At the Origins of the Literary Portrait: Physiognomy in the Context of Modern Humanities

The article explores the peculiarities of literary portraits and studies the interconnections and contrasts between painted and written portraits. The recognizability of a portrait in pictorial art is attained not only through physical resemblance but also through “artistic deformations” that the author introduces to the appearance of the portrayed. In a literary portrait, identification is achieved both by verbal and plastic detailing and by addressing the reader’s inner experience and imagination. Traditionally, the literary portrait in the Russian literature of the 19th century is based mostly on plastic characteristics, comparisons, and color accents, and because of this, it is often defined as “pictorial”. However, portraits by Pushkin and Dostoevsky stand out as exceptionally original, as if created from a different material. Pushkin avoids detailing, instead, he presents a “suggestive” portrait, i.e., a dynamic outline of the personality. The reader’s imagination is influenced not by details, but rather by the dynamic nature of Pushkin’s characters. Dostoevsky does not inherit Pushkin’s methods, though he also turns to a dynamic principle in describing the heroes of his novels. When they first appear, he presents them as if from different angles of vision, and their features may often be in discord, which makes the reader sense a contradictory impact of their personalities, as well as of their portraits. This kind of portrait is a dynamic message, where the reader follows the hero along unexpected and contrasting paths that the author previously mapped for him. From the beginning to the very end of their works, these two classics of Russian literature present the human personality as a being in a state of life-long development, always changing and always free in its existential choice.

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The Literary Portrait of Byzantine Female Saints

The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography ◽

10.4324/9781315141909-16 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 363-386

Author(s):

Nathalie Delierneux

Keyword(s):

Literary Portrait ◽

Female Saints

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“Beautiful on the Cross, Beautiful in His Torments”: The Place of the Body in the Thought of Paschasius Radbertus

Traditio ◽

10.1017/s0362152900000222 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 60 ◽

pp. 1-46

Author(s):

David Appleby

Keyword(s):

Image Of God ◽

The Body ◽

The People ◽

The Cross ◽

Literary Portrait ◽

The Image Of God ◽

Mind's Eye

In his literary portrait of Abbot Adalhard, written soon after the abbot's death in 826, Paschasius Radbertus of Corbie compared his subject's moral and spiritual progress to the method of the ancient painter Zeuxis as this had been described in Cicero'sDe inventione.According to Cicero, the people of Cortona commissioned Zeuxis to decorate a temple with the image of Helen, who was reputed to be the most beautiful of mortal women. Because nature withheld overall perfection from any individual, Zeuxis studied several handsome models and combined the best features of each in an image that was more perfect than the form of any actual maiden. Adalhard too was an artist who sought to realize a work that somehow went beyond nature, but in his case the objective was a reformation of the image of God in himself. To achieve this, Adalhard too used models, in his case the lives and deeds of the saints, whose examples of virtue he discerned with the mind's eye and assimilated in an effort to resemble the transcendent archetype.

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The symbolic survival of the “living dead”: Narrating the LTTE female fighter in post-war Sri Lankan women’s writing

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature ◽

10.1177/0021989417723414 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 54 (3) ◽

pp. 384-398

Author(s):

Birte Heidemann

Keyword(s):

Women's Writing ◽

Sri Lankan ◽

Living Dead ◽

War Experiences ◽

Post War ◽

Literary Portrait ◽

The Individual ◽

Female Fighters ◽

The Military ◽

Women’S Writing

This article examines the lingering presence of the female militant figure in post-war Sri Lankan women’s writing in English. Through a careful demarcation of the formal–aesthetic limits of engaging with the country’s competing ethno-nationalisms, the article seeks to uncover the gendered hierarchies of Sri Lanka’s civil war in two literary works: Niromi de Soyza’s autobiography Tamil Tigress (2011) and Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2012). The reading draws attention to the writers’ attempt to “historise” the LTTE female fighter and/or suicide bomber within Sri Lanka’s complex colonial past and its implications for the recent history of conflict. The individual motives of the female fighters to join the LTTE, the article contends, remain ideologically susceptible to, if not interpellated by, the gendered hierarchies both within the military movement and Tamil society at large. A literary portrait of such entangled hierarchies in post-war Sri Lankan texts, the article reveals, helps expose the hegemonic (male) discourses of Sri Lankan nationalism that tend to undermine the war experiences of women.

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Techniques of Yuri Annenkov’s verbal painting (on the example of the literary portrait “Boris Pasternak”)

Science and School ◽

10.31862/1819-463x-2020-5-31-36 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 31-36

Author(s):

Margarita V. Olyunina

Keyword(s):

Boris Pasternak ◽

Functional Methods ◽

Literary Heritage ◽

History Of ◽

Literary Portrait ◽

Contemporary Artist

The article analyzes the ways of creating a verbal portrait in the memoirs of Yu. Annenkov’s „Boris Pasternak” with the substantiation of genre and style features of the considered verbal image which allows to take a fresh look at the already textbook image of the writer. Capturing the image of the poet and prose writer B. Pasternak, the painter creates both a self-portrait and the portrait of the era. Thus, Yuri Annenkov’s literary heritage turns out to be the second portrait gallery, for which the artist once again paints his relatives and dear people, who remained on his canvases. The purpose of this work is an attempt to show the features of verbal image in Yuri Annenkov’s book of memoirs “Diary of my meetings”, “Cycle of tragedies” on the example of the essay “Boris Pasternak”, to enrich the image of the writer through the prism of perception of his contemporary artist. This study is based on comparative historical and functional methods and is based on the works of contemporary literary scholars engaged in the theory and history of prose portrait.

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RIVER IN THE WORKS BY M. F. ISTOMIN: ON THE PROBLEM OF MODELING THE IMAGE OF THE NORTH IN THE WORKS OF KOMI WRITERS OF THE XIX CENTURY

Yearbook of Finno-Ugric Studies ◽

10.35634/2224-9443-2021-15-4-654-662 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 15 (4) ◽

pp. 654-662

Author(s):

Valentina Aleksandrovna Limerova

Keyword(s):

Literary Work ◽

Russian Language ◽

The North ◽

Russian Literary ◽

Literary Process ◽

History Of ◽

Literary Portrait ◽

Xix Century ◽

Literature Material ◽

Made In

The works of Mikhail Fedorovich Istomin (1821-1862) are part of the unexplored and, until recently, not included in the history of Komi literature material - essays created by Komi writers of the XIX century in Russian language. Meanwhile, the work of M. Istomin is very representative both in terms of the formation of General regional characteristic of all the literature of the North, and the ways of familiarizing Komi intelligentsia to literary work. The analysis of works of M. Istomin made in this work, allows to judge about actual for the writer-“foreigner” of the XIX century connection to all-regional and all-Russian literary process, and also about a problem of creation of a native literary portrait for different people of the North. The description of the territory, its geographical and climatic features, the creation of descriptions of places was chosen by the writer as a priority, the most important task of creativity. This allows him to embody fragments of the Northern world through the focus of view of autochthon, to identify and record the most important, especially important for the northerner, locations and objects of environment. The writer paid special attention to the rivers as the most important geographical and natural attractions of the region. In essence, the North in the essays of M. Istomin takes the form of world saturated with many waters. The writer is far from symbolizing natural objects, does not endow their images with figurative meanings, at the same time, many descriptions of different rivers in his essays indicate the movement of regional and Komi literature by the way of creation its own concept of the North as a natural environment-centered world.

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