Afanasy Fet’s essays “From the Village” and Pavel Medvedev’s article “Dreams and Reality”: to the history of polemics

Abstract

This article meticulously analyzes the views of the representative of aesthetic school and school of democratic poetry of the Russian literature of the XIX century upon the designation of art and science. The essays “From the Village” by A. A. Fet, which depict the poet’s outlook upon the role and tasks of poetry, science, and art as a whole, serve as the materials for this research. Opinion of the opponents from democratic school is demonstrated on the example of the article “Dreams and Reality” by the author of the satirical magazine “Iskra” Pavel Medvedev. The article examines polemical dialogue between the two schools, analyzes and compares the arguments provided by its representatives. The article describes various mechanisms that allow using aesthetic beliefs as the foundation for creating a parodistically distorted personality and as a method for exposing the true views. The cycle by P. A. Medvedev “Dreams and Reality”, which combines the attributes of satirical parody and satire itself, was created as an instrument that is able to discredit publicizing of A. A. Fet in his essays “From the Village”, and thus unveil not only his aesthetic, but also sociopolitical position, ideology of the right-winger and advocate of serfdom. The parodist was trying to achieve such effect solely through interpretation and commenting of the statements of A. A. Fet himself.