Sports in the Soviet Artistic Interpretation: A Culturological View on Motives and Narratives

The article is devoted to the interaction between two spheres of socio-cultural space — art and sports — with a focus on the principles of culturological analysis. The factual base of the study is mainly related to the early Soviet stage of the development of the socio-cultural practices under consideration. At that time the confluence of their development was determined not only by the intentions of the subjects of artistic creativity and/or sports action, but also by the general socio-axiological context, which powerfully stimulated collaboration of art and sports. The article examines some examples of artists’ interest in the world of sports, which is due to their understanding of sports as an area of manifestation of the beauty of the human body and spirit, and as a space free from ideological restrictions. Such an interest, a desire to understand sports as a special sphere of life more deeply, was manifested in the wide representation of sport themes in the Soviet art in the first decades of the 20th century, in the preserved words of artists with ‘declarations of love’ to sport, and in their actions (captured in the memoirs of contemporaries) associated with the desire to join the world of sports — be it through personal participation in sport competitions or enthusiastic support. The author of the article argues that one of the ‘common denominators’ which determine not only the described interest, but also other forms of interaction between artistic creativity and sports action (for example, the phenomena of artification of sports, on the one hand, and sportization in certain genres of art, on the other), is the high emotional intensity of these practices, their expressiveness, and a kind of cathartic effect concerning both the actor and the viewer.