«Словесная живопись» в историческом повествовании: от Пушкина к А.Толстому
Streszczenie
The article discusses the poetics of ‘word painting’ in the generic and stylistic development of
historical prose: from Pushkin’s Peter the Great’s Negro (1829) to Tolstoy’s novel Peter the Great
(1930–1945). It is revealed that ‘verbal art’, along with ‘Walter Scott’s’ type of description of the
epoch, functioned in novelistic texts as the most productive means of expression for artistic historicism.
The opposition between this method of representation and that of static historical description –
as in the ‘boyar chapters’ of Peter the Great’s Negro – is explained. It was this that may have caused
the breach in the stylistic integrity of the novel and determined the incompleteness of its conception
and realization. In their dynamic presentation of the life in ‘Peter’s Russia’, both Pushkin and Tolstoy
blend antithetic techniques: viewing reality from a historical distance – with a direct vision of
phenomena, generalizing historical and philosophic formulas – with objectified specificity of visual
expression. With the help of the ‘verbal-art’ methods, an insight into the epoch is made possible
by combining points of view and showing an image from varied angles. This serves achieving an
artistic effect defined by Aleksei Tolstoy as ‘contemplation through somebody else’s eyes’, which
illustrates the problem of ‘varying scale’ in presenting the era as having its own artistic significance.
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