Mystical Petersburg in Moi Vospominaniya by Alexandre Benois

The aim of the study is to determine the specifics of the chronotope of Saint Petersburg in the memoir-autobiographical work Moi Vospominaniya [My Memories] (1934-1960) of the Russian emigrant artist Alexandre Benois and to identify the relationships between the aesthetic settings of his paintings and their reflection in his perception of the city in the verbal text. The work uses an integrated approach based on historical and literary, comparative-typological, phenomenological and cultural methods. Benois's Moi Vospominaniya is considered as an egotext about art, in which the author represents the concept of his own creativity. This work has been studied in the aspect of implementing the idea of synthesising the arts through the interaction of pictorial and verbal artistic imagery, relevant to the culture of the turn of the 20th century. Moi Vospominaniya is characterised by a multi-level structure of the spatio-temporal organisation of the narrative: the chronotope is embodied both in real historical "open" time and in an imaginary space, subjective "closed" time, the space of art, the mystical chronotope. The space in the text is modelled by art but represents the real world restored by the author's memory. Sometimes elements of another being dangerous to humans penetrate into it: the mystical atmosphere of Oranienbaum and Pavlovsk, white nights, the oneiric chronotope (terrible prophetic dreams, pictures coming alive). The author concludes that Benois's text models images of the artistic space, in which the elements characteristic of his pictorial and theatrical-decorative works that combine realistic and fantastic principles are realised. The space-and-time of Saint Petersburg in the text is polysemantic; it incorporates various cultural and spiritual phenomena. The real and the surreal mutually influence and condition each other, the conscious and unconscious spheres of life and art are intertwined. Hoaxes in the narrative are exposed to cultural monuments, artifacts, family relics that symbolise the connection of the life of an autobiographical character with previous eras, the merging of dreams, fantasies and reality that conveys his attitude. By turning to the art of the past, the alarming symptoms of the future are discerned: the anxiety and fear dispersed in the narrative becomes evidence of the character's fears of the invasion of something hostile, a sign of human doom, the death of a peaceful way of life, old life, culture, a forerunner of new disasters. Mystical and everyday lives coexist not only in the life of the character himself, but also of his contemporaries; the author pays special attention to this, foreseeing a negative and dangerous trend in the overconcentration of infernal manifestations (growing religious mystical searches, the spread of sectarianism in different layers of Russian society).

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