The Petersburg text in Vospominaniya by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky

Abstract

Mstislav Dobuzhinsky (1875-1957) was one of the members of the artistic movement Mir Iskusstva, a cityscape painter, book illustrator, scene designer, and also wrote memoirs. He had been writing his Vospominaniya [Recollections] for over 30 years, from the mid-1920s to his death in 1957. Emigration, home-sickness, author’s intention to relive the foretime stipulate the specificity of the text’s chronotope, which is mainly related to Petersburg. Dobuzhinsky idealized the image of Petersburg in Vospominaniya. I determine the specificity of Petersburg’s chronotope and describe the interconnections between the delineation of Petersburg and its verbal image in the text. The theme of depicting Petersburg highlights Dobuzhinsky’s artworks. Dobuzhinsky perceived Petersburg as a piece of art and focused on his own visual interpretation of the city. His attitude to Petersburg metamorphosed with the autobiographic main character’s acquisition of new art techniques and artistic devices from works of Alexandre Benois and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Petersburg’s chronotope is multifaceted in the text: it is a real historical cityscape, a happy childhood time, an object of visual art of the autobiographic main character, and also a space of author mystification. The main character perceives Petersburg and the Petersburg text through the prism of works of Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The city becomes the author’s ideal. It is the space that combines the features of the beautiful and the ugly, which determined the antinomy of the Petersburg text. Petersburg is fantastic, it has an infernal theme, an evil principle inherent in the city: in inclement weather, the main character had nightmares in the streets and petty demons coming out of the cracks. The narrator recognizes the city as an inspired creature hostile to man, the main character himself is confronted with a peculiar manifestation of Petersburg’s metaphysical fear. In the narration, Petersburg reflected the various features inherent in the image of the city in Dobuzhinsky’s artworks with their aestheticism, tragedy, lyricism, irony, philosophy, and sentimentality. Petersburg in Vospominaniya concentrates different real and unreal meanings. The autobiographic main character teeters on the brink of his historical real-life time and space and unreal time and space created by literature texts and pieces of visual art that compensate the need for comprehending the city’s soul. Petersburg in the text is a complex ambivalent space, saturated with cultural codes, reflected by the cognizing consciousness that acts systematically and transforms the main character’s inner world. The theme of depicting Petersburg allows the author-narrator to reveal the general approach to his pictorial art, rethink some aspects of artistic activity, and verbalize the visual representation of the city. The author declares no conflicts of interests.