Dialogic Aesthetics in Boris Zaitsev’s Russian-Italian Text

Abstract

This article examines the interconnection of the images of Russia and Italy in B. K. Zaitsev’s artistic consciousness revealing their ideal-forming meaning and studying the literary and aesthetic concept of the writer. It is argued that the themes of Russia, Italy, and Florence dominate in the writer’s work, making up the internal semantic unity of his multi-genre texts. The “Florentine text” is interpreted as a local textual subsystem of the “Italian text”, which is a dialogical element of the Russian-Italian text (super-text) created by the writer throughout his artistic life. According to Zaitsev, the city of Dante formed his aesthetic experience, his spiritual, and intellectual identity. Building a dialogue between Russian literature and Dante’s work, Zaitsev follows the philosophical and aesthetic programme of Russian Europeanism characteristic of the Silver Age culture. In the article, the author develops the thesis about the relationship between the image of Russia and that of Florence in the artistic consciousness of Boris Zaitsev. It is demonstrated that the study of Zaitsev’s “Florentine text” provides an idea of the semantic conditionality between the leading Russian and Italian themes in the writer’s work that define his aesthetic concept as dialogical. To achieve this goal, the paper analyses Zaitsev’s artistic and documentary evidence about Florence and the features of his aesthetic reception of the culture of Russia and Italy. The article focuses on the method of literary mnemonics developed by the writer. With its help, Zaitsev creates an authorial version of the myth of Florence in the context of Russian and European literature. The reconstruction of the historical and ideological context of Zaitsev’s work proposed in the article makes it possible to understand the artistic and philosophical nature of his works addressed to Russia and Italy more accurately. As a result of the study, the author determines the structure of the dialogical interactions of imaginative and semantic elements of Zaitsev’s Russian-Italian narrative. Russian and Italian themes that form the dialogical integrity of the Russian-Italian text in the writer’s work are a key aspect of our understanding of B. K. Zaitsev’s artistic concept from the point of view of literary theory and aesthetics.