Sovremennye Issledovaniâ Socialʹnyh Problem (Nov 2015)
PLOT REELED INTO AN EKPHRASIS IN BELLES LETTRES OF THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY
Abstract
Plots reeled into the ekphrasis have always existed. In belles lettres of the beginning of the 20th century, the fight between the pagan and the Christian manifests in the opposition of scenic space and it creates a powerful «magnetic» field. This is a special type of mythologism in which the Christian imagery is on the positive side of the binary opposition with its respective system of ethical coordinates. In «polytheistic systems, the presentations of evil is static as of the essential and eternal beginning of the world», but in the orthodox Christianity, the devil is a ghost, lure, disembodied temptation and «with every day it approaches nonexistence» (from the «Moralia» of the 6th century by Gregory the Great). However, Gregory the Great also notes that the power of Satan is from God as all other powers, he just distorted his power with his God-given free will. Even at the level of worldly wisdom aphorisms there is a conventional belief that our shortcomings are the continuation of our merits, and therefore it is necessary to adhere to the golden mean. Accroding to A. Gracheva in the book «Dialogues of Janus: Belles lettres and classics in the Russian literature of the early twentieth century», at the beginning of the 19th century, the mythologism of the spontaneous and not experimental type (often encyclopaedic and «algebraic») like in the works of Joyce and Bely, is especially pronounced in the works of writers, who are close to mass literature with their democracy or «boudoir» and especially in the works of female writers. This is due both to existing archetypes of the collective unconscious (some of which are even atavistic) and «migratory plots» which are characteristic of both folklore and popular culture. Despite the compelling erotic subject matter, belles lettres is not always frivolous and, on the contrary, it is edifying and full of moral questions, which are sometimes rhetorical: «What is a sin and what does the evil mean? I’m going through my memory, what interesting things I heard and read about love, about the rights of genders, flesh, and find different clever words. But that’s just words ... They do not illuminate my soul with the understanding «(from the story of Avgusta Damanskaya» One day», published in the seventh issue of the «Education» magazine for 1908. The collision of pagan and Christian ekfrastic worlds is central in the novellas of G. Chulkov, S. Auslender, A. Mar and other representatives of the Russian decadence and Silver Age, which can not be considered in the context of Western European culture (from Stesichorus to Proust, from Zeu-xis with Parras to von Stuck with Knopf), for all the modernists (as well as realists) of the early twentieth century, in the words of Alexander Blok, were sick with «Europeanism». However, Roerich and Vrubel, who are perceived not only as art revelation, but also a supreme religious revelation, and sometimes as an obsession, a temptation of the era, have a strong influence on the world art (not to mention the Russian art).
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