About the Sublime (Great) in Chernyshevsky’s Aesthetics

Abstract

In the contemporary scholarly discourse, aesthetic views of Nickolay G. Chernyshevsky (1828–1889) usually are observed only in the framework of the analysis of his thesis “the beautiful is life”. According to the author’s view, this approach does not fully reconstruct the main senses of the aesthetic system of the thinker, that is why the arthor of the current article reconsiders them from the perspective of the sublime (great), the original understanding of which is given by the Russian thinker. Our key points of discrepancy with the previous aesthetic ‘prevailingׄ’ systems and the specific Chernyshevsky’s improvements are explicitly shown. The thesis about the levelling of the role of imagination ability is interpreted as a core characteristic of his aesthetics. The author resolves two historical and philosophical issues: which of the previous aesthetic systems were criticized by Chernyshevsky? On which tradition does the thinker based his theory? Giving answers to these particular questions, the author criticizes the Chernyshevsky’s argumentation, submitting a thesis that his original definition of the sublime (great) has only a formal similarity with the Kantian definition. By coming down the role of imagination to the reproduction Chernyshevsky necessarily comes to the notion of ‘great’, which is based on comparison with the nearby objects (phenomena) but not on the clash of the cognitive abilities of a human, the infinite with the finite.