"engineer of the human soul" is not Stalin's notion of the writer.
I think it is Gorky's.
My theoretical outlook on art is very little touched by Russian education. It
mostly developed in the USA in fighting incompetent
professors and learning from good ones.
Boris Shoshensky
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Rand Chapter One: Psycho-epistemology of Art
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:04:52 GMT
"Art is inextricably tied to man's survival - not to his physical survival -
but to that on which his physical survival depends: to the preservation and
survival of his consciousness"
This is one of Rand's notions that Sciabarra ("Ayn Rand: The Russian
Radical")
would probably source to Nikolai Lossky and the distinctly Russian
conflation
of intense spirituality with scientific explanation - as also reflected by
Stalin's notion of the writer as the "engineer of the human soul"
So it's no surprise that is shared by Boris, who comes from a Russian
education, and is still attached to the visual expression of the Russian
avant garde of that period.
And so am I -- not as an artist -- but as an aesthete who enjoys it, and who
may be the only non-Ukrainian to regularly visits the Ukrainian Institute of
Modern Art here in Chicago.
But I do notice that a more religious, i.e. Orthodox Christian, expression
of
spirituality seems ever closer to emerging from the work of the living
exponents of that tradition. (although if they actually began to paint
orthodox icons, they could no longer call themselves Modern artists)
My problem with it is that there is no way to prove or disprove that "Art is
inextricably tied to man's survival" (so as science, it fails) -- and within
a critical discussion of art, it's a conversation stopper. Have you ever
tried to account for the survival of your own consciousness?
Substitute "my survival" for "man's survival", and Ayn is telling us that she
desperately needs a connection to certain works of art (mostly by Victor
Hugo) -- and the consequence of the desperation of that connection, is the
extreme narrowness of her taste.
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