Poetics of V. F. Odoevsky's Novel Russian Nights: the Intermedial Aspect

Abstract

The article presents an intermedial analysis of V. F. Odoevsky's novel Russian Nights. The analysis aims to identify the methods of including visual and audial media in the verbal printed text medium. A deliberately created experimental work served as material for the research. V. F. Odoevsky's philosophical universalism extended to his aesthetic views, as evidenced by his articles and treatises. He believed in the emergence of a new art, which would be a synthesis of all arts, and tried to bring it to life on his own. In terms used by Western intermediality theorists, the novel Russian Nights did not combine different kinds of art, but adapted visual and audial channels of information transmission to create vivid mental images and a sense of acoustic presence. Odoevsky rendered visual images through ekphrasis, i.e. verbal representation of visual representation, and through the use of literary pictorialism, in which the very reality of the artistic world presented itself to the reader in the form of a painting. The transmission of audial information occurs on three levels. Firstly, it is the level of verbal description - when the author wanted to present the readers with reflections about music, rather than music itself. Secondly, it is the level of references to real musical works - the partial reproduction mechanism switched on, and the reader could get an insight into the acoustic component from the name of a composition alone. Thirdly, it is the level of direct integration of an alien semiotic system - musical notation, when the author needed to represent a small fragment of a musical work as accurately as possible. Thus, Odoevsky tried to realize the romantic idea of an integrated art and create an intermedial novel. © 2021 Petrozavodsk State University. All Rights Reserved.