Modernist ekphrasis in Marina Tsvetaeva’s essay Natalia Goncharova. Life and Work

Abstract

This article examines Marina Tsvetaeva’s modernist perception of the personality and paintings of the greatest representative of the Russian avant-garde of the 20th century in the essay “Natalia Goncharova. Life and Work” (“Наталья Гончарова. Жизнь и творчество”, 1929). Goncharova’s paintings that Tsvetaeva describes in her essay are indicated. The principles of modernist poetics and ekphrasis are revealed (lyrical subjectivism, ontology, consonance, anagrammatic disclosure of the inner form of a word, mythologization, reader co-creation, dialogism). The similarity between Tsvetaeva’s understanding of painting and poetry is compared to the ontological understanding of art by Martin Heidegger. This can be explained by the tradition of ontological poetry (Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke), which is important for both. The ontology of Goncharova’s painting is also considered in the context of the ontology of animals in Russian philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century (Vasily Rozanov) and in the Tahitian Painting of Paul Gauguin. Special attention is paid to ekphrastic poetics (style, tropes, consonance), with the help of which Tsvetaeva authentically transfers the ontologism of Goncharov’s painting in its stylistic diversity (cubism, neo-primitivism, rayonism) to the verbal level. Tsvetaeva and Goncharova in the respective Russian and European context (Gauguin, Rozanov, Heidegger, Rilke) appear as exponents of the ontological turn in the culture of the first half of the 20th century.