Criticism of the genre study of painting in the works of A. V. Mikhailov

Mikhailov A. V. was known as a leading Soviet philologist-Germanist, who interpreted the phenomena of German literature of the 19th century from a cultural perspective. But he was also an original theorist of painting, who created his own theory of painting genres, based not on the subject of representation, style or custom, but isolating different genres as different attempts to overcome the crisis of representation and style. Due to the multitude of cultural contexts, the works of A. V. Mikhailov require special interpretation: for example, to understand the still life, the analysis of the connection between still life, portrait and medieval metaphysics, is involved, undertaken by his colleague and friend S. S. Averintsev. The author shows his dearness to M. A. Lifshits on the issue of the insufficiency of the pleasure principle for the creation of representation. The paper reconstructs general scheme of the theory of genres of painting by A. V. Mikhailov, who insisted on the correlation of the classical principle of mimesis and chora as understanding the space, and on the existence of alternative and complementary logics of interpreting individual works of art after the collapse of classical mimesis. These logics obey the metalanguage, which Mikhailov understood, in contrast to structuralism, not as a static, but as a dynamic construction. The individual traits of genres are not the result of mimesis, but on the contrary, a deviation from an overly hasty mimetic decision in favor of social reflection, which does not belong only to the artist or the work, but arises as a communicative situation in the course of the historicization of pictorial art itself.