Aesthetics of French classicism: Between norm and freedom

This article deals with understanding the aesthetics of French classicism, which not only assumes compliance with norms, but also establishes “freedom” as the leading aesthetic component of the text. The first part of the study demonstrates the deformed logic of perceiving classical aesthetics in Russian philological science, which largely followed the French ideological attitudes developed during the 19th century. The French conceptualization of the term “classicism” took place in the context of nationalist propaganda, which imposed ideas about the national art of the “l’âge d’or” as a timeless norm. In American literary criticism, however, since the middle of the 20th century a strategy for the perception of classicism as an aesthetic compromise has been established, expressed in a complex combination of scientific and secular trends. In the process of analyzing the classical treatises created in the 1670s (“Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène” by Dominique Bouhours, 1671; “L’art poétique” by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, 1674; “Les réflexions sur la poétique de ce temps et sur les ouvrages des poètes anciens et modernes” by René Rapin, 1674; “Traité du poëme épique” by René Le Bossu, 1675; etc.) we show that not only the prescriptions of “vraisemblance”, “bienséance” and three unities, but also the aesthetic strategies of the “inexpressible” (le je-ne-sais-quoi) and super-natural gift (innate talent) were developed as necessity for creativity. Considerable attention was paid to the reflections about the image of the “miraculous” in literary texts, which turns out to be an important element of the text decoration as well as the popularization of the category of the “sublime” largely related to the assimilation of the treatise “On the Sublime” by pseudo-Longinus and its translation by the Boileau brothers. The conclusion shows that Boileau introduces an important rule “not always follow the rules” to resolve possible disputes, and this rule is the “freedom” of the French classicism.