The Idea of the “Creative Form” in the Aesthetics of the Russian Avant-garde of the 1920s

Abstract

The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s was a time of a utopian thinking crisis in theoretical aesthetics and in art. The utopianism of the avant-garde project consisted in the impracticability of the mission of art to totally transform reality and man through aesthetic means. The key idea of the avant-garde aesthetic concepts was the effectiveness of the creative form building the integrity of the life creative matter. The concept of the “creative form” was developed in different directions: from the concept of a single style in all spheres of life and the theory of synthesis of arts to the aesthetics of functionally appropriate forms of the objective environment. The symbolic language of style was a universal aesthetic translation of metaphysical ideas into sensual ontological image of the wholeness of being; synthesis of arts was seen as a means of expressing the initial wholeness of cosmic being; and a functionally appropriate form of the objective environment was understood as a means of direct involvement of man, spontaneously causing his active creative response. The utopianism of the idea of the “creative form” determined its rapid demise, which had a complex of philosophical, social, political and human reasons. The major of them included the totality of the wholeness project, the undervaluation of the individual artistic subject’s creative freedom, the rejection of a substantial spiritual and value-based interpretation of culture, the hope that the aesthetic influence might transform the masses into creative subjects, the narrowing of the potentialities of the utopian project by the attempt to turn it into a methodology of action, the pursuit of realization that limited the growth of its inner potential, and the undervaluation of the real conditions for its implementation.

Keywords

• creativity
• life-building
• form
• utopia
• universalism
• aesthetic
• art
• symbol