ICONOLOGY OF THE PICTORIAL ELEMENTS OF POEMS BY PRINCE VLADIMIR PALEY
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2022-2-68-87
The collection Poems (1916) by Prince Vladimir Paley does not have a common plot and composition, it presents scattered lyrical impressions. The composition of the collection is organized by extra-textual pictorial elements: headpieces and vignettes. Responding to the collector’s taste of the poet, these elements force one to read his lyrics differently: not as a transfer of personal impressions, but as a complex construction of his own identity based on various cultural languages. The use of the iconological method and appeal to the resources of visual semiotics allow showing how, thanks to the order of illustrations, certain motifs of romantic and modernist poetry cease to be self-sufficient, becoming only moments in the acquisition of a more holistic lyrical position. Such design elements of the book as cartouches with the titles of poems, headpieces with images of landscape and genre scenes, and scattered vignettes were analyzed; the entire volume of the book’s illustrative accompaniment was covered. The article shows that despite the fact that the design of this book is fundamentally restrained, which corresponded to the new settings of the taste of wartime, each type of artistic accompaniment builds its own program for reading these poems, not allowing the content of individual poems to be reduced to the reproduction of romantic, neo-romantic or symbolist motifs. The article demonstrates how cartouches with the titles of the poems allowed educated readers to thematize the relationship between nature and history by de-automating the perception of the title as an indication only of a subject topic. The decor of these elements indicates both the interpenetration of the natural world and the world of culture, and the inadequacy of individual languages or semiotic formations to convey the idea of a person’s metaphysical destiny. Three poems with the cartouches build an independent plot of the presence in nature of not only fatal forces, but also metaphysical insights. Illustrations-headpieces demanded a special interpretation based on knowledge of the realities and conceptual meanings of certain painting genres. The article proves that poems with the headpieces convey the general plot of the independence of an intimate mental life from ready-made patterns of history perception. In these poems, the idea dominates of intimizing history as the only way to comprehend the meaning of historical catastrophes. Finally, individual vignettes allow reading the entire array of the poems in this book as supporting the main idea of accepting natural necessity in order to overcome private ideas about fate, with the necessary Christian reinterpretation of forebodings and individual symbolic indications. Thus, the illustrative mode of the book corresponds to the principles of multilingualism and polystylistics of Russian modern style. The study allows clarifying both the landmarks of the official Russian culture of the pre-revolutionary period and the specificity of the poetic works of Vladimir Paley as one of the most striking cases of supporting the original poetics with the visual semiotics of natural and cultural objects.
Keywords: Prince Vladimir Paley, lyrical position, lyrical hero, polystylistics, iconology, book illustration, emblem
References:
Apuleius. (1893). Amur i Psikheya. Skazka Apuleya [Cupid and Psyche. A story by Apuleius]. Translated from Latin y Yu. A – dt. Panteon Literatury.
Averintsev, S. S. (1995). Spetsifika liricheskoy geroini v poezii Anny Akhmatovoy: solidarnost’ i dvoynichestvo [Specificity of the lyric heroine in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova: solidarity and duality]. Wiener Slavistisches jahrbuch, 41, 7–20.
Averintsev, S. S. (2011). Po povodu stat’i A. Zubova “Puti Rossii” [Regarding A. Zubov’s article “The Ways of Russia”]. Kontinent, 148. 122–126.
Belting, H. (2005). Image, medium, body: A new approach to iconology. Critical Inquiry, 31(2), 302–319.
Ekshtut, S. A. (2017). Revived by the revolution. The life and extraordinary adventures of the heroine of the picture by Y. P. Annenkov. Novoe proshloe – The New Past, 2, 26–46.
Farné, R. (2019). Didactic iconology. IMG Journal, 1(1), 122–127.
Hollerbach, E. (1922). Dvortsy-muzei. Sobranie Paley v Detskom Sele [Palaces-museums. Collection of Paley in Detskoe Selo]. Sredi kollektsionerov.
Markov, A. V. (2020a). Schumann’s “Carnival” in the poetry of Dmitry Klenovsky. Studia Litterarum, 5(2), 270–285. (In Russian).
Markov, A. V. (2020b). The sense of homeland: The iconological program of illustrations for the Town of Muses by Erich Gollerbakh. Nasledie vekov – Heritage of Сenturies, 4, 28–36. (In Russian).
Müller, M. G. (2011). Iconography and iconology as a visual method and approach. In E. Margolis, & L. Pauwels (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of visual research methods (vol. 1, pp. 283–297). Sage Publications.
Nayman, A. G. (1999). Rasskazy ob Anne Akhmatovoy [Stories about Anna Akhmatova]. Vagrius.
Olson, L. C. (2004). Benjamin Franklin’s vision of American community: A study in rhetorical iconology. University of South Carolina Press.
Paley, Prince Vladimir. (1916). Stikhotvoreniya [Poems]. Petrograd.
Sherer, D. (2020). Panofsky on architecture: Iconology and the interpretation of built form, 1915–1956, Part I. History of Humanities, 5(1), 189–224.
Stein, C. (2021). Medieval naturalia: Identification, iconography, and iconology of natural objects in the Late Middle Ages. Medievalista, 29, 211–241.
Zelenin, D. A. (2016). Vzaimootnosheniya slova i obraza v emblematike: problemnye sluchai [Relationships between words and images in emblem: Problematic cases]. In A. E. Makhov (Ed.), Emblematika i emblematichnost’ v zapadnoevropeyskoy i russkoy kul’ture [Emblematics and emblematicity in Western European and Russian culture] (pp. 59–75).
( 778.01 kB ) 
( 755.15 kB )
Issue: 2, 2022
Series of issue: Issue 2
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 68 — 87
Downloads: 520