Article

Name: The Image of the Modernist Reader in Russian Painting and Early Lyrics by M. Tsvetaeva

Authors: N. V. Prodanik

Omsk State Pedagogical University

Abstract: The article establishes the features of the image of the reader in Russian painting at the turn of the 19–20th centuries and in the early poetry collections of M. I. Tsvetaeva – «The Evening Album» (1910) and «The Magic Lantern» (1912). The image of the girl with the book, imprinted in the landscape (or at the window, opened in the park), occurs in the works of M. Nesterov, N. Ge, K. Somov, V. Shukhaev (M. Nesterov, Natasha Nesterova on the Garden Bench, N. Ge «Natalia Petrunkevich's Pottery», K. Somov, «The Lady in Blue», V. Shukhaev, «Portrait of L. Reisner»). The park, the garden, the evening, the window, the silence and the book are all components of the image of the Lady of the Silver Age. In her guise, the features of long-gone epochs – Renaissance, rococo, romanticism – are clearly «read», she is theatrically trying on herself known female destinies. The romanticized look of the reader was often surrounded by the aura of childhood memories: the image of a girl with a book that easily passes from the world of reality to the world of artistic conventionality will be met by M. Tsvetaeva (M. Tsvetaeva, «Books in a red cover»), a girl like her, carried away by a book and not noticing anyone around, we see on the picture of M. V. Nesterov (M. V. Nesterov, «Natasha Nesterova in the Garden Bench». 1914). A book in which the font on the pages (or as in V. Shukhaev's completely white pages) is blurred is another sign of the scenic plot of reading in the style of epoch of modernism. Book is more often a generalized cultural phenomenon, therefore the book is depicted in general, and not as a specific text. If we repeat this semantics of generalization, M. Tsvetaeva will say: «...we are all books in a row, all the melodies» (M. Tsvetaeva, «They and We»). In the early collections of M. Tsvetaeva there appears the image of a reader who, like a romantic woman, also lives in the art world: her feelings are «borrowed » from literary sources; she seeks literary stories in her life, she strives to live bright literary fates and find in book the food of your feelings. However, if the romantic beauty in the literary «exemplary» of her heart movements saw the pledge of a high feeling («It is not nature who teaches us love, / But Staël or Chateaubriand» (A. S. Pushkin, «Eugene Onegin»)), the beautiful woman of the modernist era style sadly approves that her heart «is collecting books’ dust» (M. Tsvetaeva, «Thirst»). The world of art in which the book was the guiding thread turned out to be a beckoning ghost, and the game of cultural associations prevented the reader from manifesting herself in an existential way, to find her personality («We can not drive down slumber / And we can not tell who we are...» M. Tsvetaeva. «They and we»).

Keywords: epoch of modernism, creativity M. Tsvetaeva, the image of the reader in the early lyrics of M. Tsvetaeva, Russian portrait painting of the 19th – early 20th centuries

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