3. Osval'd Shpengler (Oswald Spengler), Zakat Ewopy [The Decline of the West], vol. 1; Russian trans. [by L. D. Frenkel,
(Moscow-Petrograd: Mospoligrafl l, 1923. 4. N[ikolai] Ia. Danilevskii, Rossiia i Etnopa. [Vzgliad na kul'tum,yia i po\itiche skiia otnosheniia sliauanskog o mira k germanskonxu. Russia and
Europe. A View of the Cultural and Politieal Relations between the Slavic and German Worldsl (3d ed. [St. Petersburg: "Obshchestvennaia pol'za"l, 1888).
the word stgle signifies certain kinds of natural phenomena that impose definite traits on all manifestations of human activity, large and small, quite irrespective of whether or not their contemporaries might have aspired to or even have been at all aware of them. Nevertheless, the laws eliminating "chance" from the creation of any man-made product assume their own concrete expressiveness for each facet of creative activity. Thus, a musical work is organized in one way, and a literary work in another. Yet in these rather different laws, engendered by differences in the formal method and language of each art form, can be discerned certain common, unified premises, something crystallizing the whole and bindingit together-in other words , aunity of style in the broad sense of the word. Thus, the determination of the style of an artistic phenomenon can be regarded as being definitive when it includes not only an illumination of the organizational laws of that phenomenon, but also the establishment of a definite link between these laws and the given historical epoch, and a verification ofthem through a comparison with other forms of creative work and human activity contemporaneous with that epoch. It certainly is not too difficult to verify this relationship for any of the historical styles. The indivisible connection between the monuments of the Acropolis, the statues of Phidias or Polykleitos, the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides, the economy and culture of Greece, its political and social order, its clothing and utensils and sky and terrain, isjust as indestructible, in our view, as that between analogous phenomena of any other style. Such a method of analyzing artistic phenomena, because of its relative objectiv-
ity, supplies the investigator with powerful tools for dealing with more controversial questions as well. Thus, proceeding from such a point of view to developments in our own artistic life during the preceding decades, it is possible to recognize, without any particular difficulty, that such tendencies as the "Moderne"" and the "Decadence,"d as well as all our "neo-classicisms" and "neo-Renaissances," cannot in any way stand the test of modernity. Having originated in the minds of a few highly cultivated and refined architects and, as a result oftheir considerable talent, often yielding rather accomplished images in their own right, this superficial aesthetic crust, like all other possible eclectic manifestations, represents an idle invention that appealed for a time to the taste ofa narrow circle ofconnoisseurs but did not reflect anything other than the decadence and impotence of an obsolescent world.
In this manner, we discern a certain self-sufficiency'of style, the uniqueness of the laws governing it, and the relative isolation of its formal manifestations from the products of other styles. We discard the purely individualistic evaluation of a work ofart and consider the ideal ofthe beautiful, that eternally changeable and transitory ideal, as something that perfectly fulfi.lls th,e requirements and concepts of a giuen place and epoch. Questions naturally arise: What is the relationship between the individual manifestations of art in the different epochs? And are Spenglers and Danilevskya not
correct in their theories, isolated and separated though they are from one another by a gap in cultures?
Although we have established the exclusivity of the laws of any style, we are 42