Art, culture and «experience of most real» in Vyacheslav Ivanov’ metaphysics

The article is devoted to the most important aspects of the intellectual heritage of Vyacheslav Ivanov, a prominent
Russian thinker and poet-Symbolist. According to the author of the article, this heritage still needs to research using the new
horizons of meaning. Research methodology is based on the application of schematized concept of experience as profound and
irreversible internal change or as the off set or shift of semantic horizons and vanishing points of semantic perspectives. On the
one hand this kind of experience is individual and unique, on the other – it is universal and archetypical. The author sets a task
to clarify and explicate precisely that idea of experience, which is the meaning generating principle underlying Ivanov’s views
on the essence of art and culture. Search idea inferred from analysis of major theoretical texts by Ivanov and is denoted by the
author of the article as «the experience of the most real». The most important factor of such «experience» is the Epiphany, that
forms a vertical that is perpendicular to the plane of everyday life and marks the gate to the transcendent. The vertical pierces
reality layers and pushes apart them forming a particular region of being inside where there are no common relationships. The
experience of this kind is characterized by Ivanov’s concepts symbol and myth. Symbol is not the disignation of reality but the
reality itself of the other existence. Life and progression of symbol by which its essence reveals, is a myth. Myth adds horizontal
dimension to the vertical of symbol and overgrows by «branches» of images and meanings. Art, thus, is a myth, and the myth is
true culture, since the completeness of its content is revealed only in the folk element. Return to myth is a return to the «all-nation
art» and genuine folk culture. In the article, thus, consistently shows how the deployment of meaning generating structure that
was designated as «the experience of the most real» in the teachings of Vyacheslav Ivanov leads to the idea of transfi guration
of man and a new cultural synthesis.