Historical method in Apollon Maikovs articles on exhibitions in the Imperial Academy of Arts

Historicism in its full scope and complexity becomesthe crucial stage in the development of the philosophy of art and aesthetical criticism. It asserts historical approach as indispensable bothin assessing works of art of any period and in interpreting plots and images. Apollon Maikov, who embarked on literary criticism inmid-1840s, relies on the traditions of the philosophic theory of aesthetics and literary criticism as a whole and, in particular, onBelinskys methodological tenets. As a result, historicism in its full understanding becomes the foundation of his aesthetic thinking. Itwas this thinking that determined Maikovs attitude to the representatives of past literary criticism, and, first of all, to Rafael Mengs,who initiated the idea of the decline of contemporary art. This thinking also accounts for the negative evaluation of the contemporaryRussian literature about art. After a critical review of the literature about arts of his time, Maikov sets the task to create an adequateaccount of different periods and stages of the development of art, linking the aesthetic problem patterns prevalent at a particular periodto the peculiarities of the social consciousness and the relevant system of values, and, to be more precise, to religious and philosophicalthinking. Moreover, he develops the historical approach to understanding the basic categories of formal aesthetics, such as the problemsof object typology and genres of fine arts, and next, to the problem of historic transformation of the category of genre. He was the firstwithin the emerging Russian art studies to introduce a modern interpretation of the genres in highest demand, i.e. landscape, portrait andso-called tableaux de genre. Historicism becomes the crucial category that explains conceptual principles guiding Maikov as a critic andtheoretician of art. It determines the preconditions of the problem pattern of most of his articles on exhibitions in the Academy of arts,which is based not on the mere review of the works of art, but on selecting the best and most significant ones that are indicative of theRussian fine arts within the context of two basic problems, i.e. inherent causal connection between the spirit of the epoch and problempatterns prevalent in the works of art, and the idea of historic transformation of the genre.

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