Authors
- Golovko Vyacheslav M. Doctor of Philology, Professor Russian Federation Stavropol
Annotation
This article, drawing on data from V. M. Garshin’s metapoetic text, examines the writer’s interpretation of the criteria and attributes of artistry that characterize the quality
of an aesthetically perfect work of art. This Russian classic’s metapoetics is examined from a literary perspective: the analysis utilizes a «second-order» text embodying
the writer’s aesthetic reflection on the nature of classical exemplary works of art. The self-interpretation of his own work and the works of other creators of aesthetic values is naturally supplemented by texts relating to the writer’s ongoing literary career, primarily the memoirs of his contemporaries, which convey V. M. Garshin’s thoughts, ideas, formulations, and language on the phenomenon of artistry and the aesthetic requirements that «high works of art» must meet. The analysis revealed that Garshin examines the phenomenon of artistry in two aspects: from the perspective of artistic criteria and from the perspective of the aesthetic forms of their creative objectification. Viewing artistry as a high degree of mastery in the embodiment of «beauty, simplicity, and truth», Garshin emphasized the following as key parameters of artistry: the presence of an original «thought» and an authorial philosophy; the embodiment of life’s «highest truth» in art; the dialectic of «richness of content» and «poetic skill», «skillful technique»; the integrity of the work of art; and the individuality of the writer’s creative style (Contemporaries…, 1977, с. 192, 180; Garshin, 1955, с. 331, 336; Zhurakovsky, 1903). Garshin’s self-interpretation of his work demonstrates that the criterion of «highest truth» is achieved through the writer’s recreation of artistic reality as a conventional reality: its image is created on a prototypical basis, resulting from the author’s «living» of his characters’ lives and a level of creative generalization that makes the depicted «truthier» than empirical life itself. Studying Garshin’s metapoetic text, his understanding and interpretation of the «laws of art», allows us to estab ish correlations between the philosophical and aesthetic ideal of the era and the writer’s creative intentions, enriches classical aesthetics, and contributes to the improvement of methodology and methods of study in the field of historical and theoretical poetics.
How to link insert
Golovko, V. M. (2026). CRITERIA OF ARTISTRY IN THE AESTHETIC REFLECTION OF V. M. GARSHIN Bulletin of the Moscow City Pedagogical University. Series "Pedagogy and Psychology", 2 (62), 28. https://doi.org/10.24412/2076-913X-2026-262-28-47
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