‘A type of a literary Cheka agent’: G. Benn on S. Tretiakov’s Berlin lectures

The article examines an incident in the history of Russo-German literary relations — the lectures delivered by a LEF (Leſt Front for Arts) leader Sergey Tretiakov in Germany (1930–1931) and their reception by German literary circles. Along with ecstatic feedback from leſtist writers, Tretiakov’s appearance provoked criticism from a more conservative public. It is to the criticism of the lecture from the viewpoint of ‘art for art’s sake’ that Gottfried Benn devotes his radio broadcast of ‘The New Literary Season’ (1931), subjected to a detailed analysis in this article. Although contesting Tretiakov’s views of the relationship between literature and politics, as well as offering their slightly cartoonish depiction, Benn provides a fairly detailed description of thetheses; it becomes an important source of information about the contents of Tretiakov’s lectures since one of them was never published. Comparing Benn’s rendering of Tretiakov’s ideas with other publications by Tretiakov, the author discovers that Benn presents an accurate summary of Tretiakov’s critical views on Russian classics and the role of a writer in a Socialist society.

Understanding Dalit Literature: A Critical Perspective Towards Dalit Aesthetics

Indian literature has always been governed by classical norms. Literature has been divided into ‘high culture’ and ‘low culture’. The non-Dalit writing revolves around ‘rasa’ and the motive is ‘art for art’s sake’. Dalit aestheticism is ‘art for life’s sake’. When certain forms and styles are applied imitating Sanskrit poetics, Shakespearean language or Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’, literature is considered to be following beauty parameters that are considered to be necessary for artistic pleasure. This kind of claim of holding traditional Indian aesthetics as a law book for all kinds of literature cannot be validated. The assertion of mainstream aesthetics as aesthetics for pan India is bound to exclude the truth of disregarded subjects. There is a need for Dalit literature to follow alternative aesthetics as the writings are the real story of pain and survival. How can pain be read for the purpose of pleasure? In the case of Dalit literature, the artistic yardsticks are not destroyed rather they are rejected. The traditional aesthetics will not be able to do justice with Dalit literature. Sharankumar Limbale writes “To assert that someone’s writing will be called literature only when ‘our’ literary standards can be imposed on is a sign of cultural dictatorship” (Limbale, 2004, p. 107). This paper will be an attempt to discuss the need for alternative aesthetics to understand Dalit literature.

The Representation and Agency of Artistic Interventions in Community in Mainland China

Based on immersive participatory observation of the curatorial practice of the 2019 OCAT exhibition Rural Construction through Art in Shenzhen, we identified two modes of community-based artistic interventions: a cultural “governance/capital” intervention deeply embedded in the social structure and a collective experimental art production intervention dissociated from the social structure. However, both forms of “production art” are essentially “unities of opposites” integrating incorporation and resistance, consistent with the socialist art policy of promoting the flourishing of all types of arts. Though the aesthetic divide between “art for society’s sake” and “art for art’s sake” positions these artistic interventions in different places in society, we argue that the domain of Chinese contemporary art is shifting away from the studio and toward scenes, events, experience, and dialogue. The approach of “the era of mass art” also means that “art-as-resistance” is being legitimized as “art-as-incorporation” in a subtle but unremitting way.

Decadence and Japan

In the second half of the nineteenth century, literary decadence developed in parallel with japonisme, the taste for Japanese art and culture that seized Western countries following Japan’s opening to foreign trade. This article starts with an analysis of how the intertwining of japonisme and art for art’s sake pioneered by visual artists influenced writers associated with decadence, such as Walter Pater, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde. The evolving relationship between decadence and japonisme assumed a distinctive character in the work of Lafcadio Hearn, who lived in Japan all through the 1890s and wrote a series of influential books about the country. The article closes with an account of how ideas of decadence traveled back to Japan. Yōshū Chikanobu’s color prints reverse the orientalist gaze of Western artists by documenting a Japanese fascination with European culture that traditionalists viewed as a symptom of decadence. As Japanese literature opened itself to cosmopolitan influences, key writers such as Natsume Sōseki, Tanizaki Junichirō, and Mishima Yukio borrowed from Western literatures to provide ambivalent depictions of Japan’s social and cultural changes.

Conclusion

This is a survey of the intersecting problems of politics, aesthetics, and criticism. The identification of poetic personae, artistic play, and ironic reserve cannot be the ultimate target of criticism. An analysis of art executed in purely aesthetic terms elides the political dimension more generally. And this move specifically fails to grapple with the self-serving politics of “art for art’s sake.” The glorious plenitude of art needs to be considered next to its partner, the glorious plenitude of imperial power. These two ineffable marvels are in communication with one another. And the artist is the one who has crafted the dialog. When we move past the terms of the debate set by the artist we can find a psychic life of power that is complicated and disturbing. Talk of the mastery of the master-craftsman hides this from us. It hides both the political complicity and the painful paradoxes that must be lived in order to embrace the glory and shame of complicity. Such talk hides the way in which artistry captures, reflects, reproduces, intervenes in, and celebrates the socio-political milieu more generally. Or, to the extent one does discuss the above, an overly sentimental discourse of “resistance” is allowed to guide the discussion. We finish with an appraisal of the problematic politics of intertextuality and allusivity as critical obsessions. The narrowness of such a research agenda can itself become politically complicit by offering a bibliophilic hiding place for people who have something to hide.

Introduction

The Introduction situates the discussion in the present book in its historical and autobiographical contexts, and delineates the characteristics of poetry that emerges from the experience of political oppression. The major terms employed—‘the language of oppression’, ‘freedom’, and ‘artistic engagement’—are defined. Poetry, politics, freedom, and oppression are considered through their manifestations in language that governs private and public lives. While the Introduction establishes that the main argument does not proceed from views of ‘art for art’s sake’ or ‘art for social justice’, the notions of artistic commitment and the social utility of art are presented in order to explore the processes of language as they play a role in determining how people understand their place in a turbulent world, and, more importantly, how literary language helps them define, and perhaps also achieve, a sense of personal freedom.

RUSSIAN LITERARY CRITICISM FROM 1941 TO 1945 WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF CONCEPT OF “PURE ART”

The aesthetic views of representatives of Soviet literary criticism during the Great patriotic war, in relation to the orientation of the supporters of the concept of pure art, are discussed in the article. In this aspect both dominant and not so widely spread tendencies in criticism of the designated period are being comprehended. The character of reception of artistic heritage, which belongs to the supporters of the concept of pure art in the Russian culture of 19 century, in the criticism from 1941 to 1945 is being identified. Despite the prevalence of categorical statements which consider the concept of “art for art’s sake” as a vector of creative activity to be absolutely unacceptable for a Soviet writer and statements in defense of utilitarian attitudes, it is being proved that a number of principles of “art for art’s sake” are still being mainstreamed by the critics of the period of war. This, however, is being carried out without reference to this concept or to the judgments of its authoritative spokesmen.

Spiritual Practice & Experience: A Kind of Contemporary Art View Leading to Civilization

As a kind of perceptual sign of human spiritual dynamics and civilization height, “contemporary art” does not pursue the performing “sense of existence” under the spotlight, but leads to civilization and seeks its own “sense of belonging” through the current spiritual practice and exploration of the living noumenon of art — human— to the daily life world. Criticizing and deconstructing the traditional purist view of art, rejecting art for art’s sake, and promoting “art noumenon” to “existence noumenon” — value significance of Karl Popper’s so-called “Three Worlds”, which are mutually dependent and promoting, mutually opposite and complementary, has been historically awakened and highlighted. Among them, “world two (experiencing world)”, which is characterized by human spiritual practice and behavior experience, has the most life significance and artistic value “from culture to civilization”. Define contemporary art from five key points combined with world two: reflecting the daily state of consciousness or mental state of human and society; highlighting the behavior, interaction, recognition of spiritual activities, and the everydayness of the effect on three worlds; an existing way of perceptually mastering the world; a symbol of apperception, personification, and living humanity world; and an artistic and dynamic world of connecting and driving the three worlds. Its fundamental logic is that: experience is cognition, that is, the continuous unity and dynamic unity of expression; it is the highest belonging and value conversion of culture leading to civilization; it is the true art that pursues truth, discovers possibility and highlights human nature.