Complex ekphrasis of the Hermitage moving in the latest russian poetry
Authors: Markov Alexander Viktorovich 
Published: December 2021

Poetic ekphrasis may be not only simple, like a description of a work of art as a system of images that naturally come to life in an artistic description, but also complex, meaning the stay of exhibits in a museum or gallery. Complex ekphrasis is used also be different, in contrast to the type of contextualization of exhibits in the space intended for them, and a special ekphrasis of movement can be distinguished, where it is not the delay in front of the exhibits that is important, but the experience of the museum space itself as strange, existentially significant and associated with key existential moments in the life of a lyric character. In such a subspecies of ekphrasis, it is not the action of the imagination that is essential, but the skills of orientation in a value-marked space, with signs of up and down, openness and closeness, due to which the return of aesthetic experience in a complex existential situation is thought. The article offers a close reading of several examples of such an ekphrasis of gallery movement. In the poetry of Mikhail Eremin, the Saint Petersburg Hermitage turns out to be, first of all, a place of various forms of reflection, and the overlap between the metaphorical (reflection and attention to the phonetics of speech) and literal (mirror) understanding of reflection forms a mechanism for the quickest transition from spatial confusion to the aesthetic experience of the Hermitage collection. In the poetry of Sergei Stratanovsky, on the contrary, the Hermitage is shown through the eyes of a conventional character, immune to culture, where the mechanisms of such a transition are absent, and any attempt to simplify spatial self-awareness turns into a total immunity to art. In the poetry of Asya Veksler, the Hermitage turns out to be a hero with its own subjectivity, modeled on Petersburg in Anna Akhmatova's Poem Without a Hero, and this allows the episodes of a love drama to be developed as confirmed by various formal decisions and to erase the border between the aesthetics of space premises and the aesthetics of works. All three solutions imply the general properties of a complex ekphrasis of displacement: 1) a presence of an existential basis of a poetic utterance, detached from the usual modes of relations with time, partially blocking the usual modes of aesthetic perception of works of art, 2) a constant search for means of overcoming this blocking, which can be successful, if associated with the acceleration of sensory experiences, and unsuccessful if associated with frustration and/or routine admiration, 3) a situation in which architectural and design decisions are perceived as deeply symbolic and valuable, while works of art remain mysteries among other mysteries, and only the correctly found speed of mental work with the past and the present allows them to be perceived, 4) uses of the names of artists and plots of works not as symbols, but as part of the route, with the ambiguity of this route, the lack of sufficient motivation for it in the plot, but partial support from the book explications or educational habits, 5) an attention to the formal components of both the interior and individual works, as the only key to integrating these solutions into large value oppositions. A close reading of these poems allows for a better understanding of the importance of formal analysis for a comprehensive understanding of fine art and plastics and their reflection in literature as an art that deals with different modes of sensing time.