Biografia autore
Vladimir Stasov (1824-1906) was a Russian critic of music and visual art. Born into a wealthy, noble family, he became a prominent figure in mid-19th-century Russian culture, discovering a large number of talents, inspiring many of their works and fighting their battles in numerous articles and letters to the press. As such, he carried on a lifelong debate with Russian novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev and with the critic and composer Aleksandr Serov, who held him as his sworn enemy. Stasov wanted Russian art to liberate itself from what he saw as Europe’s hold. By imitating Western culture, he felt, Russian artists could be, at best, second-rate. Differently, he promoted borrowing from their own native traditions, in order to create a truly national art that could stand as a peer aside Europe’s with equal artistic standards and originality. He defended his positions in a substantial corpus of writing, which was later to serve as a hard core for Soviet criticism and the formulation of the aesthetic canon of Socialist realism.