RECEPTION OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY’S WORK IN THE NOVEL “THE APES OF GOD” BY WYNDHAM LEWIS

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of Wyndham Lewis’s perception of Aubrey Beardsley’s graphic and literary works. We apply an aesthetic-poetological method and historical-literary method and biographical method. The comparison of Beardsley’s novels «Under the Hill» and Lewis’s «The Apes of God» is associated with the experience of graphic creativity of the authors, with their interest in Catholicism, with parody and the grotesque. An analysis of direct references to Beardsley in the context of “table talk” and aphorisms of Wilde, Beardsley and Whistler shows that Lewis does not completely deny the experience of the 1890s. Rather Lewis pays a lot of attention to them in the form of reminiscences, following the aesthetics of objectivity. If the era of 1890s is characterized in Lewis’s novel with the help of food metaphors, then the pictures of modernity are created with the help of battle, military vocabulary. Lewis characterizes fictional heroes of the 20th century through the artists of the nineties of the 19th century – Beardsley, Wilde, Whistler, Leverson. If Wilde and Whistler are recognized by Lewis in the artistic world of the novel through Pierpoint, Zagreus and Osmund, then the name of Aubrey Beardsley is more associated with the image of Sib. The heroine of the novel (whose prototype is Ada Leverson) is created through characteristics reminiscent of Beardsley’s drawings, which combine masses of black and white and which are associated with the tradition of the «Fetes Galantes».