ARTISTIC SYNTHESIS IN CHESS SONNET

Abstract

The article focuses on one of the visual types of syncretic poetry — chess poems. Years ago Anatolii Moisiіenko initiated the chess poetry genre in Ukrainian literature; in a number of critical papers, he presented the specifics of construction and functioning of such artistic structures, which are basically characterized by the symbiosis of proper poetry and chess composition. In this article, the author uses Viktor Kapusta’s books of poems “The Checkered Continent” and “Unguaranteed Migrations” to analyze the chess sonnets of the poet who added a new page to the history of Ukrainian visual literary art by proposing a peer-to-peer combination of a strictly structured literary form and a chess problem. The aim is to conceptualize the figurative and compositional relations within the sonnet structure itself, which relies on the artistic palette of the chess game, with its diversity of geometric abstractions, local mise-en-scénes of unpredictable theatrical performances played out on the chess-board by wooden pieces — or on the chessboard of readers’ imagination. Attention is drawn to the transformational peculiarities of the sonnet line, read in a palindromic and pantorhymic way. The pantorhyme is the versificational and compositional basis for the chess sonnet sequence “Castling. A Herbarium of Stars”, which is analyzed here with regard to the transposition of some characteristics to the realm of chess composition. A diagrammed chess problem becomes a specific chess component of a sonnet sequence, where, for example, the variants of the solution (Black’s defensive moves and White’s attacking responses) correspond to the poetic lines making up the fourteen sonnets whereas the problem’s threat, like a principal poem, concentrates all the mentioned chess movements in a single variant.