PORTRAIT IN LITERATURE AND GRAPHIC ART: THE CASE OF THE FIERY ANGEL
Journal Title: Studia Litterarum - Year 2017, Vol 2, Issue 2
Abstract
This essay analyzes portraits in several editions of The Fiery Angel published during Bryusov’s lifetime and claims that the portrait was as a universal point of convergence for verbal and visual arts. The dialogue between literature and graphics in the context of the synthesis of arts sheds new light on the possibilities for interdisciplinary research. The time of the “beautiful book” was a time of great artists and illustrators who introduced the peculiarities of their own style and the manner of their artistic schools into their art. Books were commonly decorated with vignettes and famous paintings. Portraits, as well as plates in general, were of the highest quality. They were ornamental and illusory, with every minute detail finely drawn out. Yet, in the second edition of the novel Bryusov deliberately included medieval engravings and portraits. A comparative analysis of the verbal portraits in The Fiery Angel and engraved portraits in the book (Ruprecht, Heinrich, Faust, Mephistopheles, Renata, and Madiel) demonstrates that both the main and the secondary characters of the novel are picturesque and multidimensional whereas the xylographic portraits rather reveal conventionality and simplicity of the medieval time. This way Bryusov was seeking to debase clichе’s, especially as regards Agrippa von Nettesheim and Faust: according to Bryusov, the character of Agrippa had already become a clichе’d image and so was the popular engraving of the scientist that he reproduced in the middle of the sixth chapter of the 1909 edition. Juxtaposing the verbal and the graphic portraits in The Fiery Angel helps us better understand the function of the verbal portrait in a Symbolist text that was determined by the author’s design, on the one hand, and by various “instruments” of different arts, on the other.
Authors and Affiliations
N. A. Drovaleva
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP26143
- DOI 10.22455/2500-4247-2017-2-2-10-21
- Views 270
- Downloads 13
Re-reading Vsevolod Ivanov’s Story “The Armored Train 14-69” Against Siberian Periodicals (1919): The historical comment of the Russian allies in the Civil War
The essay discusses the role that the allied powers — United States, France, Britain, and Japan — played in the development and in the collapse of the Admiral A.V. Kolchak’s anti-Bolshevik Russian government between 19...
MEREZHKOVSKY’S THE FOURTEENTH OF DECEMBER: A NOVEL ABOUT THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION
The article demonstrates how Dmitry Merezhkovsky, in his novel The Fourteenth of The article demonstrates how Dmitry Merezhkovsky, in his novel The Fourteenth of December written in the midst of the revolution...
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...
The Dutch Connection: Johanna van der Meulen’s Contribution to Russian Symbolism
The Symbolist Ėllis’ (Lev Kobylinskij) writings during his Moscow period emphasize the split, the division and dichotomy between material reality and celestial vision. His works written in exile in Locarno-Monti in Switz...
Rahel Vaenhagen and the Culture of Her Time
This essay examines the personality of Rahel Varnhagen, one of the brightest representatives of the German cultural milieu, owner of a literary salon that brought together prominent authors, artists, philosophers, noble...