Door and window in the house Baroque emblems

The Baroque chronotope of the house preserved a close connection with the folk ritual fixed in the Ukrainian and Russian literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. However, if in the archaic consciousness the house was the center of the human world, and the door and the window marked the border, the point of contact with the world of natural space, in the Baroque aesthetics, reflecting the Christian view of the world, the house and its components gained a universal emblematic value. The house was a symbolic analogue of the universe and included natural, human, historical and transcendent dimensions. This Baroque motive reflected in the structure of the Nativity puppet show, popular in Ukraine, that showed sacral and domestic scenes in the home-like interior. G. Skovoroda, a famous philosopher of the Ukrainian Baroque, actively used the Nativity theater technique. His famous emblematic image of the town that influenced the "composite town" of N.V. Gogol is nothing but an extension of the Nativity cave space to the limits of an urban ensemble where the comedy of earthly life, a reflection of the cosmic mystery, is played. Symeon Polotsky's "Greeting < . . .> to Alexei Mikhailovich < . . .> on his successful moving into a new house < . . .> in Kolomenskoye" offers a distinctive sample of the literary emblem of the house. The Tsar's palace here was the archetype of the house, a perfect house, and its versatility was emphasized by cosmic analogies; in their light any piece of the interior embodied a part of the universe. In this context, the semantics of doors and windows also became emblematic: windows were like stars illuminating the terrestrial world, and doors opened an entrance to the realm of beauty and wisdom. The door and the window attract Baroque man as a means to look into the unknown. Russian-Ukrainian Baroque, replacing the Middle Ages, first made man the center of special interest: only man's eyes saw the diversity of God's creation in its earthly and transcendent incarnation. The meta-plot associated with the door and the window is based on the parable of the prodigal son: the hero leaves his home, a familiar narrow sphere that he has overgrown and seeks to learn the big world, across different borders, but eventually returns to his father's house that now is the whole universe and is known in its new faces. This semantics found consistent implementation in Symeon Polotsky's "Comedy of the Parable of the Prodigal Son". The summarizing collections of the Russian-Ukrainian Baroque present a similar trip in the change of different types of space, including the house. Readers of Symeon Polotsky's "Multicolor Vertograd", without leaving their homes like the prodigal son, virtually make a long tour around the universe. The complex organization of the collection transforms it into a bizarre path reminiscent of a maze with a variety of entrances and exits. The door and the window here acquire the character of a meta-metaphor when metaphorical images of one poem transfer to the images of another creating metaphors of a higher order ("House of Mourning and Banqueting House", "House of Virtues", etc.). The vertical dimension of the borders in "Vertograd" also has horizontal lines associated with different spatial zones and corresponding types of houses. The door here is a kind of a mediator: the big world and the general laws entered the house through it, which united single private plots by the Divine denominator.

Keywords

Authors

References