The Visual Codes of “The Ivanovs’ Christmas Party” Play by Alexander Vvedensky

Abstract

The present paper investigates the visual codes of A. Vvedensky’s play “The Ivanovs’ Christmas Party” (1938) and their influence on the nature of artistic communication. It is noted that the change in the media landscape of the era in the direction of predominance of visual media and as well as media combining the image and word has led to the creation of new artistic worlds in literature with the participation of naive painting, the hagiographical icon, popular print, buffoonery, circus, cinema, formerly located on the periphery or outside the zone of aesthetic perception. In the course of the study the author comes to a conclusion that the problem of creating new artistic worlds in avant-garde drama is also associated with participation of other arts. The paper notes that due to Vvedensky’s refusal of realistic drama and psychological theater traditions, the image plan substitutes the expression plan. The play composition is compared with the composition of a hagiographical icon; the central part of it is the death of Sonya Ostrova event with the hagiographic stamps in the form of remark pictures framing it. In the absurd world of Vvedensky’s characters, the sacral is mingled with the profane, which is confirmed by the mixture of the hagiographical icon code with the codes of circus and buffoonery that leads to coarsening of traditional culture, degenerating into the Puzyrevs, the Ostrovs, the Pestrovs and nanny-the killer Schmetterling. The conclusion is that the inclusion of visual codes of other artistic and non-artistic systems into Vvedensky’s literary discourse has lead to an increase in the meanings of the play and the richness of interpreting it.

Keywords

• avant-garde drama
• vvedensky
• symbolization
• intermediality
• visual codes