Reception of ancient aesthetic categories in Pyotr Chaadayev's first “Philosophical letter”

The relevance of the study is due to the need for an aesthetic analysis of a famous journalistic work of Pyotr Chaadayev, which in the history of philosophy has been studied in detail from the ethical, epistemological, ontological, and theological perspectives, but the aesthetic aspect has been overlooked. The problem of identifying the reception of ancient aesthetic categories in the most famous Russian philosophical letter of the first half of the 19th century is associated with a change of cultural eras and is of interest in terms of preserving the content of the categories of aesthetics that was laid down by Plato and Aristotle. The research methodology includes the text analysis method and the comparison of the content of aesthetic categories of ancient philosophers and Chaadayev. The study revealed that Chaadaev in his letter uses the reception of the Socratic dialogue, adapted for his time, which suggests the author’s commitment to ancient traditions. Chaadaev’s most popular aesthetic categories are the sublime and the base, as well as mimesis (he uses the word “imitation” in his letter). As a result, it turns out that while characterizing Western European culture the philosophical letter’s author correlates it with the category of the sublime, which is close in content to the sublime of the Platonists and Pseudo-Longinus. The opposite category of the base in the Aristotelian interpretation, from Chaadaev’s point of view, best describes Russian history and culture. According to the results of the comparison, the reason for such a bitter picture of domestic existence found by the author seems logical - it lies in the mimesis or imitation, which in Chaadaev’s definition clearly manifests the traces of both Platonic and Aristotelian meanings. As a result, the letter obviously demonstrates the reception of ancient aesthetic categories. However, it can be noted that the entire composition of the work is built on the contrast between the sublime and the base. It was this contrast that created the plot conflict of the letter, which caused a stir among the nineteenth-century readers and leaves no one indifferent to this day.