Landscape, Still Life, and Portrait as Titles of Poems

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the problem of visual aspect in literature. We study one of the aspects of the visual in a lyrical poem: the representation of painting genres in the titles of the poems, as well as the interaction between the visual and the verbal in lyrical texts. The goal of the paper is to analyze the semantics of such a title and its influence on both the unfolding of the lyrical plot and the figurative system of the poem, also on the strategy of the perception of such text by a reader. To do this, we solve several problems. First of all, we define the concept of the visual in literature; the concepts of the visuality and the visualization are delimited. Secondly, we consider the main ways of representing of the visual in a lyrical text (taking into account the specifics of the lyric as a kind of literature): lyrical plot, image, compositional forms (a description, a dream, an ekphrasis), and allusions to the genres of painting. Thirdly, the importance of analyzing the title for a lyrical poem is justified. Finally, the most representative texts are analyzed from the specified point of view: we examine how the allusion to the painting is manifested in the title.The material of the paper is the number of poems by the Russian and the Polish poets of the nineteenth – twentieth centuries. Their titles coincide with the main genres of paintings, for example, “Landscape”, “Portrait” and “Still Life (nature morte)”. But at the same time, they are not considered to be ekphrasises. That means there is no any description of a real or imaginary picture there, but there is a recreation of the visual imaginative system by the verbal means; and the poems appeal to the reader's viewing experience. In particular, we analyze the poems of A. Maikov, I. Selvinsky, Y. Levitansky, B. Akhmadulina, L. Martynov, J. Przyboś, A. Pushkin, V. Khodasevich, D. Kedrin, Y. Hartwig, I. Brodsky, A. Svershchinskoy.