Evolution of the Problem of National Style in Cultural Theory and Aesthetics

Abstract

The article provides theoretical and methodological analysis of the evolution of the national style problem research in culture and art. This problematic was formed during the 19^th–20^th centuries in the context of considering the correlation between the general and particular, stable and dynamic in culture. The paper criticises the concepts of cultural development as spiritual self-development, the opposition of national tradition to the general historical process of cultural development, the dissolution of style diversity in the model of multiculturalism, the identification of folk and national culture, national identity and mentality, as well as the interpretation of the genesis of national style from the sphere of unconscious sensuality or mythology.

New approaches to the problem are considered in the structural-semiotic and dialogical concepts of culture developed by Lotman and Bakhtin, which justify the understanding of national style as a form of cultural creativity, which transforms the boundaries of cultures into a collective symbolic image of the dialogue of the external and internal, tradition and renewal. The analysis concludes that national style is an expression of the historical formation of national self-consciousness, on the way from dissolving into anonymous ethnic tradition to finding its own voice in the dialogue of cultures and eras. Historical style modifications structure the national self-consciousness with a palette of aesthetically expressive artistic images, which together give a picture of the semantic volume and linguistic diversity of national culture, not reducible to a single style. Such understanding leads to a dialectical understanding of the creative nature of national style in the historical development of culture, thereby transcending the contradictions of the opposition of the national and the universal, tradition and dynamism, the local and the foreign.