Границы реализма: к проблеме терминологии

Abstract

The major objective of this publication is to trace the formation of the term “realism” both in the plastic arts and European artistic culture in general. The need for such an analysis is determined by the current terminology applied to various phenomena in the history of European art, which results in a large degree of ambiguity with respect to the conceptual range. Although the origins of the concept “realism” date back to the scholastic religious philosophy of the Middle Ages, its application in Art Studies has entirely different backgrounds and can actually be traced back to the middle of the 19th century. As far as the Western European art is concerned, this concept is first used with respect to the artistic works by Courbet. In the history of the Russian Art in general and art criticism in particular, the term is commonly used with reference to the emergence and development of the “Natural School” literary movement.
 At the same time, a thorough analysis of, inter alia, the epistolary and artistic-critical legacy of the leading figures of the Russian culture in the middle and the second half of the 19th century, such as Belinsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Stasov, and others, explicitly reveals a rather early application of this term, but mainly in the field of literary rather than artistic criticism. This situation can be explained by the total predominance of literary centrism in the 19th century Russian Art, which, in its turn, was determined by the specific aspects of our country’s social and political development. The explicit translation of this concept into the plastic arts domain was at the same time associated with the use of terminological qualifiers such as “critical”, “didactic”, and “socialist” with respect to the word realism, which resulted in even greater conceptual ambiguity. There is no doubt that the analysis of historical formation and that of characteristics of the figurative-plastic system of realism as a creative method should finally be subject to a comprehensive review, which can allow avoiding its excessively broad terminological interpretation.