Alexandre Dumas’s Works in the Art of Alexandre Benois

Abstract

The article studies the problem of interpretation of literary source in visual creative work of A.N. Benois. There are identified and analyzed new sources of his works — historical novels by A. Dumas, père. The question about the role of the novels by Alexandre Dumas devoted to the history of France of the 17th and 18th centuries in creative work of Alexandre Benois has never become the object of research. The re­levance of this article is determined by this fact. The scientific novelty of this article lies in revea­ling new literary sources of creative work of A. Benois — Dumas’s novels “Joseph Balsamo (Doctor’s Notes)” (1846—1848), “Louis XIV and his Century” (1844), “Louis XV and his Epoch” (1849) — and determining parallels between them and art practice of the artist: painting, graphics and art of book. The author analyses content of the ar­tist’s memories, his literary works, diaries, as well as diaries by E. Lanceray, and complements these information details by a comparative textological analysis of Benois’s memoirs and Dumas’s no­vels in Russian translations. This method allows to deepen the formal analysis of A. Benois’s works (primarily the two Versailles series) and partially reveal the mechanism of complex figurative synthesis in the artistic consciousness at the turn of the 19th—20th centuries, on the basis of which they were created, to expand the existing perceptions about the literary sources of the artist’s creative work. The author concludes that the no­vels by Dumas “Joseph Balsamo”, “Louis XIV and his Century” had an influence on the artist’s perception of the theme of court culture and Versailles in the historical, cultural and natural aspects. It was reflected in the appeal to the plot of “fish feeding” in the late 1890s, in the formation of the images of Versailles and King Louis XIV in old age. The article also finds that the novel “Joseph Balsamo” had an influence on Benois’s creation of Trianon’s everyday image in the past. At the same time, the artist turned to the interpretation of the image of Marquise de Pompadour as “sultana” under the influence of Dumas’s novel “Louis XV and his Epoch”. In addition, the three musketeers — characters of Dumas’s novel with the same name — are placed in the drawing of the title page of Benois’s “Versailles” album. It is important that it does not come about direct illustration of the novels, but about an artistic process of creating a figurative system of images and forming the artist’s stylistics.