Читать книгу Symbolism - Nathalia Brodskaya - Страница 5

ERATO (invisible). – Your Small Treatise on French Poetry is a delicious work, master Banville. But the young poets have blood up to the eyes fighting against the monsters fed by Nicolas Boileau; you are asked for on the field of honour, and you keep silent, master Banville!

THEODORE DE BANVILLE (dreamer). – Curse! I would have failed in my duty as elder and lyric poet!

(The author of The Exiles breathes a lamentable sigh and the Interlude finishes.)

Prose – novels, short stories, tales, fantasies – evolves in a sense similar to that of poetry. Elements, seemingly heterogeneous, converge there: Stendhal brings his translucent psychology, Balzac his exorbitant vision, Flaubert his cadences of sentences to the full arches. Mr Edmond de Goncourt brings his modernly suggestive Impressionism.

The conception of the Symbolic novel is polymorphic: sometimes a single character moves in surroundings distorted by his own hallucinations, his temperament; in this distortion lies the only reality. Beings with mechanical gestures, with shadowed silhouettes, are agitated around the single character: to him these are no more than pretexts to sensations and conjectures. He himself is a tragic or comical mask, of humanity however perfect although rational. Soon the crowds, superficially affected by the set of ambient representations, carry themselves with alternations of shocks and stagnations toward acts which remain incomplete. At times, some individual wills appear; they attract, agglomerate, generalise each other towards a goal which, either reached or missed, disperses them in their primitive elements. Sometimes mythical phantasms are evoked, from the ancient Demogorgon to Belial, from Kabirs to Nigromans, and appear ostentatiously dressed on the rock of Caliban or by the forest of Titania to the mixolydian modes of Barbitons and Octochords.

Józef Mehoffer, The Wisla River, near Niepolomice.

Oil on canvas.

Fine Arts Society, Kraków.

Jens Ferdinand Willumsen, Sun in the Park, 1904.

Oil and tempera on canvas, 194 × 169 cm.

J. F. Willumsens Museum, Frederikssund.

So scornful of the puerile method of Naturalism – Zola, himself, was saved by a marvellous writer’s instinct – the Impressionist-Symbolic novel will build strong its work of subjective distortion from this axiom: that art should seek in the objective only one simple, extremely brief starting part.

Witold Pruszkowski, Falling Star, 1884.

Oil on canvas.

The National Museum, Warsaw.