Looking for the Auteur Intonation: The Poem The Twelve in the Creative Interpretation of Artists of the 1960s–1970s

Abstract

The focus of the research is on the illustrations for Alexander Blok’s poem The Twelve made for its various editions in the 1960s and 1970s, in the heyday of illustrated books in the USSR from the Thaw era to the late Soviet period. Blok’s poem (the history of illustration of which generally characterizes the path of the evolution of Soviet book graphics, from the post-revolutionary period to the 1980s) is presented here as a universal literary work — a ‘landmark subject’. As the artist approaches the ‘landmark subject’, the qualities of the poetic text and its space-time image can relatively freely correspond with variations of its creative interpretation. In the context of the creative interpretation of The Twelve, the article highlights the works of the famous Soviet artists who received attention in the scientific and critical literature of their time. Among them are Andrey Goncharov, Boris Markevich, Alexander and Valery Traugot, Mikhail Rudakov, Boris Diodorov, and others. In addition to the analysis of the selected artistic examples, the theoretical ideas that accompanied the appearance of these illustrations are also considered. In the sequence of changes in conceptual settings, the author of the article emphasizes alternative approaches to the interpretation of the literary image, as well as to understanding the illustration in general — as an element of graphic culture, from the perspective of the ‘pictorial’ approach, and in the context of the adaptation of the genre of author’s book (‘artist’s book’ / ‘livre d’artiste’) in the Soviet reality. The highlighted episodes of illustrating the poem characterize the level of creative freedom possible in that period in relation to the selected literary works, positioning the range of diversity of artistic solutions in the situation of ideological control and the officially approved method of expression.

Keywords

• illustration
• book graphics
• soviet graphics
• poem the twelve
• alexander blok
• andrey goncharov
• boris markevich
• g.a.v. traugot
• mikhail rudakov
• boris diodorov