Fragrances of life and death in the works about Florence by Russian authors

The article examines the real and metaphoric flavors generated by Florence. In the most general form, they can be divided into two groups, those that relate to life and death. Aleksey Tolstoy, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Innokenty Annensky, Alexander Blok and Nikolay Gumilev knew the city of flowers well and created its image, which can not be imagined without the olfactory component, in their works. Tolstoy miraculously conveyed the spirit of Florence, the city of flowers, painting and love, in his letters, autobiography and especially in the poem "Portrait". The hero of the poem not only sees, touches, but also smells a fragrant flower or a faded one, which smells of wilting, and sees a beautiful flower girl, decorated with flowers, carrying flowers and emitting fragrance, a girl who descended from a picturesque canvas to the real world. The image of the heroine of the poem is associated with the scents of love, beauty, spring, miracle. Merezhkovsky believed that the fragrance of Florence is the "smell of damp dust, like that of irises", the smell of water, water dust, a moist smell, light and subtle, it falls into components and conditions its derivatives - the incense of fog, lake, river. It is present in the famous painting of Leonardo da Vinci, who perpetuated the Mona Lisa. The simple and natural smell of water joins the "barely perceptible fresh smell of lacquer and the colors of very old paintings", which emphasizes the contrast of the city of flowers, its special atmosphere of love, the beloved woman. Annensky was looking for his dream flower in Florence. It can be assumed that the symbol of the city of flowers - the lily - became such a flower. The smell of lilies is diabolical and divine, it is the focus of the hope for reciprocity and the impossibility of this reciprocity. The flowers smell of a new meeting and separation, a hope for life and the inevitability of death, they breathe fragrantly and poisonously, divinely and diabolically. The beauty of flowers and their smells cannot be separated or replaced with anything. Blok was looking for the smells of the Florence of the past in the present, in the contemporary reality. He is haunted by the cadaverous smell of roses, scorched by the fire of irises, smoke and burning, by the trading spirit that has replaced the smell of damp flowers. The trampled lilies he mentions probably emit the smell of wilting and death. Gumilev emphasized the simplicity, the artlessness of the scents of the city of flowers -the smells of water, river, grass, and the artificial smells of "incense" that oppose them, as well as the smells of smoke and burning from the fires that devoured Savonarola and the painting by Leonardo. In the works of Tolstoy and Merezhkovsky, the smells of life prevail over the smells of death, in the poems of Annensky they balance on the verge of complementing each other, and in the sketches of Blok and Gumilev the scents of death dominate over the fragrances of life.

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