LIFE HISTORY AND ITS ROLE IN THE STUDY OF ART HISTORY

The article is devoted to the argumentation of the key importance of the biographical method among other approaches to the study of artistic creativity. One of the most difficult stages of scientific research is the definition of a methodological toolkit that allows to identify the specifics of any artistic phenomenon. Reconstruction of the chronology of the life path, individual facts of the creator's biography, the study of authentic documents, epistolary heritage, memoirs, etc., allows not only to clarify the aesthetic and style guidelines of the author of works of art, but also to create a holistic picture of the cultural era. The complexity of the biographical method due to various factors (fragmentary information, different versions of events leading to inevitable mythologization of the author's persona, etc.) is emphasized in the article. The connection between everyday life and creative hypostases of the artist's personality is not explicit and is not regulated. Nevertheless, biography is a vital source of understanding of creative imagination, since it reflects the connection of the creator with the era, culture, and everyday life. The biography helps to identify the psychological type of a person in its national and social conditionality. The importance of biographical details in understanding artistic realities is considered in the article on the example of an unknown autograph of Boris Pasternak discovered in 2015 in Nizhny Novgorod-a verbal and musical recording in the album of a gymnasium friend. Based on the study of this document, we come to an understanding of the dramatic choice of the 17-year-old author between music and poetry (in favor of the latter) and further-to an additional rationale for the role of the sound element for Pasternak's poetic thinking. Special attention is paid to the problem of relations between Boris Pasternak and Alexander Scriabin. As a result of the analysis of the autograph-the album sheet, as well as memoir and epistolary sources, conclusions are drawn about the decisive influence of the composer-idol on the feelings order of the young poet and his "fatal" role in Pasternak's "voluntary refusal" from music.