But only those who know how to see and hear will transmit them[75].

Such is the objective, realistic understanding of art and, like it, the understanding of philosophy, science and technology. The other view, according to which the artist and the cultural worker in general organizes what he wants and how he wants, the subjective and illusionistic view of art and his culture, is profoundly alien to the former in the order of the cultural worker's well-being and his worldview. But both views are formally equal, equally possible, isotenic interpretations of one and the same fact: culture. However, of course, one or another understanding of one's own activity, although capable of being interpreted in both directions, cannot but be affected by the special tonality of the activity itself.

XXIII

We will speak more narrowly and more definitely, about artistic activity. Is it because the artist saturates certain areas of space with the content accessible to the receptivity for which the work is intended, it is distorted and made especially strong or especially weakly capacious, i.e., it is organized? or because it is already organized, possesses special capacities, and is therefore curved, and therefore allows for an uneven load of the required content, both are formally one and the other. It can be figuratively explained: the artist saturates a certain area with some content, forcefully presses the content there, forcing the space to yield and accommodate more than it usually accommodates without this effort. To a geometer who measures spatial extensions—lengths, surfaces, volumes—as a chosen or physical standard, the extension of a given area, and consequently its capacity and curvature, will not appear to be altered by this. This is true, but it means nothing: for as a geometer, in terms of its basic physical process, it is incapable of noticing a work of art at all; the latter is inaccessible to him, just as a magnetic field is inaccessible to one who has neither iron nor metal masses at all. Of course, not perceiving a work of art that simply does not exist for a geometer, the latter has nothing to say about the curvature of its space.

This is one approach. The other understands space itself as having in certain areas a markedly distinct capacity in relation to one or those perceptions on which the artist is counting. These places of space turn out to be greedily absorbing, sucking up the means with which this artist works; or, on the contrary, these means are very poorly accepted by them. The artist with his means of capturing moves in a given space, as in uneven terrain, and from the way these means of his scatter from some places and accumulate in others, he gets an idea of the organization of space. He then feels compelled by the objective conditions of work, by the terrain in which he works, to act in this way and not otherwise, not to do what seems desirable to him, and, on the contrary, to do the undesirable and even unforeseen. He is as if rubbing paper with a pencil with a model placed under it, while the images appear by themselves. This is the realistic approach to art.

But, again, from the formal side, both are only interpretations of one fact. In all the arts there is one process. In music, the characteristics of the capacity of the corresponding spaces are tempos, rhythms, accents, meters with different shades, as dealing with durations, then melody that uses pitch, harmony and orchestration, saturating the space with coexisting elements, etc. In poetry, the same meters and rhythms, melody and instrumentation, as well as visual, tactile, and other images evoked indirectly, serve as such means. In the visual arts, some of the enumerated elements, such as meter, rhythm and tempo, are given directly, although not as clearly as in music and poetry, others, such as melody, are evoked indirectly, and still others, on the contrary, appear directly and with special explicitness: visual and tactile images, colours, symmetry, etc. In spite of apparently fundamental differences, all the arts grow from the same root, And as soon as you begin to look at them, unity appears more and more convincingly. This unity is the organization of space, which is achieved to a large extent by homogeneous methods.

But precisely because of their homogeneity, what has been achieved is far from being the same. Painting and graphics occupy a special place among other arts and in a certain sense can be called art par excellence. Whereas poetry and music are somewhat close, by their very nature, to the activity of science and philosophy, and architecture, sculpture and theater to technology.

In fact, in the organization of space, music and poetry have an extraordinary freedom of action, while music has unlimited freedom. They can and do make spaces absolutely anything. But this is because half or even more of the creative work, and at the same time the difficulties of the artist, are shifted by the artist from himself to his listener. The poet gives a formula for a certain space and invites the listener or reader to imagine specific images by which this space should be manifested. This is a multifaceted task, allowing for different shades, and the author disclaims responsibility if his reader fails to find a solution that is sufficiently illustrative. Great works of poetry, such as the poems of Homer, Shakespeare's dramas, The Divine Comedy, Faust and others, require extraordinary efforts and enormous co-creation from the reader so that the space of each of them is really represented in the imagination quite clearly and holistically. The imagination of the ordinary reader cannot cope with these spaces, which are too rich and intricately organized for it, and the spaces in the mind of such a reader are divided into separate, unrelated areas. The material of poetry, words, is too little sensuously dense not to submit to any thought of the poet; but precisely for this reason he is not able to exert enough pressure on the reader's imagination to force it to reproduce what the poet thinks. The reader retains too much freedom, the unity of space in the work can easily sound to him an abstract formula, similar to the formula of science.

Music uses material that is even less bound by external necessity, still more amenable to any wave of the creative will. Sounds are infinitely malleable and are capable of imprinting the space of any structure. But precisely for this reason a piece of music leaves the listener the greatest degree of freedom and, like algebra, provides formulas capable of being filled with contents that are almost infinitely diverse. The task facing the listener of music allows for many solutions and, consequently, poses corresponding difficulties for the listener to choose the best one. The composer is free in his ideas, because his material has no firmness in it; But for this very reason it is not in the power of the composer to force his listener to carry out images and the corresponding organization of space in a certain sense: a significant part of co-creation lies with the performer of a musical work and then with the listener. Like science and philosophy, music requires a significant share of the listener's activity, although less than they do.

XXIV

Theatre, on the contrary, least assumes the activity of the spectator and least allows diversity in the perception of its productions. This is an inferior art, which does not respect those whom it serves, and does not seek artistic consciousness in them. And it does not respect itself, being given to the viewer without difficulty and without amateurism. This passivity of the spectator is possible here because of the rigidity of the material, its sensual saturation, which holds with the greatest definiteness and sensual impossibility, the form that the totality of the actors of the stage, from the poet and the musician to the crowbar, managed to impose on him. But it is not always possible to superimpose on this persistent material – living people, human voices, the sensual space of the stage – the forms conceived by the playwright or musician, and in most cases it is simply not possible at all. As living bodies, actors are too tightly connected to the space of everyday life to be transported, even temporarily, to another space; In any case, they cannot be transferred to every other space, especially if we take into account that in order to do so they would have to experience something to which they are in fact alien. When Shakespeare in Hamlet shows the reader a theatrical performance, he gives us the space of this theater from the point of view of the audience of that theater — the King, the Queen, Hamlet, etc. And we, the listeners, have no overwhelming difficulty in imagining the space of the main action of Hamlet and in it — the space of the play played there that is isolated and self-contained, but subordinate to the first. But in a theatrical production, at least from this point of view, Hamlet presents insurmountable difficulties: the spectator of the theater hall inevitably sees the stage on the stage from his own point of view, (and) not from the same point of view, the characters in the tragedy, sees it with his own eyes, and not with the eyes of the king, for example. In other words, the power of the impression of Shakespeare's tragedy as such is achieved by the potentiation of space, by the double isolation, before which the reader stops because he identifies himself, for example, with the king. But in a theatrical production, the spectator sees the scene on the stage to a large extent independently, not through the king, but by himself, and the two-degree of space is not given to his consciousness.

In other cases, when the structure of space departs even further from the usual structure, the stage does not allow such a reorganization of its space, and apart from claims, the actor of the stage does not manifest anything and, most importantly, cannot manifest it. Such, for example, are visions, apparitions, ghosts. Their spaces are subject to very special laws and do not allow coordination with the images of everyday space. Meanwhile, the sensual density of such phenomena on the stage necessarily correlates them with ordinary space, and the ghost remains only a person in disguise. When it is necessary to show the peculiarity of the space of the drama, for example, in Faust, the actors of the stage, under the pretext of being unstaged, save themselves from the corresponding difficulties by cutting the drama into pieces and throwing out the most essential, which gives spatial unity to the work. In these transitions it is often the most important, but in fact it is not theatrical, not in the sense of uninterestingness, but because of the powerlessness of the stage to organize itself spatially, as the poet demands. In reading Faust, I can imagine a space at first comparatively close to the ordinary, and then, through the realm of the Mothers, passing into something quite different. But if this transition through the kingdom of mothers were omitted on the stage, then absolutely nothing would remain of Faust as an artistic whole. Meanwhile, this transition could be shown only to a theurgist or a magician, by no means to a director. Or here is "The Temptation of St. Anthony". If they had decided to stage this work by Flaubert, then nothing would have come out except a funny ballet. After all, the whole essence of "Temptation" is the gradual transformation of space, from closed, very capacious, saturated and whole, into expanding, empty, indifferent, in the gradual erosion of existence by emptiness, chaos and death. In short, it is an artistically visual image of the Modern Age. In order to show such a transformation on the stage, it would be necessary to gradually reduce the size of the actor playing Antony, as well as the size of the whole setting, and already close to the beginning of such a play, both Antony and all the everyday objects known to us would have to be drawn to a point. As long as Anthony is seen as commensurate with the surrounding space, he will remain the measure of it, and of its directions and its scale; Consequently, the result will be a Euclidean canto-astronomical space, i.e., the staging of the play will not succeed.

A great deal can be said about this sensual rigidity and immobility of the stage, but what has been said is enough to understand the contrast between theatre, music and poetry. Architecture and sculpture have a certain affinity with the theatre, although, of course, the stubbornness of their material is incomparably less than that of the theatre.

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