Art criticism self-definition of Russian formalists

Abstract

The article considers the limits of self-definition of Russian formalist philologists as art researchers. It is demonstrated that formalism was in a state of double crisis: the crisis of ambitions of symbolism and the crisis of positivist art criticism. The crisis of symbolism forced the formalists to look for a new positivist code to substantiate their work, while the crisis of positivism itself required the use of particular aesthetic narratives. The era of general aesthetics came, which evolved from a project in the vein of B. Croce into a shared self-definition of art as probing the gap between the possible and the actual. Formalism, with its pathos of the reality of the word, could not entirely renounce the domain of the possible, which was conceptualized as the core aesthetic sphere, including the production of personal reactions to what was happening. Only the contextualization of formalism within the linguistic turn, drawing on the ideas of Bakhtin and Gadamer, allows us to realize the input of the movement not only to the methods of certain humanities, but also to the specification of art in the 20th century.