Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Latvian Press of Soviet Latvia: Reflections on the Detachment of Art from Life

Having originated on the threshold of Modernism, literary Aestheticism is a reaction against the objective perception of art, an affirmation of aesthetic subjectivity, and an expression of writer's cosmopolitan imagination that due to its "cosmopolitan ethos" prevented many national literatures from having an air of provincialism. A complete detachment from social concerns and the aestheticization of art, highlighted by employing a cosmopolitan style and new narrative forms, contributed to the depiction of cosmopolitan locations, international and metropolitan settings, cosmopolitan circles, "strangers" in the world of pleasures (Bohemianism), as well as cosmopolitan outlooks, experiences, and values. After the loss of national independence (1940), the development of Latvian literature was halted by the sovietization and ideological censorship of culture and art, which, demanding the reflection of social aspects of reality and typization in literature, turned against any manifestation of individualization. The paper is aimed at studying the attitudes to aesthetic cosmopolitanism in Soviet Latvia periodicals Karogs [Flag] and Literatura un Maksla [Literature and Art] within the 1940-1950s-the period of time when the aesthetic component was rapidly losing its basic value and became the decisive means for educating the Soviet man. The research allows concluding that the distinctly negative attitude to aesthetic cosmopolitanism and to writers representing it was part of a great ideological struggle targeted against the West European avant-garde trends on the whole and writers-"renegades" in Latvia, without highlighting one specific trend or tendency but reducing them to the category of "-isms" harmful for the Soviet power, which do not show "the reality of flourishing life." The research has been carried out by applying cultural-historical method and content analysis.