‘This clumsy, heavy-minded age, without youth, without faith, without hope, without a coherent knowledge of life and soul, torn, full of memories and premonitions; an age of unprecedented loneliness of the artist…’

Vladimir Weidle

There are two truths about man, and both are dangerous to the one who finds them. Each does not tolerate rivalry, each requires choice and submission.

The first truth is expressed in the words, ‘neither man himself nor his place in the world is any mystery. Their weight is measured and found very light’. It sees man as a simple machine accidentally created by a bigger and more complex machine: the world. The laws of motion of both machines have been calculated, and if something is still unknown, this uncertainty is temporary: give only time, and we will not only explain them to the end, but perhaps even reproduce them in a test tube. This opinion cannot be called well-founded — at least not insofar as it concerns man. Like many other judgements about man, it passes by without touching or explaining the essentials; and, like all simplistic explanations of complex things, it is in a certain sense fruitful, that is, it promotes political, commercial, or other external ‘successes’. This is the view proclaimed by science; however, science (as I once said) deals with man unwillingly and without curiosity, slipping away at the first opportunity to its laboratory, to inanimate and therefore predictable objects… It is this view that in recent centuries has been considered worthy of a thinking man (I am not speaking here of exceptions, of which there were many before and still are now, but of human multitudes).

The artist these days is also under the spell of this deadening truth. He lives in a society in which the belief in ‘success’ and ‘common sense’ has long since triumphed (one could add: in ‘democracy’ and ‘science’, because to the modern ear the words ‘success’ and ‘science’, ‘success’ and ‘democracy’ are almost equivalent). Sooner or later, however, he learns that he is facing two quite different paths, one leading to success and the other to a truth about man quite different from the conventional one. Though creativity begins, as a rule, with a mere trial of one’s abilities; with the pursuit of a

                  ‘sweet passion
of lofty thoughts and poems’, 

sooner or later the artist has an encounter after which he cannot remain the same.

Almost everyone knows Pushkin’s poem about the poet’s encounter with the six-winged seraphim, and almost everyone does not attach any special significance to The Prophet; at best, they see it as a poetic rendering of a biblical story. In fact, this poem speaks of the artist’s encounter with the greatest danger on his path: the Truth. This Truth concerns the artist not when he comes out to confront reality, but much earlier, when he asks himself the question: ‘Who gave me my gift? Who do I serve with this gift? Does my labour have other purposes than the multiplication of beauty or my personal success?’

Such an encounter promises much to the creator, but promises exceptional difficulties to the man. There is nothing humanly pleasing in an encounter with a six-winged seraphim. Man is creeped out; man suffers; man asks: ‘What is this to me for?’ Out of this eeriness, these sufferings and these questions will come true creativity — not for success or praise, creativity-blessing and creativity-cursing of the creator. The pursuit of truth is the only true and ruinous path of art, on which it gains strength and height, moving further and further away from the reader, the viewer, the critic.

What is this truth which art encounters and which is not visible to the scientist’s all-pervading gaze, as is commonly thought? To put it this way: if the truth about man is that he is an animal, indistinguishable from other animals, then to be fully human, to conform to his true nature, is to be fully animal. The attentive gaze directed inward must meet animal impulses and animal thoughts. Our experience tells us otherwise: when we look inside ourselves in moments of love, triumph or anguish, we find complex feelings, complex thoughts, more than that: the deepest, most complex rich, alien to the ‘animal beginning’ experiences we take out of these moments.

However, I do not claim that the last and final truth is available to the artist. As Vladimir Weidle said: ‘The truth with which art deals is not expressible at all except in refraction, in circumlocution, in fiction’. Yet he rises far above (or plunges far deeper into) that shallow, commonplace truth about man, which is necessary to ‘make friends and influence people’, and finds a truth in the light of which man can no longer be a thing among other things that can be controlled and possessed. When the wheel of life ceases to flicker, through its spokes, which before merged into a solid veil, he begins to discern something else. Our destiny becomes important, large and mysterious. Man, illuminated by art, emerges from nothingness.

‘So this truth is of those’, you will say, ‘which the ears cannot hear and the eyes cannot see?’

‘No’, — I will answer. — ‘It is the truth of experience and deduction, but of experience free, unrepeatable in the laboratory, and of deduction not only directed to the exterior of being’.

‘But a man’s life needs structure and firmness. You propose him to look up into the sky and wait for the appearance on the distant clouds of the sparks of your inexpressible and hard-to-observe truths’.

What to do! Truth is the sky above us, which illuminates all our actions. We do not know how to ascend into it and live in it, but without seeing the sparks in this sky, we cannot find our way on earth…

Timofey Sherudilo.
From the book Knowledge and Creativity. Essays on Cullture.

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