The article is dedicated to the insufficiently studied problem of the visual image that was formed in the creative aesthetical discourse of Alexander Blok. His articles “Colours and Words” (1905), “Works of Vyacheslav Ivanov” (1905), “About the Present Condition of the Russian Symbolism” (1910), “In Memory of Vrubel” (1910) and also exhibition overviews are considered in the article. The main task of the research is to reveal that the visual image is a way to represent thoughts of symbolist poet, and it is also a model of visual perception, which is characteristic for the modernist culture. The analysis methods are receptive criticism, intermediality and phenomenology of E. Husserl and M. Merleau-Ponty. The reasons why Alexander Blok paid close attention to the works of such painters as A. Böcklin, M. Vrubel, V. Kandinsky and others are analysed in the article. The examples demonstrate how the principles of Italian painters (Fra Angelico, Giovanni Bellini, Leonardo da Vinci) reflected in his aesthetics. It is indicated that the visual image in Blok’s articles is symbolic and metaphysical representation of the aesthetic idea. Blok uses various types of unclassical ecphrasis that have a function of visual codes. Moreover, he creates a type of “fictitious” ecphrasis as a “landscape of consciousness” and uses linguistic contamination. The conclusion is made that the new understanding of art emerges in Blok’s aesthetics, which was characteristic for modernist poetics of the beginning of the XX century. The function of the visual image is representation of symbolic forms (space, colour, composition, things, nature, body dynamics) as phenomena of consciousness and ways to express ideas.
Russian Symbolism: A Study of Vyacheslav Ivanov and the Russian Symbolist Aesthetic. By James West. London: Methuen, 1970. vii, 250 pp. $9.50, cloth. $4.50, paper. Distributed by Barnes & Noble, New York.