APOLLON MAIKOVS ARTICLESABOUT EXHIBITIONS IN THE ACADEMY OF ARTS AND THEIR ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENTOF AESTHETIC AWARENESS OF 1840-1850S

Maikov begins his activity as a critic in the second half of the 1840s, which was a period of pronouncedupswing of cultural life as a whole and critical thought in particular. Maikov becomes a noticeableparticipant of the literature process and regularly publishes his poems, verses and attempts inprose. There have been a number of reasons why Maikov turned to criticism, among which are thework of his father Nikolai Maikov, an academician in painting, Maikov's own interest in painting, hisrich and diverse aesthetic education, influence by his brother, Valerian Maikov, who in 1846 became aleading literary critic of magazine "Otechestvennye zapiski", where Maikov's first article about theexhibition of Aivazovsky's works was published.The contents of this publication demonstrate that Maikov was relying on certain conceptual stancewhich accounts for the problematic background of all his articles on fine arts. The new Russian literatureabout art must serve one foremost goal, namely the gradual aesthetic education of the Russian society, whichwould include familiarization with basic aesthetic categories, the main stages in the history of art, with theessence of aesthetic quests of various epochs and their fundamental connection with the "spirit of the age",or, taken together, with the contemporary scientific approach to assessment of works of art as a historicallyconditioned phenomenon. In most of Maikov's articles these are the issues that are pushed to the forefrontand account for the analysis of the works of art represented at the exhibition.Maikov's articles on fine arts become an important stage in the development of Russian art criticism,overcoming the previous dilettantish approach and providing the criticism with a firm scientificand professional base. On the one hand, this happens due to Maikov's family background: being a sonof the art academician, he was preparing to become an artist himself; on the other hand, this can beexplained by his active participation in the literary process of 1840s, whereby he closely followed theaesthetic polemics of the period and advocated new aesthetic requirements, which he naturally transferredto fine arts. Preparing to write a number of articles on contemporary painting, which was a materialrelatively underdeveloped in the Russian context, he approaches this task relying on the experienceof Russian philosophical aesthetics and criticism of 1830-1840s, which was generalized andgiven new interpretation in Vissarion Belinsky's critical heritage. Maikov supplements this experiencewith his profound knowledge of special issues in the theory and history of art and develops a widerange of general and applied problems that previously eluded detailed investigation but were indispensablewithin the scientific approach to the material. All these features make Maikov's articles a remarkablefact in the history of the Russian aesthetical thought of mid-19th century.

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