VISUAL STUDIES
This paper focuses on the gesture of a hand pressed to the heart and on the possibility of interpretation of this gesture in a single work – the famous Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature. Portrait miniatures of the late 16th century performed the function of a private message transmitted through various elements of the image, including the posture and gesture. Quite common in European art the heart motif of a hand, pressed to a chest, confirms the growth of interest in the inner emotion of a portrayed personality as main content of the portrait in the Early Modern time. The art of miniature, which became in Elizabethan England quite an independent kind of portrait genre, combines typical and individual features in the treatment of the depicted persons poses and gestures. Special attention to the private life of a person, his feelings and states, is manifested in the necessity of self-expression, translation of emotional experience through a portrait. Those features were likely embodied in the Hilliard’s portrait miniature known as “Young Man Among Roses”. The article attempts to interpret the ‘hand on heart’ gesture based on the iconographic analysis of this visual expression in European art. The position of a hand pressed to the heart is studied in the article both as an artistic device and as a rhetorical formula. At the same time, the key to the meaning of that gesture lies in the drawing and composition of the portrait image.
STUDIES IN CULTURAL HISTORY
The article deals with some passages from several important works by O.M. Freidenderg, an outstanding Russian scholar, that are connected with issues of Archaic Greek lyric. With her views on that subject O.M. Freidenberg was much ahead of her time. Some of them now find parallels in postmodernist humanitarian studies. Being under influence of, on one hand, of N. Marr’s ideas, and, on the other hand, of the “Cambridge ritualistic school” in philology (J. Frazer, F. Cornford and others), O.M. Freidenberg in her works insisted on folklore origins of Ancient Greek lyric and genealogized it eventually to rituals. Accordingly, she was ready to minimize authorial principle in that lyric. Her thoughts on symposial context of Hellenic lyric poetry are of importance (nowadays, such a context is accepted unequivocally by scholars and is often researched). However, some Freidenberg’s theses seem to be wrong, as, for example, her suggestion to date Sappho’s verses almost a century later than is accepted, and her factual negation of the very historicity of the poetess.
The article is devoted to the cultural policy of the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. It analyzes the legislative acts regulating the life of the imperial court, first of all, as well as the issues of the morality and charity.
The circumstances of the coming to power of Elizabeth (the first coup in the history of Russia that overthrew the Emperor in the prime of life from the throne), the doubtfulness of her rights to the throne (the presence of two male heirs: Ivan Antonovich, the only man of the segnior branch of the Romanovs, and Elizabeth’s nephew, the son of her elder sister, who had more rights to the throne under the will of Catherine I) forced the Empress to organize a kind of propaganda campaign to legitimize her position.
Among other things, the cultural policy ofElizabethwas aimed at constructing an image of her as a truly Russian sovereign. The kinship of the Empress with Peter the Great was confirmed by the addressing with the patronymic, “by the proximity of blood”. The appeal to national traditions and underlined religiosity, the care for Christian morality, the charity of the disabled and needy people helped the Empress to distance herself from the so-called “German heritage” so alien to the Russians, and to receive additional dividends in the eyes of public opinion.
The article deals with semantic changes which suffered V.S. Grossman‘s story “The Old Schoolmaster” in the period from 1943 to 1962. For the first time the researcher compares all published versions of the text with archival typewritten manuscript and analyzes carefully the detected differences based on the cultural and historical situation of the epoch. Even the plot of the story “The Old Schoolmaster” reconsidered now in the light of newly discovered facts.
The article demonstrates that the magazine “Znamya” publication (1943) was the most faithful to the original author’s idea. In the later editions as a result of censor changes the main character – Boris Isaakovich Rosenthal – turns from the Jewish teacher and tzaddik into a common kind, but weak person, and the image of Dr. Weintraub is greatly simplified and becomes less associated with the Jewish theme. Many of the wartime realities depicted by the author, including those relating to the fate of Jews in the occupied territories, are also consistently reduced.
“THE NEW ART” AND CULTURE OF THE 20TH CENTURY
The complexity of staging the emotional scenario, coinciding in its appearance with the crisis of montage in silent cinema, inclines fi directors to creative experiments. The fi “The Simple Case” was based on Rzheshevskii’s script and went down in history as a creative failure of Pudovkin and his plan was left largely unrealized for diff reasons. The refl on principles of the emotional scenario took place during Pudovkin’s work on that fi and it is being studied in the article following the text of the surviving shooting script. The author considers that Pudovkin’s approaches were aimed at the plot episodization which helped to increase the signifi of the particular character. Working on the “symbolic prologue” of the shooting script Pudovkin was looking for new ways to represent the man on the screen, involving synthetic principle of depicting. The character becomes not a derivative of the plot structure but a form of the reality presence, created through the diff emotional stimuli: visual, colorful, vocal, musical. The article considers his work in relation to the ideas about synthetic artwork, which became relevant in the 1930s as a potential alternative to analytical experiments of avant-garde and to the doctrine of socialist realism.
The paper considers expressions of emotions in the magazines’ photography of the Thaw, that play a signifi role in the bodily representations of that period. The era was oriented on sincerity that realized itself in photography through the aff of a gesture, through an emphasis on the immediacy of emotional reactions, through the attention to everyday life. Thus the romanticism of the sixties revealed itself by suggesting a diff view on the Soviet man. The most noticeable changes occurred in the representation of power, as well as in the pictures of youth and children that became widespread during that period. The emotionality of the Khrushchev’s epoch can be opposed not only to the visual stillness of the Stalinist era, but also to the more limited repertoire of bodily expressions of the Brezhnev stagnation. Once again that underlines the cultural uniqueness of the Thaw determines its specifi .
Changes in the field of visuality occurred in connection with changes in the political life of the country, an increase in foreign contacts, and the development of the media sphere. The article considers the periodical illustrated magazines such as “Ogonek”, “Soviet Photo”, “Soviet Union”, “Soviet Woman”, “Health”, etc. It focuses on the format of publications, comparing text and images, as well as their placement in the periodicals.
The article discusses the cinema method, consisting in the inclusion in the narrative film structure of the elements that the French film critic Andre Bazin in the article devoted to the film of Robert Bresson “The village priest diary”, called “raw aesthetic facts”. “Raw aesthetic facts” in the film’s structure are the different cinematographic, literary or graphic works of art, others in relation to the film, embedded in the narration of the film, but at the same time existing in the film as if parallel to the narration. These “raw aesthetic facts” can be otherwise called as “non-diegetic aesthetic facts”, because, being not incorporated into the unfolding screen story, they thus exist in the film outside the diegesis which is defined as “space and time of narrative fiction”. Analyzing the above Bresson film and its interpretation by Bazen, as well as Andrei Tarkovsky film “The Mirror”, the author of the article shows that the basis for using non-diegetic aesthetic facts and the reason for the differentiating such use from including quotes and simulacra in the film’s structure in postmodern cinema is a direct connection of that cinema method with Christian personalism, an influential modernist philosophical movement of the mid-twentieth century.
