The article analyzes one of the most unique ekphrasis of European art, which combines into a single intertext the Gospel stories about the Virgin Mary, the medieval cult of the Madonna generated by them, the Sistine Madonna painting by Raphael Santi, an article by V. Zhukovsky dedicated to this masterpiece, love sonnets of Adam Mickiewicz, Pushkin's poems “To K***”, “There Lived a Poor Knight...”, as well as his sonnet triptych: “Severe Dante did not despise the sonnet...”, “To the Poet” and “Madonna”. Pushkin twice beat Zhukovsky's figurative definition that struck his imagination. In the madrigal of 1825, addressed to Anna Petrovna Kern, he actually quoted him: “Like a genius of pure beauty”, using it as an exquisite gallant hyperbole. And in a sonnet of 1830, addressed to Natalya Nikolaevna Goncharova, having slightly modified the original version, he described his future wife as “The purest example of the purest charm.” The author of the article concludes that the ideal of heavenly beauty and purity praised by Pushkin was generated not only by a real earthly woman, but also mainly by intertextual terms of a mythological, pictorial and poetic nature.
Key words: Virgin Mary, “Sistine Madonna”, Raphael, Zhukovsky, Mickiewicz, Pushkin, sonnet
DOI: 10.22250/20728662_2023_4_152
About the author
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Oleg I. Fedotov – Doctor of Philology, Full Professor, Professor at the Department of Russian Classical Literature of the Institute of Philology of the Moscow State Pedagogical University;, build. 1, house 1., Malaya Pirogovskaya str., Moscow, 119435, Russia; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. |