The verbal portrait in the memoirs of M.V. Dobuzhinskiy

The first half of the 20th century is characterized by the interest to the synthetic literary genres which include memoirs located between the documentary and fiction literature. Memoirs were important for the first wave of the Russian emigration because they gave an opportunity to revive the reminiscence about the outgoing Russia, to image the literary and cultural life of the Russian intelligentsia forced out of the homeland. No recollections of the studied period which aim to represent the transitional nature of the historical epoch cannot do without verbal portraits of the author's contemporaries, many being symbolic figures in the art and literature of that time. Verbal portraits in the memoirs of Russian artists are understudied, so their consideration is of the utmost interest as they are created by the imaginative interpretation of the human character by the author-artist, which actualizes the problem of the interaction of the verbal and artistic pictorialism. The identification of the verbal portraiture allows understanding the special aspects of the structure and form of this type of nonfiction. M. Dobuzhinskiy was predominantly a landscape-painter, yet he also painted portraits of his contemporaries, Symbolism writers and World-of-Art artists. He was a prominent representative of his epoch who left the evidence about it in his memoirs. M.V. Dobuzhinskiy did book graphics, masterfully interpreted the content of literary works, especially finely felt the connection between the word and the image. M. V. Dobuzhinskiy wrote his Vospominaniya [Recollections] for over 30 years, from the mid-1920s to his death in 1957. These memoirs are constructed on the understanding of the facts of the Russian artistic culture, in which the memoirist took part. Among the verbal portraits in Dobuzhinskiy's Vospominaniya are portraits of artists, writers and poets. However, not all of them have a pictorial analogue. Thus, K.A. Somov, B.M. Kustodiev, A.N. Benois, N.N. Evreinov are portrayed in pencil drawings. Dobuzhinskiy made caricatures of F.K. Sologub, V.I. Ivanov, I.E. Grabar, I.B. Bilibin, cartoons on L.S. Bakst, Z.I. Grzhebin, M.A. Kuzmin, etc. The analysis of the verbal portraits in Dobuzhinskiy's Vospominaniya shows that the epoch of the Silver Age with its artistry and masquerading had a significant impact on the artist's work. The pictorial ways of the author-artist are in the text of the memoirs: the simultaneous nebulosity and the specification of the image, no superfluous phsychologism, the demonstration of the personalities of the portraits from different perspectives. The creative work is of primary importance (without criticism, yet with some reflection), its essence and ideas, the structure of the portraits form around this concept reflecting the image of the author and his contemporaries in the light of art. REFERENCES

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