Journal archive

Abstract: This article presents the research of Surikov's historical painting perception in the Russian poetry of the twentieth century (M. Voloshin, M. Tsvetaeva, M. Kuzmin, A. Akhmatova, A. Tarkovsky, N. Glazkov, V. Shalamov, and L. Gubanov). The article attempts to not only comprehend the mechanisms of interaction between different languages of culture (a poetic text and a picture) but also to reveal the root reasons of the poets' reference to Surikov's paintings and to define the cultural and historical background which promoted the dialogue of the arts. Frequent appeals to the images of Surikov's paintings (Boyarina Morozova, The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy, and Menshikov at Beriozov) caused the creation of another intertext in Russian literature. Highlighting of these paintings is connected with the fact that the artist managed to touch the hidden mechanisms of Russian history and thereby to foresee its further catastrophic development. Chronologically, the poetic ekphrasis in question (1917 - 1960s) is the time of Poet's and the Power's antagonistic relations. As a result, the characters of Surikov's paintings are often the artist's alter ego. Cross-cutting plot of all poems is a symbolic one of death/resurrection. A number of poetic texts were first considered in the framework of interdisciplinary studies, two poems («Boyarina Morozova» by N. Glazkova and «St. Petersburg» L. Gubanov) were the subject of detailed philological analysis for the first time.