State Academy of Arts: Tradition and Modernity. Part Two: «Smoldering Traditions of Modernity»

Abstract

The State Academy of Arts is a phenomenon of Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th century. Archival reconstructions of its history are still continuing. The scientific research task of the State Academy of Arts was a comprehensive study of the issues of art and artistic culture, the solution of the problem of the synthesis of arts, as well as the unification of domestic specialists who worked in this field. The emergence of State Academy of Arts was conditioned, on the one hand, by the building of the institutions of the young Soviet state, and, on the other hand, by aspirations for interdisciplinarity and creative synthesis as an inertial movement of the Silver Age culture. The uniqueness of State Academy of Arts was the integration of pre-revolutionary academic and emerging Soviet practices. However, at the turn of 1920-1930-ies in the Soviet Union, repressive tendencies intensified: searches for enemies, «purges» and mass arrests swept over scientific institutions. «Akademicheskoe Delo», «Delo Slavistov», «Pulkovskoe Delo», «Leningradskoe Delo» and others led to the death of many scientists and the loss of scientific directions, the defeat, above all, of the socio-humanitarian sciences. «Cold Civil War» as a Result of the Cultural and Psychological Traumas of the Twentieth Century carries the risks of the smoldering traditions of totalitarianism. What is needed is educational activities, responsible pedagogical and psychological work with historical memory, the restoration of forgotten names and the cultivation of attitudes towards social harmony in a complex and diverse modern society