상징주의의 생예술 이념 (2): 뱌체슬라프 이바노프

The Idea of Symbolist Lifecreation (2): Vyacheslav Ivanov

Vyacheslav Ivanov found his theory of the theurgic art (теургия) as the idea of “lifecreation” (жизнетворчество) which was fully saturated with the aesthetics of Vladimir Solovyov who advocated the art and the concept of beauty as the highest cultural categories among human activities. Ivanov elaborated the conception about the aesthetic reality as the second, the higher and idealistic reality which represented the younger generation of the Russian symbolism, bringing Solovyov’s thesis of the metamorphosis of the reality by the art, and developed the idea of “theurgic symbolism” (теургический символизм) which conceptualized the creation of life by the artistic creation. In his theory Ivanov presented the complete unity of the life and the art and set up the most completed type of lifecreation theory. The concept of the theurgic art of Ivanov was already implied in the basic poetic principle of the Russian symbolism, the principle of “correspondences” (соответствия). The symbolist premise of “correspondences” between the noumenon and the phenomena, the substance and the signs, naturally could lead to the art that should make possible the unification of the reality and the ideal, the life and the art. The theurgic symbolism was expected to convert the higher, idealistic idea into the reality through the process of the artistic creation which embodied the ideal in the material. On this premise of “correspondences” Vyacheslav Ivanov introduced the Dionysian consciousness of ecstasy which was adapted by Nietzsche and developed the artistic forms of uniting the life and the art. He called them “the mystery” (мистерия) and “the theater of communion” (театр соборности), in which the consciousness of ecstasy that would not differentiate the subject and the recipient in the process of the artistic creation was supposed to destroy the barrier between the artistic illusion and the life and to allow the artistic reality to substitute the life. But in this point of the completion of lifecreating, the mystery fell into the art of ‘usurpation’, the art of ‘switch’ (подмена). The conception of the second, the higher and the more beautiful artistic reality which could substitute for the life is nothing but the deception. The theater of the mystery which was expected to produce the complete unity, the complete identification of the substance and the sign in the mytholozing consciousness, on the contrary, demanding “the marginal semioticity”, the subjective conditionality, creates the illusion of the ‘pseudo-reality’ which is confined in the separated consciousness of the recipient. The theurgic art of Ivanov implied the danger of transferring the art into the religion, moreover, the danger of eliminating the art itself. In this Ivanov’s utopian art was overturned into the anti-utopian art that could threaten the life itself.