Ekphrasis as a reflection of the world outlook of the hero-artist in the novel The White Dove of Cordoba by Dina Rubina

The essay addresses the novel The White Dove of Cordoba by Dina Rubina, which is dedicated to her husband, a well-known Israel painter Boris Karafelov. It reflects some facts of his biography. Rubina endows the main character, Zachary Kordovin, whose name echoes Karafelov with his artistic preferences, thoughts and perception of art. On the basis of the novel about an artist, the authors of the article study ekphrasis as a peculiarity of the character's world outlook, which involves visualization of images, their correlation with different works of art, and is one of the devices of the poetics of picturesqueness. Ekphrasis is interpreted in a broad sense: as a verbal description of not only art, but also phenomena that are perceived by the hero-artist as works of art. Ekphrastic vision, including the description-interpretation of imaginary paintings, is subordinated to scenic logic and expresses a specific perception of reality by the artist. Kordovin perceives the phenomena of the surrounding reality as fragments of imaginary paintings or sketches for future paintings. If in Gogol's "The Portrait" or Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" ekphrasis intruded into the story: the image came alive and the hero left the canvas and came out of the frame, in Rubina's novel the process is reversed: life phenomena are enclosed in the ekphrastic frame. Kordovin continuously transforms life material into imaginary pictures or graphics, for him it is a necessity, a way of perceiving the world. Almost anything that catches his eye is mentally enclosed into a frame, and further, within its borders, the process of creation begins. Among the ekphrases of imaginary paintings in The White Dove of Cordoba prevail female portraits, which is due to the character's inherent ability to see and appreciate the beauty of women and nature. Their description, as a rule, is combined with a detailed artistic and historical analysis of the imaginary paintings, suggesting the presence of a viewer. The article explores the principles of creating these imaginary portraits and landscapes from the point of view of texture, color, play of color and light, composition, etc. Stopped by the artist's eye and mentally enclosed into a frame, a life phenomenon converted into text becomes a microchronotope within the chronotope of the author's fictional reality, that is, text in the text. Unlike a man-made pattern, the peculiarity of these verbal paintings is their dynamism, subordination of the spatial parameters to the temporal ones, which researcher V. A. Milovidov defined as "a dialogue of the verbal and the visual, and within this dialogue, each of its participants dictates the other conditions of its existence".

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