“Good style” and “new artisticity” in the magazine polemics of the 1860s-1870s

The research aims to determine the mutual influence of the principles of democratic criticism and raznochinets (“mixed-title”) literature in the 1860s-1870s. The work examines the issues related to the denial of artisticity as an important aesthetic criterion, as well as to the attempt to diminish the authority of literature with a “good style”, which “real critics” attributed to “aristocratic” literature. The paper considers the polemics of those years related to the socio-literary definition of the new stage of democratic literature with a social orientation, which was presented in magazines and by writers. The influence of raznochinets prose on the development of new criteria for evaluating literary works is identified, the function of the rhetorical form of a “conversation with the reader” in terms of combining critical and literary discourse is analyzed, using the prose of A. Scheller-Mikhailov, F. Reshetnikov, and I. Fedorov-Omulevsky as examples. As a model for subsequent imitation by fiction writers, the “conversation with the reader” in N. G. Chernyshevsky’s novel “What Is To Be Done?” is considered in comparison with his concept of art in “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality”. Scientific originality is determined by the comparative method, which allows the researcher to reveal the forms of discursive interaction at the level of the concept of criticism and its embodiment in literary practice. As a result, it was found that a “conversation with the reader” as a metatextual manifesto of the author’s program becomes a component in the concept of literature of the post-Gogol period.