V.A. Zhukovsky and German painters: from C.D. Friedrich to the Nazarenes

The mastery of Zhukovsky-painter was a result of long practice. He incorporated the artistry of using the brush and words, literature and visual art in the unity of the art world (''painting and poetry are sisters''). The School of Painting in Dorpat, founded by genial translator, innovator of crayon painting and portrait painter K.A. Senf, was with Zhukovsky throughout all his creative career. The technique of crayon landscape, engraved copperplate and graphic arts of Senf defined the peculiarities of Zhukovsky's artistic thinking. The first trip to Germany in 1821 provided the poet with a new interest and a new teacher. The School of Painting in Dresden had an unquestionable impact on Zhukovsky's landscape pictures. The results of the influence were both the physicophilosophical themes, deeper mythopoetics, as well as original seascape writing that manifested itself along with ''The Sea'', an elegy. The immediate influence of C.D. Friedrich's manner on Zhukovsky's art system is an admitted fact in Zhukovsky studies. The role of L. Tick and Friedrich's follower, painter, medical man and philosopher C.G. Carus was not less important. Tick's synaesthesia and Carus's symbolics were the recognized organizing bases of Drezden Romanticism, which inspired Zhukovsky, who objectified this doctrine in the literary translation of Fouquet's story of Nyx's animation. The second foreign tour determined a new wave of the poet's landscape art. The acquaintance with Gerhard von Reutern (1794-1865) during the second trip became an important point of Zhukovsky's creative career. Von Reutern took Friedrich's place, who refused to accompany Zhukovsky to Switzerland in 1832-1833. The landscape pictures were the result of the relations between Zhukovsky and Reutern, which is confirmed by Zhukovsky's letters to Reu-tern, the extracts from which are published in Russian translation for the first time ever. According to Zhukovsky-poet and painter in the 1830s-1840s, landscape gradually became a religious and romanticist form of art, which was called to show the potential holiness of the nature in a work of art. To a certain extant, landscape became ''the theological conception'' of a soul.

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