Art in human life. Concrete sociological studies of art in Russia

A one and a half decades ago, the book of Yu. U. Fokht-Babushkin “The Art in the Life of People. Specific-sociological studies of art in Russia of the second half of the 20th century. History and methodology ”(St. Petersburg, 2001). It told about the revived in the 1950s after a twenty-year break by a scientific direction that studies the functioning of art in society, about its fate, achievements and failures.

However, the early stage of this science was poorly mastered, and in order to successfully move forward , it is necessary, among other things, to know the past, its achievements and misses. Without a calm and multilateral development of the former there is no future. And in any science, and in any society. In the mid-1930s, concrete sociological studies were banned for ideological reasons, the authorities nullified them as a dangerous source of information about real processes in a society that declared communist construction. As a result of the long development of several thousand units of periodicals and collections, it was possible to find a considerable number of forgotten research materials, which made it possible to expand the idea of ​​the 20th century gained by Russian sociologists in the first decades of the 20th century. The identified research material made it possible to designate the four main areas of the work of those years. 1. Features of social functioning in the country of various types of art. 2. The place and role of art in the daily life of certain socio-demographic groups of the population. 3. Description of the public of various types of art: fiction, cinema, theater, fine art, music. 4. Methodological searches.

This circle of questions is devoted to the proposed monograph.