AKHMATOVA’S “LEONARDESCHI”: A COMMENTARY ON THE PICTORIAL REALITY
Journal Title: Studia Litterarum - Year 2017, Vol 2, Issue 4
Abstract
This article explores why N. Nedobrovo mentioned Il Sodoma (Giovanni-Antonio Bazzi) among the artists of da Vinci School in her poem that was of particular importance to Anna Akhmatova. The referenced studies by Merezhkovsky, Freud, and Muratov, explain the convergence of Sodoma’s art with the work of Leonardo da Vinci. The author argues, however, that the real reason of this convergence was the joke narrative of Vasari about Il Sodoma that was reinterpreted by the 20th century authors in the spirit of “Romantic irony.” Placing “Romantic irony” in the context of the conversation about painting as the mirror of the world influenced Nedobrovo and Akhmatova and shaped their understanding of existence in terms of the “looking-glass.” Thus, the theme of the mirror in Akhmatova’s poetry, dominant in her poetic world, not only can be explained by autobiographical motives but also related to the mirror topoi in painting and Vasari’s story about Sodoma as the artist who was both serious and entertaining and building his own self-image on self-parody. This allows us attenuate the Doppelgänger motif in Akhmatova’s poetry.
Authors and Affiliations
Alexander V. Markov
INTERACTION OF VARIOUS GENERIC FORMS IN THE 12TH–17TH CENTURY TEXTS AND THE MINDSETS OF OLD RUSSIAN AUTHORS
The essay focuses on the understudied question of the poetics of Old Russian literature: it is the frst study of the kind that analyzes semantic interaction of different generic forms in the works of the period. The ess...
Corneille’s Heroic Comedies
The article deals with a special type of drama specified by Corneille himself as heroic comedy. The playwright placed it somewhere in between two major types of drama, comedy and tragedy, and at the same time distinguis...
A NARRATIVE ABOUT A “RESURRECTED WOMAN” IN THE RECEPTION OF D.V. BATOV, AN OLD BELIEVER OF TULA
The article deals with one of the genres of Russian folklore, the so-called obmiraniye narratives about a human soul visiting the other world during the lethargy state. It discusses the problem of perception of such tex...
Musical Outlook in Alexey Losev’s Novel The Woman-Thinker
This article discusses the role of music in the context of A.F. Losev’s philosophical prose of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Describing the key ideas of Losev’s philosophy of music, the essay presents Losev as both the writer...
ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE ON DMITRY MEREZHKOVSKY IN WARSAW
No Abstract