Formation of the artistic image of the "blue flower" in the world literature of the 17th-20th centuries: from Jean de La Bruyere to Raymond Queneau

The attention of the researchers of the floral image in literature is most often attracted by such vivid examples as the rose, the lily, the violet, the daisy, the tulip, the rosehip, and some other phyto-forms forming an artistic image. A small blue or dark blue flower is also one of the most frequently encountered micro-symbols in prose and in poetry. The "blue flower" is either specified in the text, and the reader sees the images of periwinkles, cornflowers, bells, forget-me-nots, blue roses, blue dahlias, irises, or is used as a hyperonym, an independent image, a symbol of romanticism, the World Soul, the miraculous nature of fields, romantic pantheism, which appeared in Novalis' unfinished novel Henry von Ofterdingen. Then the theme of the blue flower develops in its own way in the poetry of Joseph von Eichendorff, in the 20th century. this image appears in Raymond Queneau's novel The Blue Flowers (1965). Floral images based on specific phytonyms (hyponyms) are of particular interest in the works of Rousseau, Lamartine, Nerval, Platen, Lermontov, Pierre Dupont, Rimbaud, Kipling, Lesya Ukrainka, and some other authors. Investigating the way of the formation of the "blue flower" in the 19th- 20th centuries, it is necessary to take into account that this literary micro-image is endowed with a dual meaning, and one meaning negates the other: 1) an optimistic search for Truth, the symbol of the World Soul, the symbol of the beautiful ideal, knighthood of the Middle Ages (based on the concept of Novalis' "blue flower"); 2) a symbol of melancholy, sadness, despair, a kind of Kierkegaard's "absurd faith" in the search for a "blue flower" that you will never find (coming from Eichendorff, Goethe, Platen). The article draws a conclusion about the movement toward "optimization" of the image by the end of the 19th century, although examples of the "sad", tragic perception of "blue flowers" are also found right up to the 1910s. In the middle of the 20th century, the "blue flower" is used as one of the main symbols in the ideology of the Third Reich. In the final part of the article, when considering the image of "blue flowers" in Queneau's novel, it is concluded that the author seeks to bring the "blue flower" closer to both Rousseau's periwinkle and Nerval's forget-me-not - a symbol of memory that preserves everything in its semantics: Eichendorffs melancholy, Novalis' eternal faith in the "blue dream", Dupont's "blue dahlia", Baudelaire's "Invitation to Travel", the medieval knight and the fair lady from Kipling's "Blue Roses" and Rimbaud's "huge blue tiers" - the "flowers of the new rhetoric". For Queneau, they are "flowers of the great rhetoric" like the nameless blue flowers of La Bruyere.

Keywords

Authors

References