| The aim of the project is to describe analytically the cultural phenomenon of zhiznetvorchestvo (literally life-creation ), which was rather typical for habitual customs [Pierre Bourdieu] of Russian modernism. During that period the last decade of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century, Russia s so-called Silver Age there was an unprecedented interrelation between and interpenetration of social and cultural reality on the one hand [what is used to be labelled the public sphere by J.Habermas] and the personal biographical identities of writers and artists on the other. The cultural ikons of the said time (poets, prosaicists, painters and art-directors) were decidedly and consciously conforming their lives to already existing mythogenic popular models or created heuristically new, original biographies , highly aestheticized artistic lives , both in their works of imagination and in real life. By clarifying the theoretical and historical basis of this phenomenon, the project will contribute to a better understanding of the relevant artistic products of this important period in Russian culture. In the four chapters of the dissertation there will be given a motivated interpretation of the structure of the convergence bounded by life and art, the intersection of the public-social and personal-cultural realities in the investigated chronotope [M.Bakhtin] of Russian modernism. As a postulatio princeps of the project there exists an all-embracing desideratum to discover and determine the inner mechanisms standing behind the phenomenon of zhiznetvorchestvo which entails a detailed examination of the structure of behaviour and of the somatic (gender) identities of the persons active in the cultural field. The basic sources for the present research could be found in many-faced textual varia: memoirs, autobiographies, private letters, and literature of pure fiction. |
