Reception of Moliere’s personality and works in the literary and graphic heritage of Aubrey Beardsley

The article considers the verbal and visual reception of the personality and works of Moliere, a French playwright and actor of the 17th century, in the works of Aubrey Beardsley, an English illustrator and writer of the late 19th century. The appeal to Moliere is explained by the interest of the English artist in the era of Louis XIV, commedia dell’arte, and French literature. The watercolor portrait of Moliere (1891), the image of Titurel de Schentefleur in the unfinished novel Under the Hill (1894-1898), the drawing Don Juan, Sganarelle and the Pauper (1896), and fragments of an unwritten story about Don Juan (1897) are successively analyzed. The analysis involves Moliere’s Les plaisirs de l’lle enchantee (1665), La Pastorale comique (1666), Les Amants magnifiques (1670), and Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre (1665). The authors infer that the features of Beardsley’s artistic reception are determined by cultural distance, the era of “fin de siecle,” synthesis of arts, his biography and individual style. Beardsley reinterprets Moliere’s personality and works through the prism of the European art and culture of the 18th-19th centuries, actualizing the theatricality, mysticism and rationalism of the 17th century and the late 19th -early 20th centuries. The stylized details of the portrait of the French playwright and actor (facial features, wig) and the characters of his plays (clothes) serve as both a mask and a multivalued symbol in the verbal and visual works of the English artist. “Melancholy sadness” characterizes the scruffy figure and dark sad eyes of Moliere’s “hilarious comedian” in front of the theater curtain in a watercolor portrait by Beardsley. Explicit and implicit references to Moliere’s appearance and theater can be traced in the novel Under the Hill, or the History of Venus and Tannhauser, in the image of the conductor Titurel de Schentefleur and in the description of the ballet Les Bacchanales de Sporion. The image of Titurel was created through the synthesis of numerous cultural associations (Italian, German, French). The plot of the unfinished Beardsley’s novel and the orgy of Venus Hill resembles “amusements” at the court of Louis XIV, in the creation of which Moliere took an active part. To illustrate Moliere’s play Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre, Beardsley chooses the scene with a beggar in which the dual character of the protagonist manifests itself. The disguised Don Juan and Sganarelle resemble the stylized characters of the Italian commedia dell’arte, transformed by the European tradition into the Poet and the Black Doctor (Stello by Alfred de Vigny). Analysis of Beardsley’s sketches for books from the Pierrot Library series (1896) and other illustrations allows us to combine Pierrot’s figures, in which Beardsley saw himself, and Harlequin, whose proud pose is inherent in Don Juan and Tannhauser. The coin in the open palm of Don Juan combines the gospel motives of the temptation of Christ and the playful interpretation of the motive of fate (fortune telling). The image of Don Juan in prose fragments called the “Celestial Lover”, like in the picture, seems estranged from the world, associated with the motives of imaginary adventures and wanderings. Combining of all interpretations, melancholic irony, loneliness and mystery characterize not only the comedian Moliere and the adventurer Don Juan with their life energy, but also Beardsley’s self-reflection in his “passionate journey” (it was not by chance that he adopted Catholicism before his death). The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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