When verbal and visual arts share the same plot: artistic worlds of Bakhyt Kenzheyev's poem Hunters in the Snow and the painting by Peter Brueghel the Elder

Abstract

The authors correlate and interpret the same plot in different types of art, i.e., painting and literature. Such a rapprochement is justified by the intertextual reference of Bakhyt Kenzheyev's poem Hunters in the Snow (1984) to the painting of the same name by Peter Brueghel the Elder (1665). The languages of the visual and the verbal are organized differently: the painting offers its viewer a direct contemplation, while the world of the poem gradually unfolds itself in the reader's imagination. The images in the painting are static, whereas textual images reveal themselves in a certain sequence, according to R. Ingarden. The authors believe that the images of the house and the forest are the key difference between the figurative system of the painting and the text. In the painting, the viewer sees the house and the forest from the outside only, while the text gives its reader an opportunity to see them from the inside. The images we see in Brueghel's painting differ from those we see in our mental eye when reading Kenzheyev's poem because the narrator shifts between the space of the painting, here he is one of the hunters, and the position of an outside observer. Therefore, one and the same plot can be translated from the language of painting into the language of poetry, but the change in the format of visibility is bound to cause various semantic changes.