The style problem and methodological strategies of M.M. Bakhtin and A.F. Losev

This article considers the methodological strategies in the earlier research of Mikhail Bakhtin and Aleksei Losev (the works of the 1920s) in terms of the piece of art's procedurali-ty idea. There is a multi-aspect problem including the subjective style problem that is in the focus of attention. In terms of the theory of subjectivity the authors elaborate, a complex methodology with the hermeneutic and structural-typological principles is used. The strategies of Bakhtin and Losev are often set against each other as "dialogic" and "dialectic", but more important is the scholars' renounce to resolve the aesthetic problem to a strict model and the aspiration to head to Man, Existence and Life. Bakhtin's personological aesthetics demonstratively proves the author's "outsidedness" and "aesthetic conclusion", but definitely tells the aesthetic object from the "material". The aesthetic anthropologism of existence that lies within the core of Bakhtin's personological aesthetics is closely connected with the character as the only form of the author's impersonation - there is "tendency" and "potenсy" if there is no character, etc. The aesthetic object (the aesthetic activity load within the piece of art) and the material suffer a division that generates the image of two styles: personal-artistic and verbal, i.e. complete dualism. The current concept is that the word (the language) is the "associate" of man's artistic creation rather than the "material for overcoming", that is why Bakhtin's aesthetics that completely develops the individual (subjective) source and the essence of the aesthetic modeling (from the subject's point of view) can actually set neither the form problem (within the both its substantivity types) nor the style problem. Compared to Bakhtin's concept, Losev's dialectics logically embraces the artistic image though "it does not need" the author-creator. Losev's "subjectlessness" in terms of the source of man's creativity does not mean the artist's disregard for he has a specific role: notional objectification heads to the form, in other words, to be expressed in some kind of "otherness"; therefore, the artist has a mediating role. The artist's personality is not removed but filled by the form setting and objectified as the inherent life setting of the form. That is why the earlier works of Bakhtin and Losev consider the style as oblique to the aesthetics basis, in other words, its "legislative tone" is questionable from one of the noted points of view - both of the counterdirectional developing perspectives are needed. Thus, Bakhtin originates from man-creator and "does not touch" the form "leaping" straight to the text; Losev masterfully theorizes the form that is indissociable to existence (therefore, the general view on the form is possible), but "underrates" the artist. Both of the researchers wonderfully preserve the key - the anthropological and existential nature of the artistic image, which, like Life, is free and casually tangled at the same time.

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