The Struggle for Beauty in E.M. Bespiatov’s Philosophy of Theatre

Abstract

The article reviews the heritage of E. M. Bespiatov, a little-known Russian playwright and philosopher of theatre. The author investigates the biography of Bespiatov, defines roots of his ideas, reviews the first literary essays, and analyses philosophical positions of characters in the main Bespiatov’s play “Swan-Song”. The author considers separately a polemic article of the thinker “Tolstoy’s Paradoxes on Shakespeare” where Bespiatov opposes Tolstoy’s doctrines on art as on “maid of moral” to free spiritual endeavor of Shakespeare. The great attention is paid to the examination of his philosophy of theatre in which he tried to create his own philosophic-theatrical terminology; also, the conception of three stages of theatrical development (theatre-pageant, theatre-school, and theatre-art) is reviewed. The author gives a short characteristic of artistic ways which Bespiatov proposes for the negotiation of crisis in art — the elicitation of a spiritual philosophical point from everyday life and the “skeletisation” of everyday life elements. The work “Elements of scientific psychology in theatrical art…” where there are two main principles of Bespiatov’s philosophy of theatre — 1) an actor is a creator of theatre and 2) theatre is separate art and independent from other arts — is also reviewed. It is supposed that a key element of his philosophy of theatre is a term “Beauty” which was developed both in dramas (“Swan-Song”) and in theoretical articles (“The Evolution of the idea of Theatre”, “Prolegomena about Beauty” and others). The author points out that Bespiatov’s reflections on Beauty are very similar to the philosophical aesthetics of V. S. Solovev and have it as its source. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that there is a fundamental character of connection between an actor and the divine Beauty that is possible thanks to the specificity of the actor’s art.