Individual Human Being and Happiness are the Key Points of G. D. Gachev's Theory of Art

Abstract

Article deals with the basis of G. D. Gachev's theory of art that is subjective, personal, individual as generative source of thought in contrast to the well-known model of the impersonal cultural text what entered into late Soviet humanities and still influencing models of the history of culture. Gachev's theory of art begins with the individual itself and comes to it as the highest harmony. Individual human being and happiness are the basic concepts of Gachev's theory of art; in the concepts he considered the whole development of aesthetic thought. The personality of researcher and his artistic intuition are the key to his theories. Main attention is paid to Gachev's understanding of thought in statu nascendi, its emergence under the influence of artistic worlds and its correspondence to them. The connection between Gachev's ideas and the various traditions of understanding the problem of the origin of the work of art in the 1920s — 1930s and 1950s (Jacob Levy Moreno, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer) is investigated. The article examines the problem of the work of art in statu nascendi and (in contrast) in extraction from the origin which is the reification of the work of art. Gachev studied national images of the World in statu nascendi and the movement of different cultures towards a whole final, that he called the “inevitable,” which gives him grounds to coin a theory of accelerated development. Gachev's thought evolved in dialogue with his potential reader and showed connection between theory and everyday life.