Aesthetic modernism as a macro-epoch. Part 1

I. A Systematic approach: The concept of “Modernism” in many European philological traditions has described and continues to describe an epoch around the year 1900 when writers and critics used the term with a reference to the “modern” literature of their time. The concept of a micro-epoch is determined by a beginning, an end, and a coherence of a given epoch, i.e. by means of an overriding programme in the literary field that remained dominant throughout the period described. Over approximately last fifty years, Western European philological traditions have developed a usage of the term that is unknown to Russian philology: as a macro-epochal concept, “modernism” describes a long-term period that begins with the first emergence of the concept of the modern (e.g. genius, autonomy, youth or publicity). Such a usage has continuously remained the focus of discourse - albeit with certain variations - and we still consider it to be important today in the context of the mindset of our present age. Thus, in contrast with pre-modern foreign concepts, the present defines the temporal continuum in which it finds itself and its own antecedent history. The historical perspective (II) demonstrates that the establishment of such a macro-epoch of modernism, including the antecedent history of its own consciousness of present, is by no means new. It could have emerged since late antiquity, which defined its own present with reference to a feeling of discontinuity in relation to Greek and Roman antiquity. Thus the classic dichotomy between antiquity and modernity arose, according to which “antiquus” meant pre-modern and old, and “modernus” meant contemporary and present. For the historian Cassiodor at the beginning of the 6th century, the decline of the old Western Roman empire brought about the beginning of a new age, which could only define itself in opposition to the old era. For Goethe, modernity began in the 16th century.