State academy of arts: traditions and modernity. Part 1: inexhaustible history

The State Academy of Arts (SAA) represents the phenomenon of Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th century, still the research interest in SAA has not been exhausted to this day. Its appearance is due to the configuration of random factors, unintentional social actions, as well as the implicit, inertial development of pre- revolutionary cultural movements in the first decade of the Soviet era. Interdisciplinarity, the search for a synthesis of arts acted as a kind of trail of the Silver Age, the aftertaste of the interrupted era, continuation of its life outburst. After all, cultural traditions are not transformed swiftly and radically together with the political and economic changes, they have a time lag, lasting and dissolving in the changed modernity. They are modified, incorporated into reality under different names, merging with the mainstream of the era or dissipating into the marginal ones. From this perspective, the State Academy of Arts was a scientific structure, on the one hand, surprising in its strangeness for the Soviet era, and on the other hand, congenial to the Silver Age already left behind. The Academy not only preserved and extended the pre-revolutionary intellectual culture in the already changed country, but also itself was fed by the energy of the changes being created. Thus, along with a conscious orientation to interdisciplinarity and synthesis by art, the Academy combined “antiquity” and “novelty”, integrated tendencies of conservation and change in culture.