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The subject of the article is the content of the concept, answering the question of what an artistic intention is and clarifying its nature. Coupled with a number of concepts in textual criticism, art criticism, aesthetics (author’s intention, plan, idea, teleology, purpose, completeness, integrity), the concept of “artistic intent” does not duplicate any of them. To this day, Dmitry S. Likhachev’s judgment has not lost its relevance, according to which “The will of the author and his plan are extremely complex phenomena and, in their very essence, still little studied. Representatives of different scientific specialties should take part in studying them in the future.” The article makes an attempt to cover the morphological and etymological aspects of the concept; its definitions and approaches to understanding available in the research of domestic humanities are compared.

There are excellent research papers in the field of visual studies that examine the relationship between war and images. This paper has other and additional aims. The first is to examine not so much how war is transferred from the ground to image production, but how war, as intrusion of the real, forces a general reflection on image techniques. The second is to examine whether there is an instance of art that is somehow different from the instance of the mere image, which is always related to something that manifests itself in war, and which, especially on the occasion of a war, invites a broader reflection on existence, judgement and the world. The paths taken for these investigations are rooted in the idea that a (political) theory of art cannot be reduced to an internal classification of image theory, since it investigates aspects that go beyond the definition of the image itself.

The article presents a comparative analysis of I.V. Goethe’s “The Word to Young Poets” („Ein Wort für junge Dichter,“ 1833) and the article written in connection with A.M. Gorky death by the theorist of Marxist aesthetics D. (G.) Lukács “The Liberator” („Der Befreier,“ 1936). The subject of the analysis is Lukách’s interpretation of the ‛liberator’ concept used by Goethe in relation to his own work. Lukács, who chose this keyword from Goethe’s paper as the title of his own article, tries within the framework of the theme set by Goethe about the liberating mission of the writer to prove the validity of applying the theses of the German classic in the era of proletarian art. In the course of the undertaken analysis, the author of the article comes to the conclusion about the selectivity of Lukács’s approaches to research material. That was dictated by the specificities of the functional-target settings the author of “The Liberator,” dedicated not just to a great writer per se, but to the classic of socialist realism, was guided by. Therefore, Lukács’s interpretation of Goethe’s text isn’t based on a comprehensive analysis of the German classic and the Soviet writer views on a given topic, but is limited to the juxtaposition of iconic semantic constants that are embedded in the word “liberator,” important for Lukács in terms of their relevance to Gorky’s personality and work.

There are excellent research papers in the field of visual studies that examine the relationship between war and images. This paper has other and additional aims. The first is to examine not so much how war is transferred from the ground to image production, but how war, as intrusion of the real, forces a general reflection on image techniques. The second is to examine whether there is an instance of art that is somehow different from the instance of the mere image, which is always related to something that manifests itself in war, and which, especially on the occasion of a war, invites a broader reflection on existence, judgement and the world. The paths taken for these investigations are rooted in the idea that a (political) theory of art cannot be reduced to an internal classification of image theory, since it investigates aspects that go beyond the definition of the image itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this first of two articles, I look at the project for the "Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology" in connection with the idea of a synthesis of the "artistic sciences" as the principal task of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN, 1921–1930) in Moscow. The most important feature of the Academy was the unity of its epistemological conception (the system of artistic sciences) and the institutional structure of the Academy (its "departments," "sections," and "laboratories"), which embodied the interdisciplinary intention of uniting the philosophy of art, the artistic sciences, and artistic experimentation. I analyze the connection of the project with the task of "concept formation" in the artistic sciences, which was recognized in European philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century as the main criterion for scientificity in the human sciences. I also investigate how the Encyclopedia project, developed by Gustav Shpet, took into account previous attempts to systematize aesthetic terminology (in nineteenth-century dictionaries). I show that the project of the "Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology" was not the sole attempt to create a new dictionary of aesthetic concepts and of the cultural sciences. Similar projects were being developed in the 1920s and 30s in Germany (Erich Rothacker planned to produce Handwörterbuch der gesamten gemeingeisteswissenschaftlichen und kulturphilosophischen Grundbegriffe) and in France (Étienne Souriau published Vocabulaire d'esthétique; see Souriau 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this second article, I look at the history of the creation of the "Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology" within the State Academy of the Artistic Sciences. I analyze various versions of the encyclopedia's conception proposed by Wassily Kandinsky and Gustav Shpet and also at the theoretical bases for these conceptions. I then show how the work on the Encyclopedia was connected with the institutional transformations in the Academy. A key factor in the work on the Encyclopedia was the extensive discussions of the fundamental aesthetic terms that took place in the Philosophy Department and in sections of GAKhN. As the dynamics of the discussions also determined changes in the conception of the Encyclopedia, so work on it shifted more and more from a project for creating a new system of aesthetic concepts to a reconstruction of the "history of concepts." Such a transition marked the main vector of the development of European discussions about aesthetic concepts—from the creation of systems of aesthetic categories to historical reflection on the semantic transformations of categories. In conclusion, I investigate the cessation of work on the Encyclopedia in 1929 in response to the outside ideological pressure and the elimination of the possibility for autonomous theoretical work within the walls of the Academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]