Nikolay Chernyshevsky.
The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality
A study of art as a means of transforming reality by a Russian literary critic.
In “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality, ” the thesis he defended in 1855, Nikolay Chernyshevsky challenged the aesthetics of German Romanticism, insisting on the need “to distinguish what is actually felt from what is only said.” Chernyshevsky’s thesis confronted the ideal with life, and contrasted the incorporeality of the signified (“the ideal that exists in the artist’s imagination”) with the materiality of the signifier (reality itself).
In the preface and afterword to this new edition of The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality, the poet and philologist Pavel Arseniev argues for a view of Chernyshevsky as the first Russian-speaking media critic. Arseniev employs a sophisticated critical apparatus to prove the enduring relevance of a work that remained practically unnoticed during Chernyshevsky’s lifetime.
Pavel Arseniev (b. 1986) is an artist, poet, and theorist. Born in Leningrad, he currently lives in Marseille, France. Arseniev holds a master’s degree in literary theory from the Department of Philology and Arts of Saint Petersburg State University and a Doctor of Letters from the University of Geneva (2021). Arseniev is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of theoretical essays. He was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize in 2012.
The belief that “human desires are limitless” is false in the sense in which it is commonly understood, in the sense that “no reality can satisfy them”; on the contrary, man is satisfied not only with “the best that can be in reality, ” but also with a rather mediocre reality. It is necessary to distinguish between what is actually felt and what is only said.
The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality pays particular attention to the theory of reproduction in art, using the techniques of printmaking and daguerreotype as examples. As Chernyshevsky puts it, “reproduction theory, if it deserves attention, will excite strong antics on the part of the adherents of the theory of creativity. They will say that it leads to a daguerreotypic copying of reality.” Decades later, the philosopher Walter Benjamin would famously declare the daguerreotype to have been a turning point in the history of art.
Arseniev’s afterword bridges the gap between The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality and Chernyshevsky’s most famous work, the novel What Is to Be Done? Published in 1863, What is to Be Done? significantly influenced the development of Russian critical and political thought—its traces can be found in the work of the editors of the Sovremennik literary magazine and the Wanderers, in the writings of Vladimir Lenin and Georgy Plekhanov, in Boris Arvatov’s theory of artistic production, and in the literature of positivism in general.