Issue 2 (59)
| “ENTER A PICTURE LIKE A HUT”: THE LANGUAGE OF SELF-DESCRIPTION IN THE TRAVELOGUE AND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC PAPERS BY V. KANDINSKY | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Year | 2018 | Number | 2(59) |
| Pages | 68-77 | Type | scientific article |
| UDC | 39(470.531):75.03 | BBK | 85.103(2=411.2)-021 |
| Authors | Sozina Elena K. Snigireva Tatiana A. |
Topic | SELF DESCRIPTION LANGUAGES |
| Summary | In 1889 Vasily Kandinsky, then a law student at the Moscow University joined an ethnographic expedition to the land of Zyryan. He described his impressions in a travelogue, which was published only in the 21st century, and two ethnographic articles. By applying the discourse, the narratological and the contextual methods of analysis to these documents the authors, on the one hand, revealed the artist’s connections with the Finno-Ugric culture, the late 19th century ethnographers’ interest in the Komi culture and, on the other, reconstructed the nature of the meta-language of V. Kandinsky’s “Zyryan studies” and its influence (years later) on the graphic language of the avant-garde artist. The travelogue was viewed as a kind of self-description text which, in addition to revealing the would-be artist’s personality and his graphic and color intentions, also depicted the Komi land and the people in a new, unexpected light (V. Kandinsky returned to their descriptions more than once in the later years). The authors came to a conclusion that this trip was to the young researcher a kind of initiation, which awoke in him some spiritual and artistic intuitions reaching beyond the ordinary rationality but striking the right note and falling in rhythm with the Russian and the West European art of the first decades of the new century. In the travelogue as the self-description text V. Kandinsky’s “shamanism”, i. e. his interest in the magic, ritual practices of the peoples of the Russian Empire (not just the Zyryan) which started with his interest in ethnography, stayed in the periphery; and it was only later, when it was externalized and acknowledged by him, that it moved into the center of his artistic work coinciding with his love of color and the inner understanding of the syntony of perception offered by color/sound/music/word. At the peak of V. Kandinsky artistic career these mystical intuitions and insights became the metalanguage of his creative work, and in many respects defined his innovativeness in the art of painting. | ||
| Keywords | Kandinsky, languages of self-description, diary, ethnography, Komi culture, avantgarde art | ||
| References |
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