Voronina Natalia I.

This article presents an overview of the most significant facts and factors in the life and work of Nikolai Vladimirovich Stankevich – a Russian writer, philosopher, researcher, who managed to impress his contemporaries with the spiritual strength of his personality, moral purity, integrity of worldview and creative energy. He left a rich epistolary legacy, which allows us to see the intellectual history of Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century. The article presents the concept of the atmosphere in the Moscow Stankevich circle, which included prominent people of Russian culture of the nineteenth century: Annenkov, Belinsky, Herzen, Granovsky, Dobrolyubov, Ogarev, etc., which became a kind of "clot of cultural and historical air, which formed the essence of the "people of the forties" (G.S. Knabe).

The article focuses on the main categories in considering Stankevich's reflections a connoisseur of art and the metaphysics of music in his work: inner voice, perception of music, sound, melodism, rhythm, intonation, opera, theater, musical enlightenment, etc. The creative atmosphere created by Stankevich in the circle, his worldview, his philosophizing about art, literature and music and today, in the 21st century, in Russia, when the process of comprehending the creative activity of Russian "visionaries" is underway, these are important semantic milestones in the study of Russian culture and art. The inclusion of this dynamic process of perception of art by "high–grade amateurs" in the 19th century is an important milestone in the overall picture, as the origins of the formation and development of Russian spiritual culture and science.

Stankevich's experience, which has become a unique practice of forming a specific person's consciousness, worldview, and perception of art, is a new, little–studied phenomenon that stimulates research interest and opens up the possibilities of comparative methodology. Awareness of such a phenomenon makes it possible to clarify and detail general patterns in the development of scientific understanding of the significance of his work in Russian humanitarian thought in history, philosophy, cultural studies and musicology.