemble and show what exactly from the fullness of the universal meaning, which elements of it, which sides or manifestations of truth especially captured the soul of the poet and are mainly expressed by him in artistic images and sounds. The critic must "reveal the deepest roots" of this poet's creativity not from the side of his mental motives – this is more the business of a biographer and literary historian - but mainly from the side of the objective foundations of this creativity, or its ideological content" ^{[6, p. 530]}. Thus, poetic activity was asserted "as a beautiful object, representing in one form or another the truth of life or the meaning of the world" ^{[6, p. 533]}.

The article "On lyrical poetry. About the last poems of Fet and Polonsky" was written by Solovyov in 1890 and published in the magazine "Russian Review" in connection with the release of the fourth lifetime collection of A.A. Fet "Evening Lights" and a collection of poems by Y.P. Polonsky "Evening Bell". This literary and critical statement can be called programmatic in Solovyov's aesthetic concept. The text reveals the questions of what is the subject of the lyrical image, what is the purpose of lyrics as an activity of the human soul, into which groups all poets can be divided.

The central idea in the analyzed article is related to the juxtaposition of fake poetry and "from inspiration". Only the latter has a "fusion of content and verbal expression" ^{[6, p. 402]}. According to Solovyov, "the true source of poetry, like all art, is not in external manifestations, and also not in the subjective mind of the artist, but in the original world of eternal ideas, or primordial images" ^{[6, p. 492]}. The external beauty of a lyrical work is a consequence of deep beauty. It is poetry, not music, that Solovyov calls the highest kind of art, which contains "elements of all other arts. A true poet puts musical sounds, colors, and plastic forms into his word inseparably with its inner meaning" ^{[6, p. 533]}.

The lack of direct analysis of Fet's poetic texts is made up for by an abundance of axioms and programmatic theses: "The subject of a poetic image may not be the mental states experienced at the moment, but experienced and imagined" ^{[6, p. 399]}; "In order to reproduce his mental states in a poem, the poet must not just experience them, but experience them precisely as a lyrical poet" ^{[6, p. 400]}; "These two themes: the eternal beauty of nature and the infinite power of love - and constitute the main content of pure lyrics" ^{[6, p. 412]}.

"To see beauty is the work of poetry"

Govorukha's commitment to the views of conservative criticism, diverse in its composition, and the profession of Orthodox Orthodoxy, from the point of view of O.A. Goncharova, determined the writer's attitude to art and his position among contemporary schools and trends. The researcher claims that the critic was "the founder of a new direction in literary criticism – the Christian aesthetic" ^{[4, pp. 47-49]}. In the works of the Talker-Boy, one can see that for him the most important factor in understanding a literary work was the predominance of the "spiritual principle over the momentary, everyday" in the artist's work. <...> He considered following the Christian mood and artistic reflection of Christian ideals to be the strong side of the writer, deviation from them to be weak" ^{[4, pp. 47-49]}. The critic's views on art largely continued the tradition outlined by A.S. Khomyakov, I.V. Kireevsky, K.S. Aksakov and other Slavophiles.

The combination of such ideological systems as pochvennichestvo, Slavophilism, Christianity, and conservatism formed the originality of the views of Govorukha the Boy and had a decisive impact on his literary and critical activities. He evaluated art based on Christian teaching, and considered the task of literary criticism to be the discovery of meaning in a work that is significant "in the spiritual life of an individual and society as a whole" ^{[3, vol. 1, p. 52]}.

Referring to the words of N.N. Strakhov that criticism "has some philosophical reasoning," the Talker-Boy asserts: "an artistic work is a kind of small world, <...> the task of criticism is to discover, to reveal the meaning of this world, as the task of a philosopher is to discover, to reveal the meaning of the universe" ^{[3, vol. 1, p. 739]}.

The series of articles by the Talker-Boy about Feta can be considered an exception, since poetic works rarely became the object of attention of a literary critic. In addition, the researchers emphasize that "the articles of the Talker-Boy about Feta can be called one of the first attempts to seriously talk about the significance of the work of this major poet of the second half of the XIX century" ^{[3, vol. 1, p. 552]}. In many ways, this phenomenon is explained by the ideological and spiritual connection of writers. So, in a letter to the poet K.R. on January 10, 1892, Fet confessed: "At present, he is the most convinced adherent of autocracy and Orthodoxy and, I add, also the most sensitive and thoughtful critic. I have known Govorukha for two years, and despite the fact that I am far from being on the friendly footing with him that I was with Turgenev, Tolstoy, etc., I have never had to disagree with him on abstract or practical issues" ^{[1, p. 941]}. When comparing Solovyov's work on Feta with the articles of Govorukha the Boy, the similarity becomes obvious: the analysis of poetic texts and the identification of lyrical tools are replaced by both critics with generalizing conclusions of programmatic significance. For the Talker-Boy, the poetic text has an intrinsic value, which can explain the quotations, which in most cases have not been abbreviated. But the following theses should be recognized as more indicative in the framework of this study: "the source of poetry is not in the outside world, but in the human soul" ^{[6, p. 555]}; "Only in poetry does reality reveal its true essence, i.e. it is transformed. This true essence of reality is beauty, the primordial beauty of the world and man created by the Creator, and obscured in the fallen, sin-laden human soul" ^{[6, p. 558]}; "poetry is an epiphany "from time to eternity", the poet sees "from time to eternity" and, finding this eternal in his soul, finds it in all phenomena of nature and life" ^{[6, p. 560]}.

The Talker-Boy calls the lyrics of Fet a stopped moment, since it is in it that the elusive feelings and movements of the soul find their word. Therefore, it seems paradoxical to conclude about the source of this not material, but focused on the "inexpressible" poetry: "Its source is in the same place where the source of poetry of Turgenev, L. Tolstoy, is in that warehouse of ancient lordly life, which has already died and revived only in the works of our poets, where the poetry of this life is transmitted, i.e. that the eternal that was in him" ^{[6, p. 573]}.

The absolute acceptance of Fet's lyrics, the Talker-Boy, for his part, explains there that truth, simplicity and beauty are harmoniously combined here, And besides, by the fact that "in Fet's poetry (I do not take into account his various random poems) there is not a single false, that is, unethical note. Nothing can be taken away from this poetry, and nothing can be added to it: everything is harmonious there, there are no traces of a struggle with some kind of preconceived idea, with some kind of non-ethical trend that has taken hold of the poet. As a poet, he was always equal to himself and confidently followed his poetic path" ^{[6, p. 583]}.

Philosophical criticism of the essence of poetic creativity

Turning to the legacy of the Talker Boy shows that engaging in literary criticism seemed to him a more important mission than an isolated examination of the merits and disadvantages of a work, than a painstaking analysis of the text. The author's attention was mainly focused around the idea of the work and those useful thoughts that the reader can extract for himself. It was also important for the critic how the author's personality is revealed on the pages of the world he created. According to Solovyov, "artistic activity ... serves the common life purpose of mankind" ^{[6, p. 95]}. It is at the moment of creative realization that the personality carries out the most "penetration into the divine reality" ^{[6, p. 283]}. The key to success in this immersion was called human subordination of "thoughts and actions to moral dictates" ^{[6, p. 283]}. Moreover, Solovyov insists that art is not free from ethical categories: "Goodness, separated from truth and beauty, is only an indefinite feeling, an impotent impulse, abstract truth is empty

the word, and beauty without goodness and truth is an idol" ^{[6, p. 76]}.

The Talker-Boy evaluated art based on Christian teaching. Solovyov's theoretical arguments about poetry are characterized by universalism: in an effort to provide an exhaustive analysis, the critic relies on data from both humanitarian knowledge (psychology, philosophy, theology, aesthetics) and natural sciences. In a generalized form, it can be said that Solovyov's critical method consists in "the sacralization of poetry as the highest, divine kind of art", as well as "a high level of moral and aesthetic requirements of the critic to the poet" ^{[6, p. 35]}. If we limit ourselves to at least this set of facts, and also trace exactly what is the essence of the approaches to texts on the part of Govorukha-Otrok and V. Solovyov, then the uniformity of methods will become clear. Here, journalism and passion are combined with a mandatory focus on social impact. But if for the Talker-Boy the main point of support in literary and critical judgments is religion, then for V. Solovyov it is history. The main unifying feature is the practical orientation of philosophical research. The identity is also found in the conceptual definition of the purpose of poetry and the essence of creativity as a whole. Only the spiritual and eternal, according to writers, can be both a source and an object of poetic understanding. For both critics, the poet appears, if not a sacred, then an exceptional figure. However, for the Talker-Boy, it is the religious character of the poetic mood that is of fundamental importance. Vladimir Solovyov, a younger contemporary of Govorukha the Boy, can paradoxically be considered a teacher of criticism in philosophical criticism. Thus, it can be argued that the basis of many years of journal polemics on numerous issues hides a deep background, which is related not only to the discrepancy in the interpretation of religious issues, but also to the antagonism of teacher and student.