Konstantin Korovin, an Emigrant: The Native Land in the Artist’s Memoirs

Abstract

Konstantin Korovin is a famous Russian artist, one of the first Russian impressionists, as well as a theater decorator. The artist was highly sensitive to the beauties of the nature of his native land, and his oeuvre consists mostly of landscapes. In 1922, being at his senior age, Korovin was forced to move to one of the centers of Russian emigration – Paris. Life away from his motherland becomes one of the reasons for the painter’s artistic crisis. It was during these difficult years that Korovin began to engage in literary work. Korovin writes memoirs, significant part of which is memories of the abandoned but much beloved motherland. The article provides a comparative study of pictorial and verbal figurativeness in Korovin’s works. The cycle On the Hunt includes a short story Frost, where the landscape plays a key role in the plot. An analysis of the poetics of figurativeness in this story reveals the features of pictorial impressionism in the verbal images. The article analyzes the techniques that the memoirist employs to create the image of his motherland. The key words-leitmotifs, color palette, lighting effects, and other means of creating a lyrical landscape are also analyzed. There are found to be some parallels between Korovin’s literary descriptions of landscapes and his landscape paintings of winter forest. The paper draws a conclusion about the similarity of impressionistic techniques in paintings and the story by Korovin; the features specific to literary (verbal) figurativeness are noted, for example, folklore traditions and allusions to Russian poetic classics, the change in the narrator’s points of view, changes in emotional tonality, which forms the basis of the lyrical plot in the story Frost. The methodological framework of the study is based on comparative-typological and system-semantic principles of analysis, with elements of genre and style analysis.