Translation. Region: Russian Federation –
Source: Novosibirsk State University –
An important disclaimer is at the bottom of this article.
The topic of one of the lectures at the "Darwin Week" popular science marathon at NSU, held for the first time on the new campus, was "The Evolution of the Ideal: From Helen of Troy to the Present Day." Sergey Vasiliev, a lecturer at the Center for Continuous Education at the NSU Institute of Humanities, served as the expert.
Despite the sunny weather and Saturday, the auditorium was packed—interest in the humanities portion of the science marathon was no less than in the natural sciences.
At the beginning of the lecture, Sergei Vasiliev outlined the framework of the conversation:
We'll discuss only the ideal in the Western literary tradition. The world is diverse, and Eastern cultures had different ideas, but today we'll focus specifically on the Western part. We'll discuss how the ideal is embodied in literary texts, without touching on painting and sculpture. Even with these limitations, the topic remains vast—this will be just a brief introduction.
The starting point was the ancient world and the image of Helen of Troy in Homer's Iliad. However, as the lecturer emphasized, for the ancient Greeks, Helen was not the moral ideal of a woman:
"She was considered aesthetically beautiful, but the ideal woman for the ancient Greeks included fidelity to her husband, motherhood, and devotion. In this sense, Penelope from the Odyssey was closer to the ideal, waiting ten years for her husband's return, deceiving suitors and unraveling at night the shroud woven during the day."
The lecturer moved from antiquity to the Middle Ages and the phenomenon of courtly love, when the ideal of female beauty became unattainable.
"An ideal is something we strive for but never fully achieve. Courtly love is admiration for an unattainable woman, elevating her to the status of almost unattainable perfection," explained Sergei Vasiliev.
A separate section of the lecture was devoted to the 19th century—a time when ideals became increasingly contradictory. Sergei Vasiliev contrasted the culture of decadence with the Victorian tradition:
Decadence is a sense of the decline of an era. It is characterized by an admiration for what was previously considered aesthetically unappealing. The ugly begins to become beautiful precisely because it is ugly. Let's recall Baudelaire and his poem "Carrion," where a decomposing corpse is described as an aesthetic object.
Victorian culture, on the contrary, sought to aestheticize reality, despite the social contradictions of the industrial era.
"Victorians see a complex, often cruel world, but they strive to find and celebrate beauty—even in tragic images. It's an attempt to maintain an ideal in a rapidly changing world," noted Sergei Vasiliev.
The First World War, according to the lecturer, became a cultural turning point:
— From a cultural point of view, the 20th century begins in 1914. The tragedy of war destroys the idea of a single, utopian ideal.
In the era of modernism, it is no longer possible to talk about one ideal:
Modernists have different practices, different aesthetics, different notions of beauty. Symbolists extol the unattainable image of "eternal femininity." Acmeists appeal to concrete, earthly people. Futurists are more interested in machines and the urban world than in the traditional feminine image.
In Soviet literature of the 1930s, the canon of socialist realism was formed – with a clearly defined image of the working woman, the communist, the mother.
After World War II, the era of postmodernism began, where, according to the lecturer, the very conversation about the ideal became ironic:
Postmodernism asserts that everything has already happened. We're dealing with a cultural game, with quotations and parodies. You can turn to a classic image—but only to reinterpret it or even ridicule it.
At the end of his lecture, Sergei Vasiliev noted that the situation with the modern feminine ideal remains open:
It seems the era of postmodernism is drawing to a close, but it still can't seem to end. Is there a single ideal today? Probably not. The ideal was "finished" in Western culture at the beginning of the 20th century, and since then we've lived in a world of multiple versions and interpretations.
This Darwin Week lecture served not only as a historical and literary review, but also as a reason to reflect on how cultural eras shape our understanding of beauty and why the ideal always says more about the time than about the object of admiration itself.
After the presentation, the audience asked the lecturer questions; the most interesting ones were awarded gifts from the university.
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