The truth of life and the truth of theater. The aesthetic principles of E. Vakhtangov and his directorial style have undergone significant evolution over the 10 years of his active creative activity. From the extreme psychological naturalism of his first productions he came to the romantic symbolism of Rosmersholm. And then - to overcoming the “intimate-psychological theater”, to the expressionism of “Eric XIV”, to the “puppet grotesque” of the second edition of “The Miracle of St. Anthony” and to the open theatricality of “Princess Turandot”, called by one critic “critical impressionism”. The most amazing thing in Vakhtangov’s evolution, according to P. Markov, is the organic nature of such aesthetic transitions and the fact that “all the achievements of the “left” theater, accumulated by this time and often rejected by the viewer, were willingly and enthusiastically accepted by the viewer from Vakhtangov.”
Vakhtangov often betrayed some of his ideas and hobbies, but he always purposefully moved towards a higher theatrical synthesis. Even in the extreme nakedness of "Princess Turandot" he remained faithful to the truth that he received from the hands of K.S. Stanislavsky.
Three outstanding Russian theater figures had a decisive influence on him: Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko and Sulerzhitsky. And they all understood the theater as a place of public education, as a way of learning and affirming the absolute truth of life.
Vakhtangov more than once admitted that he inherited the consciousness that an actor must become purer, a better person, if he wants to create freely and with inspiration, from L.A. Sulerzhitsky.
The decisive professional influence on Vakhtangov was, of course, Konstantin Sergeevich Stanislavsky. Vakhtangov’s life’s work was teaching the system and forming a number of young talented groups on its creative basis. He perceived the System as Truth, as Faith, which he was called to serve. Having absorbed from Stanislavsky the foundations of his system, the internal acting technique, Vakhtangov learned from Nemirovich-Danchenko to feel the acute theatricality of characters, the clarity and completeness of heightened mise-en-scenes, learned a free approach to dramatic material, and realized that in staging each play it is necessary to look for approaches that are most appropriate the essence of a given work (and not specified by any general theatrical theories from the outside).
The fundamental law of both the Moscow Art Theater and the Vakhtangov Theater has invariably been the law of internal justification, the creation of organic life on stage, the awakening in actors of the living truth of human feeling.
During the first period of his work at the Moscow Art Theater, Vakhtangov acted as an actor and teacher. On the stage of the Moscow Art Theater he played mainly episodic roles - Guitarist in "The Living Corpse", Beggar in "Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich", Officer in "Woe from Wit", Gourmet in "Stavrogin", Courtier in "Hamlet", Sugar in " Blue Bird." More significant stage images were created by him in the First Studio - Tackleton in "The Cricket on the Stove", Frazer in "The Flood", Dantier in "The Death of Hope". Critics unanimously noted the extreme economy of funds, modest expressiveness and laconicism of these acting works, in which the actor was looking for means of theatrical expressiveness, trying to create not an everyday character, but a certain generalized theatrical type.
At the same time, Vakhtangov tried his hand at directing. His first directorial work at the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theater was Hauptmann's "Feast of Peace" (premiere November 15, 1913).
On March 26, 1914, another directorial premiere of Vakhtangov took place - “The Panin Estate” by B. Zaitsev at the Student Drama Studio (future Mansurovskaya).
Both performances were made during the period of Vakhtangov’s maximum passion for the so-called truth of life on stage. The severity of psychological naturalism in these performances was taken to the limit. In the notebooks that the director kept at that time, there are many discussions about the tasks of the final expulsion from the theater - the theater, from the play of the actor, about the oblivion of stage makeup and costume. Fearing common craft cliches, Vakhtangov almost completely denied any external skill and believed that external techniques (which he called “devices”) should arise in the actor by themselves, as a result of the correctness of his inner life on stage, from the very truth of his feelings.
As a zealous student of Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov called for the highest naturalness and naturalness of the actors’ feelings during a stage performance. However, having staged the most consistent performance of “spiritual naturalism”, in which the principle of “peeping through a crack” was brought to its logical conclusion, Vakhtangov soon began to talk more and more often about the need to search for new theatrical forms, that everyday theater must die, that the play is only a pretext for the idea that it is necessary to once and for all remove the possibility of spying from the viewer, to end the gap between the internal and external technique of the actor, to discover “new forms of expressing the truth of life in the truth of the theater.”
Such views of Vakhtangov, which he gradually tested in a variety of theatrical practice, somewhat contradicted the beliefs and aspirations of his great teachers. However, his criticism of the Moscow Art Theater did not at all mean a complete rejection of the creative foundations Art Theater. Vakhtangov did not change the range of vital material that Stanislavsky also used. The position and attitude towards this material has changed. Vakhtangov, like Stanislavsky, had “nothing far-fetched, nothing that could not be justified, that could not be explained,” asserted Mikhail Chekhov, who knew both directors well and highly appreciated them.
Vakhtangov brought everyday truth to the level of mystery, believing that the so-called life truth on stage should be presented theatrically, with the maximum degree of impact. This is impossible until the actor understands the nature of theatricality and perfectly masters his external technique, rhythm, and plasticity.
Vakhtangov began his own path to theatricality, coming not from the fashion for theatricality, not from the influences of Meyerhold, Tairov or Komissarzhevsky, but from his own understanding of the essence of the truth of theater. Vakhtangov led his path to genuine theatricality through the stylization of “Eric XIV” to the extreme game forms"Turandot". The famous theater critic Pavel Markov aptly called this process of development of Vakhtangov’s aesthetics the process of “sharpening the technique.”
Already Vakhtangov’s second production at the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theater, “The Deluge” (premiere on December 14, 1915), was significantly different from “Feast of Peace.” No hysterics, no extremely naked feelings. As critics noted: “What’s new in The Flood is that the viewer always feels theatrical.”
Vakhtangov's third performance at the Studio - "Rosmersholm" by G. Ibsen (premiere on April 26, 1918) was also marked by the features of a compromise between the truth of life and the conventional truth of the theater. The director’s goal in this production was not the previous expulsion of the actor from the theater, but, on the contrary, declared the search for the ultimate self-expression of the actor’s personality on stage. The director did not strive for the illusion of life, but tried to convey on stage the very train of thought of Ibsen’s characters, to embody “pure” thought on stage. In Rosmersholm, for the first time, with the help of symbolic means, the gap between the actor and the character he plays, typical of Vakhtangov’s work, was clearly outlined. The director no longer demanded from the actor the ability to become “a member of the Scholz family” (as in “Feast of Peace”). It was enough for the actor to believe, to be seduced by the thought of being in the conditions of his hero’s existence, to understand the logic of the steps described by the author. And at the same time remain yourself.
Starting with “Eric XIV” by A. Strindberg (premiere on January 29, 1921), Vakhtangov’s directorial style became more and more defined, his tendency to “sharpen his technique”, to combine the incompatible - deep psychologism with puppet expressiveness, the grotesque with lyricism, was maximally manifested. Vakhtangov's constructions were increasingly based on conflict, on the opposition of two disparate principles, two worlds - the world of good and the world of evil. In "Eric XIY" all of Vakhtangov's previous passions for the truth of feelings were combined with a new search for a generalizing theatricality capable of expressing on stage the "art of experiencing" with maximum completeness. First of all, it was the principle of stage conflict, bringing two realities, two “truths” onto the stage: everyday, life truth and generalized, abstract, symbolic truth. The actor on stage began not only to “experience”, but also to act theatrically, conventionally. In “Eric XIV,” the relationship between the actor and the character he plays changed significantly in comparison with “The Feast of Peace.” An external detail, an element of makeup, a gait (the shuffling steps of the Birman Queen) sometimes determined the essence (grain) of the role. For the first time in Vakhtangov the principle of statuesqueness and fixedness of characters appeared in such definiteness. Vakhtangov introduced the concept of points, so important for the emerging system of “fantastic realism”.
The principle of conflict, the opposition of two dissimilar worlds, two “truths” was then used by Vakhtangov in the productions of “The Miracle of St. Anthony” (second edition) and “Wedding” (second edition) in the Third Studio.
Calculation, self-control, the strictest and most demanding stage self-control - these are the new qualities that Vakhtangov invited the actors to cultivate in themselves while working on the second edition of The Miracle of St. Anthony. The principle of theatrical sculpture did not interfere with the organic nature of the actor’s presence in the role. According to Vakhtangov’s student A.I. Remizova, the fact that the actors suddenly “froze” in “The Miracle of St. Anthony” was felt by them as truth. This was true, but true for this performance.
The search for external, almost grotesque character was continued in the second edition of the Third Studio's play "The Wedding" (September 1921), which was performed on the same evening as "The Miracle of St. Anthony." Vakhtangov proceeded here not from an abstract search for beautiful theatricality, but from his understanding of Chekhov. In Chekhov's stories: funny, funny, and then suddenly sad. This kind of tragicomic duality was close to Vakhtangov. In "The Wedding" all the characters were like dancing dolls, puppets.
In all these productions, ways of creating a special, theatrical truth of the theater were outlined, new type relationship between the actor and the image he creates.
Fantastic realism is a term applied to various phenomena in art and literature.
The creation of the term is usually attributed to Dostoevsky; however, the researcher of the writer’s work V.N. Zakharov showed that this is a fallacy. Probably the first to use the expression “fantastic realism” was Friedrich Nietzsche (1869, in relation to Shakespeare). In the 1920s, this expression was used in lectures by Evgeniy Vakhtangov; later it became established in Russian theater studies as a definition of Vakhtangov’s creative method.
It seems that “Vakhtangov’s” is a sharp transition from the golden age to the silver age, from the classical reformism of Stanislavsky to the audacity of modernity, to the restless world of retro, to a special philosophy where fantasy has greater truthfulness than reality itself. The profession of directors became the work of intellectuals; young doctors, accountants, engineers, teachers, civil servants, and girls from respectable families gathered around Vakhtangov. The theater for the intelligentsia, as Stanislavsky conceived it, became the theater of the intelligentsia itself, gathered by Vakhtangov under the banner of his studio. "Vakhtangov" is a "fearlessness" of form in any era, even when the most terrible word was the word "formalism". Being, like Stanislavsky, a director-psychologist, Vakhtangov simply looked for his goodness in something else - the psychology of the image was revealed to him in theatrical conventions, in the masks of an eternal everyday masquerade, in turning to distant theatrical forms: to the commedia dell'arte in "Princess Turandot", to mystery in "Gadibuk", to farce in Chekhov's "Wedding", to morality in "The Miracle of St. Anthony". "Vakhtangovskoe" is special artistic concept“fantastic realism”, outside of this concept there is, essentially, not a single performance by Vakhtangov, just as there are no best creations of his great spiritual brothers - Gogol, Dostoevsky, Sukhovo-Kobylin, Bulgakov.
The Vakhtangov Theater is persistently and difficultly searching for its Vakhtangov path, and may God grant it many successes along this path. Let us only remember that Vakhtangov was the first in a series of brilliant Russian directors to tell the Theater that it did not need to refuse anything, declare nothing archaic, did not need to trample on convention, and welcome only realism. Theater is everything at once: a classic text, free improvisation, the deepest acting transformation, and the ability to see the image from the outside. Theater, as Vakhtangov thought, is fundamentally “not a reflection” of a specific historical day, but a reflection of its inner, philosophical essence. Vakhtangov died to the sparkling, champagne-like waltz from his performance; he died to the applause of the Moscow public of the twenties, who stood up and greeted the modern performance, which before their eyes was acquiring the features of eternity.
"fantastic realism"- Vakhtangov began to search, starting from two opposite foundations - the Stanislavsky Art Theater (by the way, it should be noted that during Vakhtangov’s lifetime the theater was called the 3rd studio of the Moscow Art Theater) and the Meyerhold Theater. It can be said that in his performances - and one can say more specifically - in his performance "Princess Turandot" based on the fairy tale by Carlo Gozzi, the external expression of scenery and costumes (not quite the same as Vsevolod Emilevich's, but still) is combined with the psychological depth inherent productions of the Moscow Art Theater. Carnival spectacle was combined with strong inner experiences.
Vakhtangov tried to separate the actor and the image that the actor embodied. An actor could go out in ordinary clothes and talk about topical topics for the country, and then change into a fantastic outfit on stage and transform into a character in the play.
Principles of the Vakhtangov Theater.
All the techniques gave the feeling that this was a theater on one side, but not on the other. The principle of organizing the action was taken from the Theater Del Arte, for example, people who occupied the audience between scenes, strived for complete seriousness of the game and did not tolerate hypocrisy. The scene is both real and insanely conventional, i.e. (newspaper-cup). B- was for the real relationship between the two actors, the convincingness of the game itself. Stanislavsky believed that it was unnecessary to combine convention and everyday life.
The main features of the Vakhtangov Theater:
1. Theatricalization theater - theater is a holiday for both the actor and the viewer.
2. Theater is a game, a game with an object, costume details, with a partner, insert numbers that created general atmosphere: (stick like a flute).
3. Improvisation.
4. The speech was perceived as parody.
5. Lighting also creates an atmosphere
6. Music is also conventional, creating a general atmosphere or conveying an emotional state.
A theatrical, bright, festive game took place on the stage.
Vakhtangov found his actor in the person of Mikhail Chekhov, in whom he saw an ally to his ideas. Vakhtangov asserts the priority of the actor’s personality over the image he creates. When Vakhtangov wanted to try to play the main role in his play, and Chekhov played it, he realized that this was impossible, because he gave everything he had to Chekhov.
Vakhtangov's last performance Princess Turandot by C. Gozzi (1922) is still perceived as the most iconic. Turandot, for all its distance from the revolution, sounded like the “Hymn of the victorious revolution.” Vakhtangov keenly felt the poetics of play theater, its open convention, improvisation. In such a theater there is a lot from the ancient origins of the stage, folk games, square and booth shows. The game seems to charge the air of Russia in the 1920s. And the paradox is that 1921 is hungry and cold, and does not seem to be conducive to fun at all. But despite everything, people of this era are filled with a romantic mood. "Principle" open game"becomes the principle of Turandot. The play of the actor with the audience, with the theatrical image, with the mask becomes the basis of the performance. The performance is a holiday. And a holiday is a holiday because everything changes places. And Vakhtangov’s artists play a tragedy with comedic means.
Vakhtangov himself did not consider “Turandot..” a standard, since each performance is a new form of artistic expression.
Ticket number 18. Nemirovich-Danchenko about the essence of directorial and acting creativity. Ticket No. 19. The grain of the performance and the second plan.
Just in case, a little about my creative path.
N.D. 1858-1943
Born in the Caucasus into a military family.
Entered Moscow University. He was brought up in the traditions of the small theater. I was shocked by Ermolova’s performance. What inspired you to become a theater critic?
I was on tour of the Munich theater. He began to write plays: “The Price of Life.”
1896 Nominated for the Griboyedov Prize, declined in favor of Chaika.
1891 Creates Studio
He sees Stanislavsky's performance of Othello and is very impressed. While working with Stanislavsky, N_D expresses his position on the dramaturgy of the play. He believes that the actor is the heart of the theater and everything should go to help him.
It is he who invites Chekhov to the theater. He will also find Gorky.
In 1910, The Brothers Karamazov, staged Julius Caesar, Tolstoy's Resurrection 1930, 37 Anna Karekina with Tarasova, Lyubov Yarovaya, 3 Sisters and the King of Lears.
Gives stage life to novels.
; later it became established in Russian theater studies as a definition of Vakhtangov’s creative method.
Since 1948, there has been the “Vienna School of Fantastic Realism” in painting, which had a pronounced mystical and religious character, turning to timeless and eternal themes, exploration of hidden corners human soul and focused on the traditions of the German Renaissance (representatives: Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner).
Founding of the "Vienna School of Fantastic Realism"
Together with Arik Brauer, Wolfgang Hutter, Rudolf Hausner and Anton Lemden, Ernst Fuchs founded a school, or rather created a new style. Fantastic realism" Its rapid development occurred in the early 60s of the 20th century. Its five brightest representatives Fuchs, Brouwer, Lemden, Hausner and Hutter became the main group of the entire future movement, soon Klarwein, Escher, Jofra appeared, each bringing their own manner and method of work from their national schools. Paetz, Helnwein, Heckelman and Wahl, Odd Nerdrum also formed part of the general movement. Giger worked in Switzerland.
Contemporary Russian literature
Nowadays, the concept of “fantastic realism” is actively promoted by Vyach. Sun. Ivanov and Viktor Ulin, although in this case it is more of a retrospective manifesto.
Related styles
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Literature
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See what “Fantastic realism” is in other dictionaries:
FANTASTIC REALISM, artistic trends akin to magical realism (see MAGICAL REALISM), including more surreal, supernatural motifs. Close to surrealism (see SURREALISM), but unlike the latter it is stricter... ... encyclopedic Dictionary
Artistic trends akin to magical realism, including more surreal, supernatural motifs. Close to surrealism, but unlike the latter, it adheres more strictly to the principles of the traditional easel image in the spirit of the old... ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary
SOCIALIST REALISM - creative method socialist claim, which originated at the beginning of the 20th century. as a reflection of the objective processes of artistic development. culture in the era of socialist revolution. Historical practice has created a new reality (until now unknown... ... Aesthetics: Vocabulary
Rudolf Hausner Rudolf Hausner Rudolf Hausner in 1980 Date of birth: December 4, 1914 ... Wikipedia
To tie? Gallery SLAVINSKY ART Date of foundation 2007 Location Saint Petersburg, Vasilievsky Island, 6th line, 5/5 ... Wikipedia
This term has other meanings, see Science Fiction (meanings). Fantasy is a type of mimesis, in the narrow sense a genre fiction, cinema and fine arts; its aesthetic dominant is... ... Wikipedia
Fantasy is a type of mimesis, in the narrow sense a genre of fiction, cinema and visual arts; its aesthetic dominant is the category of the fantastic, which consists of violating the framework, boundaries, rules of representation... ... Wikipedia
Fantasy is a type of mimesis, in the narrow sense a genre of fiction, cinema and visual arts; its aesthetic dominant is the category of the fantastic, which consists of violating the framework, boundaries, rules of representation... ... Wikipedia
To tie? Ivan Slavinsky ... Wikipedia
Books
- Surrealism, The book is dedicated to surrealism (from the French “sur” - over, above) - one of the leading artistic movements in world art of the first half of the 20th century. Surrealism is “the art of the highest... Category: Eras and styles Series: Large illustrated encyclopedia Publisher:
Fantastic realism is an artistic movement in Austrian art of the second half of the 20th century, known as the “Vienna School of Fantastic Realism” and had a pronounced mystical-religious character, addressing timeless and eternal themes, exploring the hidden corners of the human soul and focused on the traditions of the German Renaissance ( representatives: E. Fuchs, R. Hausner). Together with Arik Brauer, Wolfgang Hutter, Rudolf Hausner and Anton Lemden, Ernst Fuchs founded the school, or rather created a new style, “Fantastic Realism”. Its rapid development occurred in the early 60s of the 20th century. Its five brightest representatives Fuchs, Brouwer, Lemden, Hausner and Hutter became the main group of the entire future movement, soon Klarwein, Escher, Jofra appeared, each bringing their own manner and method of work from their national schools. Paetz, Helnwein, Heckelman and Wahl, Odd Nerdrum also formed part of the general movement. Giger worked in Switzerland. Ernst Fuchs taught at Reichenau Castle, where such bright and famous artists as Hana Kai, Olga Spiegel, Philipp Rubinov-Jacobson, Wolfgang Widmoser, Michael Fuchs, Roberto Venosa, Dieter Schwetrberger, known as De Es, appeared. Exhibitions with the participation of Isaac Abrams, Ingo Swan and Alex Gray were held in the USA. At the end of the sixties, the Fantastic Realism movement became international and formed, as it were, a kind of parallel art world, although many artists changed their style, moving to other societies, others appeared, coming from completely different movements. The galleries of James Cowan “Morpheus” appeared in Beverly Hills, which presented Beksinski, who so impressed the younger generation, Henry Boxer in London, Karl Karlhuber in Vienna and others. Fuchs participates in the first exhibition of the Vienna Art Club in Turin (Italy). The creativity of the representatives of the “school”, which absorbed national traditions Gothic, modern, expressionism, operating with images of myth and the subconscious, initially did not find recognition among the Austrian public, captivated at that moment by abstract art... Fantastic realism is an artistic trend akin to magical realism, including more surreal, supernatural motifs. Close to surrealism, but unlike the latter, he adheres more strictly to the principles of the traditional easel image “in the spirit of the old masters”; can rather be considered a late version of symbolism. Among the typical examples are the works of V. Tubke or the masters of the “Viennese school of fantastic realism” (R. Hausner, E. Fuchs, etc.). The current generation is clearly represented by the activities of such artists as Tristan Shen, Andrew Gonzales, Oleg Korolev, Sergei Aparin, Peter Gryk, Laurie Lipton, Jacek Yerka, Maura Holden, Lucas Kandle, Herman Smorenburg, Stephen Kenny and many others.
The rapidly increasing distance between genuine artistic values and actively replicated ones and - alas! – widely demanded mass art in its most vulgar version is a process, of course, irreversible. “Why argue fruitlessly with the century” (Pushkin). Any time tends to consider itself timeless, lamentations are meaningless and always have a smack of grumpy conservatism. What is important is not complaints, but understanding and awareness of the process.
In the space of the “unreal”, fantastic art, to which the article is devoted, the leading role fell, of course, to cinema, as a formative artistic phenomenon of the 20th-21st centuries, moreover, it is cinema that is most capable of combining both mass appeal and high quality.
It is enough to recall and compare the films of German expressionism led by the immortal The office of Dr. Caligari Robert Wiene, paintings by Buñuel, Greenaway, Blow-up Antonioni, Tarkovsky's films with popular "fantasy" blockbusters, including entire virtual mega-spaces (from films to comics) " Star Wars" Fantasy, the sacrament of the “second plan” is becoming the lot of the few and is rapidly being reduced.
With the artist Nikolai Danilevsky, about whose art I wrote an article a year ago, we talked a lot about precisely the phenomenon that is commonly called “fantastic realism.” Fine art next to cinema, due to its much more intimate role in the modern world, remains a kind of laboratory, a closed but active world, where the fantastic principle (freed, fortunately, from both the possibilities and the burden of box-office special effects) develops in the quiet of workshops.
The longer our conversations lasted, the more obvious it became: the current terminology is so confused, vague and vague, its fundamental concepts are used so arbitrarily and even sloppily, that without a detailed analysis of the main meanings, definitions, prolegomena, no discussions are unthinkable.
The result was the proposed text.
Explaining what seems banally clear - which can be more difficult. “Fantastic realism” - this term has a helpful chain of associations that have set teeth on edge. Here are Hoffman, Gogol, Dostoevsky, even Kafka, Bulgakov, Orwell, philosophical fiction, glamorous quasi-literature fantasy and beyond - right up to computer games and other nonsense, not to mention the artists themselves. Bosch, Arcimboldo, Francisco Goya, the famous Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, Böcklin, Vrubel, Somov, Odilon Redon, surrealists - in all these names and trends there is something close to fantastic realism. Separating even the obvious wheat from the visible chaff is not so easy. Moreover, few people think about the fact that even these two words, which make up such a familiar definition, are used approximately, and, most importantly, in completely different meanings, sometimes opposite.
Without pretending to establish certain general standards, it is necessary to determine the conventional, but specific meaning of these concepts in this context. It is worth keeping the following in mind:
The concept of “realism” as applied to analysis different types artistic creativity blurred to the point of complete indistinctness. Goethe said that an exactly depicted pug is another pug, and not a new work of art. Indeed: most often, “realism” is simply understood as a certain “resemblance to reality,” recognition, intelligibility and accessibility, which leads to a reduction of the term and makes it synonymous with accessibility in the most vulgar sense of the word. Here realism moves into the space of mass culture and is identified with it.
A somewhat more professional understanding of the term reduces it to a constant approach to a vaguely understood “truthfulness” and presents realism as almost the goal of evolution. In this case, the history of literature and other arts is defined as a continuous movement towards perfection (as was often asserted in Soviet aesthetics), whereby the mediocre Biedermeier artist, the minor Itinerant, or the Socialist Realist were represented as artists superior in some sense to Goya or Valentin Serov.
Often the term “realism” was used in relation to those usually ideologized artistic movements that opposed (or would like to counteract) any daring searches aimed at enrichment expressive means(let's say romanticism); then Courbet was preferable to Delacroix, and Korolenko to Dostoevsky.
Hence the completely absurd understanding of realism as a movement that has its own style and chronological framework, entering into polemics, and even battles, with romanticism, impressionism, and even more so with abstraction. Moreover: the logical series (using the example of 19th century France) “romanticism – realism – impressionism” is considered. At the same time, it is overlooked that realism is not a period, but an immanent quality of any genuine art. And the equally absurd assumption that, say, Hoffmann is not a realist, Delacroix is unlikely, but the Biedermeier artists and, of course, the Wanderers are realists. What to do with Phidias, Rublev, Giotto and Dante remained unclear.
Realism was traditionally understood (and is still understood today) as an axiological, evaluative category, in other words, it became synonymous with high quality.
These traditional ideas completely confuse all ideas about the term “realism”.
In this context, realism is considered as a method immanent (constantly inherent) in any real art, since every true artist - consciously or unconsciously - strives in his work to create an accurate and, to the best of his ability, objective similarity not to the world, but to one’s own idea of it, which he perceives as the only true one.
Exactly submission about the world, not the world itself.
For both the Egyptian artist, who created a geometrized likeness of a person, spread out on a plane, and the Hellene, the author of an exact copy, if not a strikingly similar, poetic image, and the medieval master, who sought to abandon everything corporeal and strived for an “image of the soul” and showed not so much the body, the hieroglyph of emotions, and even the abstractionist who seeks in a non-objective image a direct plastic analogue to the world of the subconscious - they are all aimed at the same goal. Towards the creation of an artistic and (according to one’s idea) truthful analogue your truth and only to her.
And the opposition in history to realism (in the proposed understanding) is not impressionism or romanticism, but two other, eternal, like it) trends: formalism And naturalism.
Wingless passion for a flirtatious and entertaining form, for experimentation as such, is just as contraindicated in art as the wretched copying of the visible in order to create illusion reality. Realism in the high and serious sense of the term, as between Scylla and Charybdis, develops in eternal opposition to these two wretched but seductive extremes. Extremes that are usually popular with the public. Large-scale manifestations, even in these areas, always have even more simplified versions, presenting to the naive viewer their vulgar publicly available versions.
Thus, already at first it is possible to declare genuine artistic quality as a sine qua non of realism. Moreover, both formalism and naturalism, by definition, are outside the boundaries of true art.
We should not forget that (since the history of art is inseparable from the history of public taste) the perception of the fine arts has changed far from synchronously with the development of art itself. At a time when, according to Pliny’s story, birds came to peck the grapes in Zeuxis’s painting, and Zeuxis himself mistook the coverlet painted by Paarrasius for the fabric itself, the assessment of art was reduced only to the degree of illusion (for many, even today such a primitive principle of assessment remains relevant). “White marble” for posterity, Greek statues were at one time painted in bright colors, but time demanded convention, the sculpture became monochrome and turned, in the words of Diderot, into a muse “passionate, but silent and secrete (silencieuse et secrete).” Illusory painting turned into a cute salon genre of “trickery.”
The ideas of positivism, in line with which both ordinary wisdom and conventional wisdom developed, were made in the mid-nineteenth century and theoretical concept“realism” is synonymous with the assertion of unvarnished truth in art. Naturally, at this time the concept truth moved away from both the sentimental-enlightenment and sublimely heroic ideas of romanticism (in official aesthetics there was the concept “ educational realism"). Romance - even as a system of forms - was far from rigid and concrete social issues(in this sense even Liberty Delacroix was perceived as a deviation from social truth).
However, the direct depiction of the fantastic (fairy-tale, mythological) is in complete opposition to “fantastic realism.” An example of this is the work of Gustave Doré: absolutely reliable dragons, giants, ghosts, monsters, etc. are conveyed with naive and majestic authenticity. The imagination of a child enchanted by a terrible fairy tale, realized with artistry and scope, but without much taste, and most importantly, without any plastic subtext, everything is said, there is no room for imagination.
If great Western painting remained devoted to the ideals of artistic form, thereby spiritualizing the “substance of art” and seeing priorities in it, the Russian visual tradition brought the idea to the fore.
At the turn of the century (the German “Jahrhundertwende” seems to be much more capacious than the usual “turn of the century”, or “Fin fin de siècle”) art was changing rapidly. However, for the majority of readers and viewers, for the liberal Russian intelligentsia, the messianic role of art still remained a priority. Changes artistic language have not yet attracted general attention: no matter how innovator in the field of artistic form Dostoevsky, for example, was, his books were perceived, first of all, as moral phenomena.
In the West, bold social ideas were most often realized in a new artistic form (Goya, Delacroix, Courbet). In Russia, as a rule, it is more than traditional. The feat of the Wanderers was already partly recognized as self-destructive: the sermon is verbal and in the visual arts it turns into tongue-tied rigorism. And if the fantastic in the highest achievements of Russian literature (Gogol, Dostoevsky), precisely because of the priority of the word, was still perceived as a natural part of the real, then in the fine arts something different reigned.
Russian writers, in fact, have almost nothing to do with the visual arts. The life of a Russian person flows entirely under the sign of a bowed brow, under the sign of deep thoughts, after which any beauty becomes unnecessary, any shine becomes false. He raises his gaze only to hold it on human face, but in it he does not look for harmony or beauty. He strives to find in it his own thoughts, his own suffering, his own destiny and those remote roads along which long sleepless nights walked, leaving these traces. . This special gift of vision brought up great writers: without it there would have been no Gogol, no Dostoevsky, no Tolstoy. But he cannot create great artists. A Russian person does not have enough dispassion to look at a face from a picturesque point of view, that is, calmly and disinterestedly as an object, without taking human participation in it; from contemplation he imperceptibly moves to compassion, love or willingness to help, that is, from figurative content to plot content. It is no coincidence that Russian artists painted “plots” for a long time. This is how Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about Russian culture, which he knew and loved.
It was this “plot” that later became the main object of not only protest, but also cruel, sometimes excessive condemnation from young “World of Art” students.
“Get away from Russian backwardness artistic life, get rid of our provincialism and move closer to the cultural West, to the purely artistic the quest (my italics, M.G.) of foreign schools, away from literaryism, from the tendentiousness of the Itinerants, away from the helpless amateurism of quasi-innovators, away from our decadent academicism” (Alexander Benois).
Freedom of imagination (we are not talking about fairy-tale plots in the spirit of Vasnetsov or Repinsky Sadko) only partially began to appear in Vrubel, but the tragic events of the revolution and the subsequent changes in social life Russia stopped for a long time the tradition, which can very loosely be called Russian fantastic realism.
However, to some extent, the search for the fantastic was synthesized with magical meaning abstract form.
Yes and Black square Malevich in his silent, menacing, strangely gloomy significance.
It is inscribed in a white shimmering field in such a way that there is an unprecedented feeling of not airy, not empty cosmic, not “abstract”, in the decorative sense of the word, space, but space in general - a kind of thick “spatial substance”. A space devoid of beginnings and ends, extension and scale, in relation to which the black rectangle is perceived as a kind of “zero space”, “anti-space”, “black hole”, “super-heavy star” - one of those categories of the highest standard of poetic scientific fiction that will appear in another half century. None of its angles are 90 degrees; it remains in perpetual becoming, as if alive. The square and the background seem to float in the same plane, in a visually felt weightlessness (Malevich invented the term “plastic weightlessness”, guessing the possibilities of anti-gravity), without protruding forward and without retreating deeper, creating a powerful feeling of a materialized idea of the primary elements, of a kind of foundation “ periodic table"forms, or, using Khlebnikov's expression, about "constructing the alphabet of concepts." Fiction, really, fiction? The epigraph contains the answer to this question. “I exist in your imagination, and your imagination is part of nature, which means I exist in nature.”
It is worth carefully and with caution to consider phenomena that are often perceived by viewers as excessively similar and, therefore, capable of seeming naturalistic.
It is easy to mistake for pure naturalism and works created in line with the movement called hyperrealism - from the French hyperrealisme (other names: “photorealism”, “superrealism”, “cold realism”, “sharp-focus realism”). This is a broad movement in Western, primarily American art, which has made itself known since the mid-1960s and has been an active opposition to abstractionism. The world, seen and objectified as if through dispassionate photo optics (often with its help), is scrupulously reproduced in work of art, so photographic information is transformed into pictorial information. Hyperrealistic paintings and sculptures assert impersonal precision, offering the viewer a unique man-made image based on a mechanical reproductive basis, and affirm the triumph of visible reality over artistic will and creative subjectivity. The resemblance to reality becomes both aggressive and poetic - the hyperrealist artist offers the viewer an image that does not require co-creation - even more detailed than the material world itself. This monumentalizes everyday life, creates a unique aesthetics of the world of consumption, and reproduces the human environment, where the person himself with his emotions and thoughts is practically absent.
But - oddly enough - even in this super-similar, super-material principle of reproducing the objective world, there is a deeply hidden fantasy, a dull subtext of anxiety.
Photorealism with its (in the words of one critic) “embalmed gloss” of objects is to some extent associated in the American consciousness with the beloved masters of the period of “romantic objectivity” in the United States, for example, the famous Edward Hopper.
Painting Early Sunday morning(1930, Museum American art Whitney, New York) Hopper has a strange appeal, a piercing sense of American specialness, of American urbanism, very far from the common images of skyscrapers or the Brooklyn Bridge. The effect of a cinematic freeze frame (the composition of many of the artist’s paintings, it seems, goes back to the aesthetics of Hopper’s cinema lasts as long as the viewer wants, and the artist knows how to captivate the viewer. The beginning of the day is perceived as the beginning of life, a child’s wary joy, the “jamais vu” effect (i.e. e. the effect of defamiliarization, the rediscovery of a familiar place), when the familiar lived environment is seen as mysterious and unknown, Hopper achieves this feeling while remaining in the space of hyper-realistic protocol precision. Probably precisely because in the persistently authentic, frontal, “still life” an image of an ordinary brick house to set the teeth on edge, in which, behind the closed windows for the tired and boring residents, the night still lasts, a breath of early bright sunny freshness bursts in, which the viewer spied together with the artist. An instantaneous state of light and air in a musty and boring world, flashing like a presence, like the possibility of a different view, this is probably the secret.
Effects of this kind are also realized by the anthropomorphism of precisely drawn, but still living architecture, and the ability to convey the loneliness of a house in an empty field ( House at railway , 1925, MoMA, New York). It is curious that this picture became for Hitchock the source of the scenery for the famous film Psychosis(1960). Therefore, an unexpected - albeit hyper-accurate - image of something seen as if for the first time is also a move in the development of fantastic realism.
By the way, returning to Hitchock in particular and to cinema in general, we can add that the gaze and poeticization of real details in cinema may well become (and become!) a poetic and quite metaphorical (and therefore with a touch of “fantastic”) part of the artistic whole . The accentuated material detail from the same Hitchock (very far from the high “arthouse”) to the famous still lifes of Luchino Visconti, Greenaway, Tarkovsky, precisely because of its objectivity, objectivity, immobility, becomes both an effective counterpoint and, at the same time, a silent accompaniment to live actors and a dynamic camera, accompaniment, sometimes more eloquent than the plot itself and the performance of the artists...
A similar secret power in the “almost cinematic or photographic” depiction of an everyday scene is possessed by the works of another American classic Andrew Wyeth, starting with his acclaimed masterpiece Christina's World(1948, MoMA, New York). Even the viewer unfamiliar with the plot (an almost paralyzed woman is depicted) recognizes a certain tragic catharsis in the film. Here it is fashionable to recall Franz Roch’s term “magical realism”.
Simple, even everyday perception of the unthinkable, as well as paradoxical perception of the ordinary, is one of the foundations of this kind of vision. Here is a phrase from Hoffmann's story golden pot: “he turned and left, and then everyone realized that the important man was, in fact, a gray parrot (eigentlich ein grauer Papagei war).” No one was scared, everyone just laughed - an everyday misunderstanding in the world of hofmania.
In the structure of fantastic realism, a frequent and important component is the presence of two registers of perception: the ordinary (“important little man”) and the incredible (it is unknown why he is already a parrot), synthesized into the unity of an unsolved mystery—intellectual or emotional. At the same time, unlike a fairy tale or legend, fantastic realism persistently strives to ground the irrational and affirm the dialectical unity of the imaginary and the material. In the story of the same Hoffmann elemental spirit Lord otherworldly forces appears in the guise of an army major and evokes a ghost by reading text from a French grammar: “it should be indifferent what means I use<...>to manifest in tactile form my connection with the spirit world.” The ordinariness and vulgarity of the situation emphasizes the scale of otherworldly horror.
The cult of unsaid (this is very important) otherworldly anxiety reigned in the so-called metaphysical painting (“Scuola Metafisica”). Longing for infinity named his painting 1911 Italian artist Giorgio De Chirico.
“What I listen to costs nothing, there is only what I see with open eyes, but even better with closed ones,” wrote Giorgio De Chirico. Direct connection with the title (and meaning) of Kubrick's last film With wide eyes closed(Eyes Wide Shut)…
For Chirico, the most valuable qualities of a painting were its contact with a dream or a childhood dream. A strange combination of mystical ideas, anxieties, aspiration to the values of primarily inner life, constant associations with antiquity (in the Roman, “Caesarian” sense of it), but deadened, motionless - such a world becomes the habitat of his characters.
His picturesque dreams are amazingly authentic. Chirico, to a certain extent, does the same as Kandinsky and Klee, but puts his unconscious into an objective form.
However, his objects do not turn the vague spheres of spiritual secrets inside out, do not overwhelm the viewer with disgusting materialized details of hidden or suppressed ideas, which would be characteristic of the surrealists, for many of the works of Ernst and especially Dali with his “fictionalized” and detailed nightmares.
In the numb, empty world of De Chirico’s paintings, it is not passion, pain, life or death that reigns, but only their distant, fading “visual echo.” Landscapes after emotional battles, petrified scars, tragedies that turned into marble monuments to themselves. This is how sometimes in a painful dream, as if from the outside, a person sees himself in a dangerous, alien space. In his sleep he often feels small, lost in huge world shifted proportions and spaces. De Chirico’s paintings are constantly dominated by this effect of painful misrecognition - “jamais vu” (familiar, seemingly seen for the first time) - a quality, as has been noted more than once, that is immanent in any understanding of fantastic realism.
Chirico's paintings are indeed a dream space, where there are no distances, where objects are distant or brought closer only thanks to certain promising hints, where what seems more significant suddenly turns from distant to close, as in a movie with the help of a modern zoom lens. A slow kaleidoscope of visions, from which it is impossible to awaken, dominate objects and people. Objects united on canvas by the will of the artist remain in non-intersecting spatial worlds. They are from different dreams.
A life-like depiction of a non-existent (if it does not remain within the framework of a fairy tale, a myth, and does not pretend to materialize shaky images of the subconscious) in a simplified version turns into a large-scale falsification.
It is such a great temptation for a practicing artist to connect the meaning of “fantastic realism” with surrealism, which is directly aimed at the world of subconscious fantasies. Tristan Tzara, one of the most talented theorists of Dadaism and surrealism, argued that art must sink its roots “to the depths of the unconscious.” Unfortunately, the superficial “salon” concept of the “unconscious” turned out to be extremely popular: the French are right when they claim that “a half-learned person is a doubly fool (demi-instruit double sot).” Overconfident little knowledge leads to aggressive ignorance.
Unfortunately, the average consciousness is captivated primarily by the speculative and bad taste (albeit very effective) work of Dali, perceived as a kind of absolute, no longer subject to criticism, artistic analysis, as a phenomenon that has gone beyond the context of art itself. The most understandable and entertaining of the surrealists, who lowered the images of the subconscious to the level of modern computer film effects, he was doomed to success and became the first large-scale representative of modernist kitsch, a mass version of an inherently intellectual artistic movement.
Unlike many of their famous contemporaries, Dali was and remained not only a bad painter, but also a mediocre draftsman. The sluggishness of the drawing and the simplified palette introduced into his paintings that approximateness and lack of professional magic that is usually characteristic of artistic demagogues who have lowered art to the level of “consumer culture.” This is confirmed by the mass cult of Dali, which exists to this day among circles that are far from true interest in art. Dali's works remain a simple master key into the difficult world of surrealism, and even modernism, thanks to which even an inertial and lazy-minded viewer feels the triumph of his own intellect. The artist sought to touch upon everything - religion, politics, sex, finding straightforward and at the same time piquant answers to everything, masterfully invented and executed with a rare plastic monotony. The petty naturalness of the unthinkable deprives Dali’s images (with rare and serious exceptions) of true tragedy.
And if Ernst, Mason, Georgia O'Keeffe, Miro and many others really created their imaginary worlds, truly based on images of the unconscious or convincingly likened to them, i.e., in other words, they depicted artistic picture of spiritual secrets, then Dali claimed a kind of naturalistic protocol of openly simulated visions, creating falsified, but wanting to seem authentic, quasi-documentary images.
Much more important for the modern implementation of the worldview of fantastic realism is René Magritte. The artist did not strive to caress the viewer's eye (which Dali claimed very persistently, striving, no matter how repulsive his characters were, for a banally understood, but still attractive, for the effect of “realness”, surreal Trompe-l'oeil). Magritte limited himself to simply visual information about what his inventive imagination produced. And these partially simplistic images, although executed with protocol skill, are indeed rooted “to the depths of the unconscious” (Tzara).
In the texture, color, linear constructions of Magritte there is absolutely no desire to please the taste of the average person, his scary devoid of sweet appeal, it is not based on naturalistic details. But, most of all, on a detached and always meaningful, meaningful comparison of objects and phenomena, sometimes even inscriptions.
Believing that painting is only a means of communicating ideas, he practically ceases to be interested in the “substance of art.” Magritte had a special gift: in his comparisons of ordinary things that sublime horror arose that is characteristic of visions, delirium, and heavy sleep. The everydayness of things in Magritte's disturbing touches inspires inarticulate and menacing anxiety.
The metaphor of undeciphered fear, not the images of the subconscious, but those pictures that the unconscious sends us not yet deciphered - this is an area where Magritte knows no equal.
One of Magritte’s secrets is his ability to put the viewer in front of a clearly fixed “frame”, as if thrown by the subconscious into the visible objective world, with frightening simplicity, without encryption or plastic hints. Yes, watercolor In praise of dialectic (Eloge de la dialectique) (1936, private collection) becomes an emotional and frightening metaphor for the famous Hegelian judgment that the internal, devoid of the external, cannot be signified by the internal: it depicts a house visible through the window of a house, inside it, and not outside - a typological situation of a nightmare, objectively and dispassionately stated.
Magritte anticipated a lot, creating a kind of guide to the labyrinths of postmodern art. His inscriptions on the paintings, asserting, say, that the pipe depicted is not a pipe (because it is only its image or simply because an intellectual and absurdist game is being played with the viewer), is a direct path to conceptual designs. Combining fragments classical paintings with his own painting, turning the face into the body, cold and rational eroticism, undoubted cinematography, closeness to science fiction of the highest standard. And, of course, a detached view from the outside at yourself and your work, repeated cold reflection, where the “frames” of the looking glass are reflected in ordinary and unusual mirrors so many times that they again begin to seem like reality. And when Magritte painted his picture An attempt at the impossible (La tentative de l’impossible)(1928, private collection), depicting an artist painting a model, he created an unprecedented and at the same time exact equivalent of a subconscious creative act: under the artist’s brush a real living body appeared in the space of the room, and not on the canvas, and everything around remained, probably, only a painted plane.
Of particular importance in our context is one of the most amazing paintings Magritte Key to fields(1936, Thyssen-Barnemiss collection), where fallen shards of broken window glass preserve the landscape seen through them until recently, a picture that contains many meanings and, of course, opens up new perspectives for not yet filmed cinema and even computer effects.
Let us add that a lot of terminological and essential confusion arises in cases where an artist or some association of artists, in the process of hasty self-identification, finds a name for itself. That's exactly what happened with Vienna School of Fantastic Realism (Wiener Schule des Phantastischen Realismus), at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. Consisting of artists mainly focused on surrealist roots. In my own way interesting masters- Albert Paris Gütersloh (Albert Conrad Kitreiber), Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, Anton Lemden, Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hutter and others, they were more or less influenced by Max Ernst, and, of course, were most focused on external exaggerated frightening effects combined with the use of decorative effects, partly echoing the style of the Secession. The movement was distinguished by overt eclecticism, although in the painting of Gütersloh (the theoretician of the group) there is an undoubted temperament and pictorial dramatic energy that anticipates the discoveries of German expressionism. One way or another, the declared name belongs only to history, but is very far from the true problems of “fantastic realism”.
It is natural that Soviet aesthetics practically excluded the fantastic principle from the context of realistic art, just as it is natural that from the late 1980s it began to return from the underground world to exhibition venues and gained famous success(especially in the world of gallery art).
The city itself contributes a lot to this. St. Petersburg is one of the youngest famous cities in the world, which has managed to be both an imperial capital and a regional center, a city that has changed faces and guises, a city that has changed its name three times (or, more precisely, four times!), and probably its destiny. “If St. Petersburg is not the capital, then there is no St. Petersburg. It only seems that he exists” (Andrey Bely).
An unsteady mixture of the imagined and the real – the phantom of Pushkin’s “proud idol”. And Pushkin’s odic lines, beginning with the words “I love,” are almost refuted by the “heavy-voiced” galloping of the idol pursuing the unfortunate madman. And this is also Pushkin (1828):
The city is lush, the city is poor,
Spirit of bondage, slender appearance,
The vault of heaven is green and pale,
Boredom, cold and granite.
Not a single city has had so many gloomy judgments expressed, although for everyone it remains the “beauty and wonder” of “full countries.”
“Everything is a deception, everything is a dream, everything is not what it seems!” “The most deliberate city in the whole world” (Dostoevsky); “And my city is iron-gray” (Blok). Even Chekhov, who was by no means a St. Petersburg writer, saw in the inhabitants of St. Petersburg “a special breed of people who are specifically engaged in making fun of every phenomenon in life; they can’t even pass by a hungry person or a suicide person without saying something vulgar” (Tale of an unknown person).
The city itself is a continuous quotation, sometimes it seems that it arose not by the will of Peter, but by the movements of a goose’s feathers; would it have existed without the nightmares of German or Galyadkin, without the torments of Raskolnikov, without Blok’s Retribution! And without the sublime and merciless dreams of the doomed Decembrists, without political murders, without the “three revolutions” that we were taught to be so proud of. Is everything a deception, everything a dream?
On the icy St. Petersburg stage, open to the winds European culture, the passions seen through the “magic crystal” of the city and those who wrote about it were painfully highlighted.
And the “cinema sphere” gradually poeticized and beautified the city: it spread out in fields of polished asphalt under the wheels of the Emka taxi driver Petya Govorkov, the future great singer (Sergei Lemeshev) and the ZIS of the arrogant and stupid Tarakanov (Erast Garin) in Musical history, surrounding the ridiculous Americanized utopia with the light of cast-iron lanterns and the patrician facades of St. Petersburg palaces; the city also became the setting of romantic fantasies of revolutionary fairy tales, its factories, ennobled by the skill of excellent cameramen, turned into the scenery of the famous films about Maxim, “legends were created in the world of prose,” in the words of Verhaeren, and Leningrad turned into a magical legend about itself. What kind of “dubious fantastic light is there, like here in St. Petersburg” (Dostoevsky).
But, unfortunately, it is precisely the salon, entertaining version of “fantastic realism” that attracts the public, eager to join the elementary, inviting, which only pretends to be deep and complex.
As Nikolai Danilevsky said, my thoughtful interlocutor is either a like-minded person or an opponent: “ Distinctive feature Petersburg fantastic realism, from similar trends in the absence of catharsis. This is a "fairy tale with an unhappy ending." Here I completely agree with him. Moreover, it is he who consistently tries in his artistic practice to find, if not a happy ending, then a genuine artistic quality, without which any experiment is doomed. Rejecting traditional figurativeness, the artist seeks and finds a purely plastic equivalent to his vision, where fantasy becomes truth itself.
There are probably other ways. In the meantime, we have taken the first steps towards understanding the root system of “Fantastic Realism”. Escapes are in the process of implementation. Quite a few artists simply call themselves “fantastic realists.” Everyone has the right to this, everyone proves it in their own way.
It must be assumed that Fantastic realism is a concept that primarily includes the desire for a meaningful, stylistically unified formal system (resemblance to nature, traditional objectivity may or may not exist), but the sine qua non is integrity, suggestiveness and individuality of artistic substance realizing the artist’s ideas about phenomena beyond sensory experience.
The only way to survive in a world you have to fight with is to know more about it.
Footnotes
* Nikolai Sergeevich Danilevsky is the founder of the St. Petersburg School of Fantastic Realism.
1 Rilke R. M.. Moderne russische Kunst-bestrebungen. Samtliche Werke in zwolf Banden. Frankfurt a. M., 1976, Bd 10. S. 613-614
2 Benoit A. The emergence of the “World of Art”, L., 1928, p. 21
3 Quoted from: 100 oeuvres nouvelles 1974-1976. Musee national d'art moderne. P., 1977. P. 24
Mikhail Yurievich German- Soviet and Russian writer, art historian, doctor of art history, professor, member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the International Council of Museums (ICOM), member of the International PEN Club and the Union of Russian Writers, member of the Union of Journalists of St. Petersburg and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). Leading researcher at the State Russian Museum
Special thanks for the materials provided Nikolay Danilevsky
German M. Yu. Fantastic realism: myth, reality, the present day (answers to unasked questions). - St. Petersburg, Pushkin Museum: almanac. Vol. 8, All-Russian Museum of A.S. Pushkin, 2017. - 432 pp., with illus. -- ISBN 978-5-4380-0022-8.)
