Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/96

70 demand merely photographic reproduction, but they insisted that the artist, too, should cultivate the sense of exactitude and precision which modern science was developing and maturing. They clung firmly to objectivism as contrasted with the subjectivism of the romanticists.

Černyševskii and his successors (Dobroljubov and Pisarev) conceived realism in the sense of philosophic positivism, conceived it as naturalism. Seeing that Russian social and political conditions made even of literature an instrument of "accusation," it is not surprising that the literary critics, the aestheticists, should approve these accusations. The question was now mooted whether the ugly, no less than the beautiful, could properly be the object of art. To the realists, who answered this question in the affirmative, Gogol seemed preferable to Puškin, although Puškin, and our classical writers in general, had paved the way for realism. After the days of Černyševskii and Dobroljubov, French realism began to make headway in the form of naturalism. Zola, in especial, came to the front in the middle sixties; a decade later (1875–80), through the instrumentality of Turgenev, he expounded his theory (which was likewise directed against romanticism and sentimentalism) in the periodical "Věstnik Evropy." But many authors and critics failed to keep within reasonable bounds; exaggeration prevailed in art as well as in criticism; hence resulted the nihilistic "annihilation of aesthetics."

ii. Philosophically, realism is positivism. Comte taught the realists to regard mathematics and its exactitude as the scientific ideal, and thus whereas the romanticists had extolled the nature philosophy, the realists proclaimed that mathematics and those natural sciences in which mathematics were employed were the genuine and proper knowledge. The mental sciences were condemned, or the attempt was made to transform them into natural sciences. Psychology, in especial, became physiology and biology. Positivism was conceived by the realists in a materialist and sensualist sense. As a rule, stress was laid upon positivist method.

Pisarev, in the presentation of his views, sometimes followed Comte's definition, although he failed to conceive it with precision. He said, for example, that the realist desired to establish scientifically nothing more than the relations of phenomena, not general results. But this term "general results" is extremely vague, and does not belong to the true