National Specificity and Artistic Value: At the Crossroads of Ethnocultural Discourse and Axiological Critique

Abstract

The article discusses correlation of ethnic, cultural, and axiological approaches as a methodologically relevant problem in literary studies. The weakening interest in the structural and semantic complexity of the literary work and devaluation of the assertion criteria assign a peripheral role to the creative factor in art. As a result, the principle of aesthetic selectivity and the literary approach to the functional role of ethno-cultural realities remain in the shadows of axiological relativism. The essay intends to restore the status of "artistic value" as a significant category in literary studies by practicing axiological approach within the literary discourse; it also invites to pay special attention to the semantic complementarity of "national specificity" and "artistic value" respectively. A change of values affects and modifies the state of literature and its self-awareness by opening a new horizon of self-expression and modelling a certain worldview; it reveals productive struggle of established and emerging meanings, traditionalist attitudes and promising artistic intentions. In contemporary literary criticism oriented at the study of the literatures of the peoples of Russia, there is a demand for the reconstruction and reevaluation of national literatures. Such criticism seeks to overcome the existing gap between axiological and cultural aspects of textual analysis.