Sergey Timofeyevich Konenkov’s Mythopoetics

Abstract

The article deals with the features of mythopoetic models in S.T. Konenkov’s sculpture. Despite the fact that monographs, albums, dozens of articles are devoted to the maestro’s works and they are quite well studied, the nature of the mythologism of S.T. Konenkov’s artistic thinking has not been fully revealed. In the ideological context of Soviet art studies, which were based on the methodology of the “social history of art”, only the fact of the sculptor’s deep interest in archaic folk traditions was noted, while this topic can be considered as a natural manifestation of the myth-making process characteristic of the art of the 20th century as a whole. Using the example of S.T. Konenkov’s works, the article attempts to retrace the formation specifics of the “non-classical artistic language” of mythopoetics in the Russian land, which consisted in the fact that, unlike Western European artists who would immerse in the exotic world of archaic art of non-European origin (primarily Africa), Russian masters were fascinated by their home antiquity. When considering the mythological structures that served as the basis for the mythopoetic models of S.T. Konenkov’s sculptural projects, three basic groups can be conditionally distinguished: a direct appeal to ancient mythology, pagan Slavic reminiscences, and a mythological interpretation of a freshly created new world. It is thanks to myth-making that the characters of S.T. Konenkov’s sculptural compositions, despite all the heterogeneity of specific subjects, belong to the integrity of a single cosmos created by the mythopoetic consciousness of the maestro. At the same time, the common mythological foundations of the Russian sculpture development in that period determine the commonality of the mythopoetic models, characteristic not only of S.T. Konenkov’s works. In many ways, they are also quite clearly manifested in the works of S.D. Erzia, A.S. Golubkina, and others.