Renaissance as an Aesthetic Mechanism: the Renaissance and the Russian Silver Age

Zagryadskaya Alisa Sergeevna ORCID: 0000-0001-8085-3887 Postgraduate 199034, Russia, g. Saint Petersburg, ul. Mendeleevskaya Liniya, 5 zagryadska@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Renaissance as a phenomenon of sensuality

The understanding of the Western European Renaissance as an integral phenomenon began in the generalizing classical studies of J. Michelet, G. Voigt and J. Burkhardt and was revised at a time when science became, according to E. Panofsky, "increasingly distrustful of any periodization" ^{[1, p. 49]}. The universalization of the Renaissance takes it out of the time frame of the conditional XIV-XVI centuries and the Eurocentric perspective, which allowed researchers to discover similar phenomena in different cultures, whether it be the medieval "renaissance in the art of the West" (E. Panofsky) or the Eastern Renaissance (V. M. Alekseev, N. I. Konrad). Comparative approaches have led to the relativization and "dispersion" of the Renaissance, which, in turn, causes the need to clarify its specifics and characteristics.

In particular, the Russian cultural (spiritual, religious and philosophical) Renaissance is called the period of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, when there was a creative upsurge in all spheres of life. Russians Russian Renaissance, defined by the Eurasianist P. P. Suvchinsky as "the healing of the intelligentsia from the nihilistic madness of the 60-80s" ^[2], was popularized by N. A. Berdyaev: "We have experienced a kind of philosophical, artistic, mystical renaissance"; "cultural renaissance of the beginning of the century"; "Russian aesthetic Renaissance" ^[3]. The apt metaphor took root, went beyond the figure of speech and acquired descriptive power.

A comparison of the European Renaissance and the Silver Age is carried out by many researchers. "At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia was experiencing its own Renaissance, which was called the religious and philosophical Renaissance," V. P. Shestakov notes ^[4]. "The era of the Silver Age in Russian culture is as distinctive and historically isolated as the Renaissance or Reformation in European culture," believes N. K. Bonetskaya ^[5]. Although the comparison is on the surface, the methodological tools for measuring depth vary. In different sources, the concepts of the "Russian Renaissance" and the "Silver Age" act as synonymous, are synthesized ("Renaissance of the Silver Age") or are divorced ^[6]. Some authors identify criteria and factors that bring the Renaissance and the era of Russian modernism closer from cultural and philosophical positions ^[7], others formulate a single spiritual paradigm of Renaissance metaculture ^[8]. But what exactly allows us to use the term "Renaissance" in relation to different epochs and cultural situations (in particular, the Russian Silver Age) not only metaphorically, but also conceptually?

As M. T. Petrov emphasized in his research on the problem of regional renessances, discussions about the (non)universality of the Renaissance lead to a legitimate question about how possible it is to compare historical processes in different epochs and parts of the world ^[9]. This, in turn, requires us to clarify on what grounds the convergence of different "renessances" can be carried out. One of the possible answers may be suggested by the morphological study of O. Spengler's cultures, which distinguished between analogy (externally similar phenomena that formed in different ways) and homology (phenomena that look different, but have a common morphological origin) ^[10]. In Spengler's concept, the search for one's own modernity for each culture is the personification of the principle of homology. Whereas, within the framework of similarity, events having a similar form may have different meanings for subjects of different cultures. Based on the principle of morphological comparison and homology of historical phenomena, it is possible to detect the work of a similar mechanism in different cultures, to identify patterns and general principles.

It is obvious that the cultural situation in Europe of the XV century is different from Russia at the end of the XIX century, but in both cases we are talking about the search for a spiritual and aesthetic synthesis characteristic of the Renaissance as a meta-phenomenon. In the Western European Renaissance, when a new interest in materiality arose, combined with personal-affective perception, and new symbolic chronotopes took shape (in the physical world, in the space of religious worship, in the dimension of art), the importance of sensuality increased significantly. Similar processes of formation of new ways of marking reality and reactualizing sensory cognition took place during the period when Russian culture experienced a short but fruitful "age", called the Silver Age.

Despite the large number of studies devoted to the Renaissance as an epoch and principle, the approach from the point of view of sensuality has not yet received a detailed understanding. Meanwhile, in today's aesthetic science, the topic of sensuality is becoming more and more relevant, returning the discipline to its own origins. The attention to the bases of perception, to somatics and sensitivity increases. In the era of virtualization, when sensuality is undergoing new radical changes, the topic of transformations of receptivity and the re-symbolization of the sensory world is particularly intriguing. Thus, our goal is to give the concept of "renaissance" an analytical effectiveness from the point of view of aesthetics, identifying for this the aesthetic and philosophical foundations of the universality of the Renaissance associated with changes in sensuality.

A priori forms of sensuality and aesthetic mechanism

Space and time are fundamental categories of human experience, the conceptualization of which, however, may vary from culture to culture. The reasons to consider the unification of these categories into a single coordinate grid (at least when it comes to the European world) can be found in the transcendental aesthetics of I. Kant with its analysis of a priori forms of sensuality that collect disparate perceptions. Pre-experimental pure contemplations exist in the Kantian system as ontic coordinates that fix the order of existence, making sensory cognition possible. Phenomena within the boundaries of these coordinates can take place due to the assigned values. The idea of space and time as organizing coordinates leads to the consideration that their reinterpretation will cause the recoding of the phenomenal content that they organize ^[11].

Many researchers recognize the cultural foundation of actual time and spatial thinking, which allows us to talk about the variability of encodings. For example, in the "new anthropology" there are perspectivist and multi—naturalist concepts (E. Viveiros de Castro), in cognitive linguistics and theory of knowledge - relativistic and post-relativistic (S. Y. Borodai). These approaches are united by the idea that different cultures perceive the basic characteristics of existence differently. The same principle can be applied to the (very conditionally unified) European civilization with its historical change of tactics. In the words of M. Heidegger, a phenomenon is something that "seems to be itself as being and being structure" ^{[12, p. 83]}, and phenomenology expresses not the meaningful "what" of the objects of philosophical research, but their "how". Thus, the way in which existence appears to be depends on how it is ordered in a particular coordinate system and reveals itself to perception.

Based on the provisions on the fundamentality of space and time for experience, as well as the possibility of describing them as the basic coordinates of reality, the aesthetic mechanism of the Renaissance can be described as follows. Following the transformation of the space-time matrix, its contents are re-symbolized: the ways of chronotopy of existence change, and phenomena acquire new meanings. The change in the concepts of space and time is accompanied by a redefinition of the existential position of man as an entity with the ability to question himself. The space-time frame affects what place the subject assigns to himself in the world, how he aesthetically comprehends the data of sensory experience and builds hierarchies. Receptive principles, ranking and representation of sensations are changing — in short, sensuality itself. The transformation of sensuality is reflected in art, which serves as the language of mastering the world. The intensification of artistic and spiritual search, the emergence of new descriptive models and forms of art are the result of culture's comprehension of a new reality. Thus, the phenomena that are called "renaissance" represent an intensive development of culture caused by a change in the conceptualization of space and time.

As an example, let's consider the trajectories of chronotopy changes in the Renaissance and the Silver Age; let's identify the factors that caused the new symbolic design of space and time, as well as the aesthetic consequences of this transformation.

The Aesthetic mechanism of Rebirth

The categories of space and time were not uniform for all European countries and social groups, however, we agree with A. Ya. Gurevich that it is possible to talk about a single substrate on which differences arise ^[13].

Within the framework of the medieval folk consciousness, space was divided into local habitats (an agricultural estate as a model of the Universe). Natural time, traditionally described as a Circle, corresponded to the agrarian cycle, the space-time coordinates retained mythological uncertainty and amorphousness. This mapping of reality symbolically corresponds to the undifferentiation of the individual and nature, reflected in the artistic hyperbolizations of the Middle Ages. Medieval Christian time is traditionally described as a linearity defined by eschatological landmarks (Arrow). The model of the Universe in the church-feudal reality was the cathedral, the world was organized by a hierarchy going to heaven, where everything was ranked according to proximity to God. This picture of reality is consistent with the allegorical interpretation of phenomena and the dualistic vision of man, based on the polarization of the upper and lower. Pre-Christian art was alien to naturalism, symbolically displaying meaning rather than specifically sensual content. The symbolism and relativity of chronotopy persisted until the High Middle Ages: the landscape is abstract, portrait similarity is not essential, the heroes of the chivalric epic are little affected by the passage of time and abruptly overcome space ^[13].

Already in the Middle Ages, changes were being laid that prepared the ground for Renaissance revival. A completely new European class of entrepreneurs and merchants is being formed, which marks the rationalization of space-time concepts, both mythological and Christian ^[14]. At the same time, a new chronotopy matured to a significant extent within the Catholic cult: the dogma of the filioque penetrates into the spiritual life, the belief in purgatory is strengthened, and the ascetic ideal associated with the figure of St. Francis of Assisi is reinterpreted. All this contributed to a sensual and material "turn" and spatial exploration of the earthly world, the growth of a personal reflexive factor in the self-understanding of a Christian.

By the 14th century, significant changes in the picture of reality determined the titular "discovery of the world and man" for the Renaissance (J. Burckhardt). In the Renaissance ranking of existence, the vertical hierarchy ascending to the divine is replaced by the convergence of the upper and lower. The spatial characteristics are being rebuilt: the length of the routes acquires a new semantic content, the previously stable boundaries of local habitats become permeable. The geographical discoveries of the Renaissance expanded the space, destroying the white spots on the maps. Archaeological discoveries, coupled with a cultural orientation towards antiquity, have built a connection with the ancients, forming the horizon of the past. At the same time, the creation of ideal images of the future begins in utopian Renaissance projects. The dichotomy of terrestrial linear time and unchanging Eternity, adjacent to the argrarian cycle, gives way to the "coming of time to earth." At the point between the past and the future, the omphalos of the lasting "here and now" is indicated.

Renaissance chronotoping, in which a person becomes a point of reference, corresponds to a new image of physicality, which is now also subject to the fundamental importance of space and time, marking out existence. In the official Renaissance culture, the body fits into a system of microcosmic hierarchies. Costume, dance movements are organized in accordance with the idea of a static pedestal body formulated by Agnolo Firenzuola ^[15], etiquette regulations regulate the boundary between the external and internal. The new bodily topography assumes an architectural hierarchy of "floors" and a delimited individualized beginning ^[16].

Along with mastering the chronotope, there is a re-symbolization of specific sensations. Various thinkers noted the strengthening of the role of vision by the early Modern period, which cramps medieval hearing and other ways of perception (the concept of "visual backwardness" by Lucien Fevre, "the great watershed" by Marshall McLuhan, studies by historians of the Annals School). In the official field, vision takes the place of a key source of information for a long time, determining the New European opticocentric ontologies. The "secondary" feelings, which have been associated with the animal nature since antiquity, have historically not been given an intellectual meaning. The curtailment of the rights of "lower" feelings corresponds to the idea of N. Elias about the process of digitization through the separation of the "animal" part and a change in the "threshold of modesty" against the background of crowding of people in the growing modern cities ^[17]. The hierarchization of the body, the strengthening of the distinction between external and internal, the new bodily etiquette, "body-pedestal" and "body-bastion" — these innovations of the Renaissance reflect a new attitude to somatics.

In turn, the mythological intention towards the non-separation of man from nature makes itself felt in informal culture and carnival practices. Such signs of the grotesque are, speaking in the terminology of J. Bataille, heterogeneous relative to the official framework. In the Renaissance, they penetrate into humanistic literature and painting, existing as a non-existence of official hierarchies. The fluid topology and the attraction to the "corporeal bottom" reach an apotheosis in the fantastic images of Bosch and Brueghel. According to M. M. Bakhtin, in Renaissance art, grotesque physicality reflects a special connection between a person and the space-time world. Rabelaisian gigantomania, justifying physical reality, rediscovers man as the measure of all things, and the "pathos of spatial and temporal distances and expanses" ^{[18, p. 317]}, which is also characteristic of Shakespeare, Camoens, Cervantes, testifies to trust in the earthly world.

Against the background of the restoration of physical reality in rights, the body has become an important subject of artistic interest: the doctrine of proportion is developing, the representation of individual experiences is deepening, the genre of portrait is developing. The new human-dimensional optics determines the appearance of perspective as a "symbolic form" (E. Panofsky). The Renaissance artist acquires the ability to create his own space and time, the chronotope of the painting. Significant changes related to spatial and temporal forms occur in the territory of the novel ^[18]. With the development of court-aristocratic and stage dance, the first textbooks on choreography appear, which record not only the figures, but also the kinesthetic experience of the dancer.

It should be noted that until its decline, the Renaissance tended towards the unity of spirit and body, assuming an immanent spirituality of the world, as it happens, for example, in Neoplatonic philosophy. In Marsilio Ficino, God and the world are united into an integral reality on the basis of a single hierarchy of existence, where there is a constant process of descent from the highest to the lowest and ascent from the bottom up. The personal anthropological principle of Christian culture meets the cosmic concepts of antiquity in an elusive balance. A similar harmony existed in the territory of Renaissance painting until the appearance of disturbing Baroque motifs (for example, in the work of Michelangelo), which marked the crisis of the Renaissance.

The desire for organic sensory-supersensible integrity, reminiscent of the mythopoeic feeling of the living cosmos, is also one of the key characteristics of the Renaissance as a universal phenomenon — as well as the appeal to the primary sources, the actualization of antiquity against the background of a changing picture of reality. The re-symbolization of the world and man with his physicality and sensations, endowing them with new (or rediscovered on new grounds old) meanings is a consequence of the reformatting of a priori forms of sensuality encoding the phenomena of space-time coordinates. Thus, the change in chronotopy in the Renaissance contributed to the dynamic development of culture and the emergence of new forms of art that comprehend the re-read existence on its territory.

The aesthetic mechanism of the Silver Age

The re-reading of spatial and temporal coordinates, a worldview shift and the dynamic development of various spheres of spiritual life accompanied the Russian culture of the late XIX — early XX centuries. We agree with M. A. Voskresenskaya that it would be hasty to call the Russian Renaissance, which was realized in a rather narrow group of the cultural elite, an "independent and full-scale cultural and historical epoch" ^[19]. Probably, the renaissance in history is destined to become more and more local as culture becomes more complex and fragmented into discourses, just as epistems that lasted for centuries by the twentieth century were replaced by micro-epistems. However, even socially localized and interrupted by the October revolution, the Russian Silver Age turned out to be an extremely fruitful period for the domestic space of meanings, which influenced Western culture, among other things.

The end of the 19th century was marked by changes associated with the scientific and technological revolution. Man mastered the habitat represented by large cities, mechanisms and ways of communication. The mindset preceding the Silver Age, which P. P. Suvchinsky characterized as "nihilistic madness", corresponded to the chronotope, focused on the ideas of progress, progressive development, and capacity building. The time of the technological chronotope accelerates, the space turns out to be marked out in detail and disenchanted. The rhythm of life in megacities, as G. Simmel was one of the first to note, suggested a new type of individuality, focused on the rapid change of impressions, reasonableness, depersonalization of urban economic relations ^[20]. The growth of utilitarianism and functionalism in the technical world threatened the mechanization of the spirit and mind, the loss of human integrity. The positivist worldview, defined by F. G. Junger as the formation of the "doctrine of mechanical movement", corresponded to naturalistic and realistic trends in art. These are the spatial-temporal arrangements and their consequences, which set the paradigm of alienation, from which the figures of the Silver Age are based.

The revision of the worldview undertaken by the Russian Renaissance required an appeal to solid foundations, new cultural syntheses, and a search for transcendent depth. The search intention finds external expression in wanderings, both literary (images of exotic countries, ancient empires, fairy-tale kingdoms in art) and physical, as in the case of the poet-wanderer Nikolai Gumilev. It is not for nothing that the images of wandering, passing by, and chance encounters turn out to be key to the art of the early twentieth century. As in the Renaissance, the pathos of space acquires great importance in the poetics of the Silver Age. This is no longer the optimistic "trust in the earthly world" that M. M. Bakhtin discovered in Renaissance literature, but rather the chronotopology of the path of the enchanted wanderer, who seeks to win back the dimension of the spirit from civilization. Nevertheless, the Silver Age has launched a large—scale program aimed at changing the world - at least utopically declared in the territory of art and philosophy.

In artistic and religious-philosophical concepts, space ceases to be an inanimate substance, a simple container of material bodies. Now it is a lively space with high-quality markings, full of hierophanies. Formulating his "Hellenism of Russian poetry", O. Mandelstam defined it as "the conscious environment of a person with utensils instead of indifferent objects, humanizing the surrounding world, warming it with the subtlest teleological warmth" ^{[21, vol. 2, p. 182]}. A qualitative dimension in the worldview of the Silver Age is also acquired by time, which ceases to be the bad infinity of evolutionism — now it is an existential nonlinear time, for which the internal connection of phenomena is more significant than their sequential organization.

The chronotope of the culture of the Silver Age corresponds to a new idea of man, who in the context of the spiritual quest of the epoch is interpreted as "the embodiment of the infinite in the finite" ^[22]. Like the Renaissance, the Russian Silver Age strives to harmonize spirit and body, heavenly and earthly, developing the concept of spiritual and bodily transformation. The body in the chronotope of the Russian Renaissance is subject to transformation along with all reality and serves as an instrument of aestheticization. The idea manifested in poetry, painting, and behavior becomes for this epoch a real way of being, based on which reality is perceived mythopoetically. The somatic problems of culture at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are an important part of religious and philosophical research. In the teachings of N. Berdyaev and V. Solovyov, the body, in accordance with the Platonic Christian line, represents a passive "choir", and the flesh, which has its own autonomy, is enlightened and spiritualized. Another approach, focused on understanding transgressive bodily experiences and Dionysian "ecstasies", can be found in V. Rozanov, D. Merezhkovsky and in the concept of Dionysianism in Russia. Ivanov. In everyday practices, the interference of the bodily and spiritual determines the bodily code. The expressive external forms of the bohemian environment (dandyism, creativity, theatricality) hyperbolically reflected the deep transformations of the worldview, one way or another characteristic of modernist culture. As I. Krebel notes in his experience of topological reflection ^[23], rhythm, body, and spatial position were extremely important for the Silver Age, which become a way of inhabiting reality as a living cosmos.

In this regard, it seems promising to describe the new symbolization of sensations in the culture of the Russian Renaissance, which assumed overcoming opticocentrism through the idea of synthesis of arts, saw in free dance a plastic overcoming of previous hierarchies ^[24], glorified the olfactory and aesthetic in poetry, rehabilitates the oneiric (dreams and various kinds of "dreams"). The revolution of the Silver Age is certainly religious, philosophical, ideological, but also sensitive.

The world-modeling codes accompanying the new chronotopy are reflected in the new artistic forms of the Silver Age. Where can a charmed wanderer find refuge in search of lost integrity? The art of Russian modernism masters different times and spaces. Like the Renaissance, it turns for synthesis to antiquity (antiquity and its own archaism), looking for inspiration in the East. The artistic here acts as a way of fixing the picture of the world and evidence of the actual chronotopy of reality; at the same time, time itself becomes a new chronotope-the space of art, which was recognized in the culture of the Silver Age as the main method of transforming everyday life and the world as a whole. The artistic creativity of Russian modernism reveals its own ways of transcoding phenomena for each direction and author. For example, if in the poetry of symbolism the world is filled with allegories, and phenomena refer to the highest reality of dreams and secrets, then acmeism offers a phenomenological rediscovery of things and the spiritualization of everyday life.

Turning to the past and the future, actualizing antiquity in the present in order to gain unity in spirit and body are characteristic aesthetic features of Renaissance universal culture manifested in the Russian Silver Age.

Conclusion

The foundations of the universality of the Renaissance as a metahistorical phenomenon or cultural property can thus be found in the aesthetic mechanism common to "revivals". We propose to describe it as a process of transformation of a priori forms of sensuality — a cultural reinterpretation of the actual chronotopy. Following the spatial-temporal coordinates, the phenomenal content encoded by them changes; the meanings and symbolic content of objects, human understanding change. The renewal of the image of reality is accompanied by an "explosion" (M. Lotman) of artistic and ideological searches, high intensity of culture. The result of the new generation, which defines the worldview and the image of the subject, is the development of thought, the development of new artistic forms, a large number of new names and figures in philosophy, art, and public life. These phenomena are noticeable in the Western European Renaissance and the Russian Silver Age, and the same model of the aesthetic mechanism can be applied to the aesthetic analysis of fruitful cultural changes in different eras.