Klara Sharafadina
Saint Petersburg Humanitarian University of Trade Unions, Russia
G. Derzhavin could not abandon the idea of publishing his poems with illustrations for several decades as he could not imagine proper perception of his poems by the reader without them. This resulted in a project which implied that the poems were accompanied by plastic images engraved after original pictures, headpieces and endpieces. This project has recently been described in more detail, in particular more information is available about the artists and painters who provided the illustrations (I. A. Ivanov, A. N. Olenin, A. Ye. Egorov); the sources of several figurative categories have also been traced. At the same time the conceptual aspect, “intersemiotic reciprocity” (Yu. M. Lotman) of poetry with fine arts, which makes Derzhavin’s project unique, remains so far insufficiently studied. The vegetal pictorial allegories are the most frequent among those to accompany the “Anacreontic Songs”.
The report provides classification of the entire complex of vegetal allegories. The origin of the allegories is traced from the classical antiquity to the baroque. Although having their roots mostly in the invariants of the “Symbols and emblems” and “Iconology”, the allegories of Derzhvin’s project are various and unique in their composition. Parallels between the pictures and “dreams and feelings” illustrated by them verify the fact that the graphical emblems offer consistent and emphatic comments to the key concepts of the book.
Basing on the ideas of the integral aesthetic nature of art, Derzhavin tended to implement the integration of poetry and fine arts in his project by suggesting the patterns of complex texts, which require isomorphic and syneathetic perception and interpretation.