Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele in contemporary Russian Poetry

Abstract

Leading Austrian artists of the first quarter of the 20th century, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, did not attract the Russian writers attention until the 1990s, when the development of Russian postmodern literature was conductive to the attention to their experiments, polystylistics, cultural symbolism and aestheticism. It is stressed that although the heritage of these artists was adapted to the aesthetic project of Russian postmodernism, poetic statements about them revealed aspects of art that are not obvious to the common viewer. First of all, in the Russian poetry of the 1990s and the early 2000s (Alexander Ulanov, Alexander Skidan, Irina Mashinsky, Polina Barskova, Elena Fanailova) it was convincingly shown that Schiele’s expressionism directly takes it start from the symbolism of Klimt, and Klimt’s aesthetics already contains Schiele’s one, but Schiele’s manner retains the achievements of Klimt. Further, the author shows a connection between these artists and the achievements of physics along with the cultural and political atmosphere of the time. Finally, it was reported that the achievements of these artists opposed Nazism because Klimt and Schiele demonstrated the inadmissibility of any form of oppression. Regardless of the private thoughts or the works of Klimt and Schiele, these ideas are conveyed by the very form of their works and the approach to style: the semanticization of the material and the ability to give life to the depicted characters. Particular techniques and devices of expressiveness of both artists were interpreted as auxiliary to their humanistic ideas, and it should be recognized as the contribution of poetry to art history.