Vladimir Solovyov - the First Symbolist or the Last Romantic? (Aesthetic Views and Creative Model)

The article analyzes the problem polemic for Solovyov studies and related to the nature of the artistic world of Solovyov the writer. The aim of the research is to study the nature of Solovyov’s artistic consciousness and method, to identify the degree of reflection of romantic and symbolist creative paradigms in them. Based on the material of philosophical and aesthetic, poetic, prose, dramatic, literary and critical works of Solovyov, the author of the article proves that Solovyov was a romantic in worldview, type of artistic consciousness, artistic method, although his works show separate features of realistic and symbolist creative paradigms. The research is carried out in the traditions of comparative literature studies (A.N. Veselovsky, V.M. Zhirmunsky, A.N. Nikolyukin, and others), which explore continuity in literature of various historical and literary epochs, the perception, assimilation, and transformation of separate ideas and features of poetics. Historical-genetic and comparative-typological approaches in Solovyov studies allow identifying the genetic and typological essence of the writer’s artistic world, more accurately determining its place in the historicalliterary process. In the course of the research, the author analyzes the characteristics of Solovyov’s worldview; his aesthetic views, nature of relationship with the reader, and means of artistic expression; the plots, artistic types, techniques, language repeated in his writings. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that the artistic world of Solovyov was built with a focus on romantic principles of perception and reflection of reality. At the same time, the romanticism of the late 19th century in Russian literature was significantly different from its classical version, actively absorbing the features of literary phenomena of a different artistic nature (primarily symbolism). Hence is the misleading external similarity between the artistic texts of Solovyov and the symbolists, which in reality is combined with significant, fundamental differences. Solovyov was close to the symbolists ideologically as much as the aesthetic programs of romanticists and symbolists were close. At the same time, he could never accept orientation to the chosen artistic layers, the “own” reader, the demonstrative freedom from religious and spiritual principles, the inadequacy of the author and his or her mask, the cult of art going so far as to deny not only high ideological content, but also any semantic coherence. Solovyov, who shaped as a writer on the aesthetic principles of his century, always proceeded from the idea of a special spiritual mission of a poet, the inseparability of the author and the work. Remaining a romanticist throughout his work, using romantic figurativeness, developing romantic themes, following the romantic project of dialogue with a reader, he combined all this with a realistic attitude to the depicted reality (desire to influence it) and with symbolist techniques (symbolism, understatement).

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