The theory of objective beauty in Soviet aesthetics

Abstract

Beauty, as an aesthetic category until roughly the ‘thaw’ period in Soviet aesthetics, was seldom treated epistemologically. While reading the pre-Stalinist works on beauty, one has a feeling that the nature and the validity of knowing beauty has been proscribed from Soviet aesthetics. One looks in vain for the psychological definition of beauty and for a theory construed from the standpoint of awareness of those qualities or relations of objects which impinge upon man’s sensory processes, or from the standpoint of ascription by an individual of his own experiences to an outside external reality. Beauty was simply recognized as existent, and no psychological probing or verification of man’s knowledge of beauty was attempted. Its objective existence was assumed to be confirmed by the classics of Marxist ideology and, therefore, all that Soviet aestheticians were to do was to illustrate the correctness of such confirmation. It was also assumed that the objective existence of beauty in reality was tantamount to the objective existence of physical reality, and hence any inclination to doubt one meant doubting the other.