ИСТИНА

The talk dealt with the issue of non-official culture in Soviet art history of the 1950 and the beginning of the 1960s, its social functions and forms. At that time the Soviet society went through its first after the World War II ideological crisis and although the official ideology still dominated some flash-points of liberal thought started arising. As a rule these islands of freedom obtained concealed forms and mainly spread among scholars and intellectuals. The talk aims to consider alternative paths inside the official ideology as they manifested themselves in “text” of culture. We are going to focus on marginal forms of art history practice as a mean to protect itself against eventual pressure of official institutions. To describe the issue we operate with a term “discipline niche social strategy”. The term brings to delineate general directions of art history in Moscow from the viewpoint of their secluded contre-ideological attitude. We aim to discuss the following area of the discipline: 1) ‘znatochestvo’ (concentration of attribution of piece of art) as a mean to avoid ideological stereotypes; 2) formal analysis as actualization of Wien and German art history heritage going back to Russian art school of the 1920s (Russian formalists + RAHN); 3) inclination with science: the first steps of Russian semiotics. There will supposed to be discussed how the heritage of H. Wölfflin, A. Riegl and M. Dvorak made impact on Soviet art historians A. Fedorov-Davydov, V. Lazarev, B. Vipper. We are going to focus both on their teaching practice and texts, on their research works on Middle Age Europe and Renaissance as a source of hidden discourse. The issue of alternative art history will be regarded in a broad context of the related trends in Soviet humanities of the 1950-60s. We intend to discuss philology (from linguistics to folklore) in aspect of its impact on other humanities (primarily art history).