On Several ‘Hermitage’ Ekphrases by Viktor Krivulin

In the practice of the Soviet literary underground, it was important to restore connections with tradition, hidden or edited according to the ideological models. Dialogue with tradition was recognized as a condition for achieving creative independence and cultural identity. Naturally, many texts created outside official Soviet literature have a wide layer of intertextual and intermedial references, often pointing to cultural layers and semantic areas that are not related to each other. A typical example of such an allusional multilayeredness and polyreferentiality is poetic ekphrasis. One of the most important literary figures of the Soviet samizdat was the poet Viktor Krivulin. In his samizdat books, many texts have obvious markers of ekphrastic descriptions referring to fine art, music, and cinema; a typical feature of his poetry is ‘complex ekphrasis’, which combines references to different works. This article deals with several of his poems related to the collection of paintings at the Hermitage, in particular the texts devoted to the paintings by Bartolomeo Murillo and Tiziano Vecellio. Krivulin’s reception of fine art was found to be influenced by his reading experience: the interpretation of the paintings is correlated with other examples of cultural reception of the same artist. Thus, ekphrasis is not only a description of a particular work but also the experience of reflection on the history of perception of an artist in culture, as well as the experience of self-relation with other ekphrases. The form of ekphrastic text thus appears for the poet as a means of historical and culturological reflection.