To illustrate the interest of turn-of-the-20th century painters in the biological aspects of human existence, growing processes and the spring of life, Latvian art history literature usually offers two vivid examples from the collection of the State Museum of Art 'Jubilant Children' (190 I) by Janis Rozentals (1866-1916) and 'Bathing Boys' (c. 1900) by Johann Waiter (1869-1932), a Latvian-born artist of German origin who changed his last name to Walter-Kurau after the move to Germany in 1906 but is usually called Janis Valters by Latvians. In an earlier publication, I have already interpreted the first of these pictures as part of a bucolic line in Rozentals' creativity that brought him from an impressive painterly symbiosis of spring awakening in nature and human life to the velvety sensuousness of his 'Sun Maidens' (1912) featuring the transformation of a typically impressionist love of light into a sort of mystical sun-dreaming. The present paper in turn explores the artistic progress of Walter's life-long fascination with the interplay of light and water in his numerous versions of 'Bathing Boys', painted between c. 1900 and 1926 in Latvia and Germany. Beside the above-mentioned treasure of the State Museum of Art - one of the most beloved pictures by several generations of Latvians - this part of his heritage includes the masterly 'Boys near Water' (c. 1900) at the Tukums Museum, a number of recently discovered private possessions and several reproductions of supposedly lost works. The first appearance of young bathers in his imagery coincided with the very height of the subject's international popularity. Bathing children were eagerly painted by Liebermann and Landenberger in Germany, Kroyer in Denmark, Edelfelt in Finland, Sorolla in Spain and numerous other artists all around Europe. Walter joined this company by sending one of his turn-of-the-century boy bathing scenes to the 3rd Exhibition of the Berlin Secession (1901) and the 4th Exhibition of the 'World of Art' In St. Petersburg (1902).
The study is concerned with Paul Strauss' poetry which was written in the '30s in German language. It was Strauss' bilingualism that helped him to deal with works of his German and Czech modernist contemporaries. His first collection of poetry 'Die Kanone auf dem Ei' (The Gun on the Egg) was apparently inspired by global and local historical processes. In his second and third collection of poetry called 'Schwarze Verse' (Black Verses) and 'Worte aus der Nacht' (Words from the Night) respectively, the reflection of the world of inner experience became prominent. The fear of mother's death, which haunted him from the time of his childhood, is strongly pronounced. The uneasiness he felt after her death was enhanced by another existential uneasiness - the revelation of his Jewish roots during WWII, although he was already Christianised at that time. The theme of 'Worte aus der Nacht' is the search for a way out of the existential crisis. It is not difficult to determine Paul Strauss' place in the literary context of the '30s. It is possible to use the explanation of the contemporary context proposed in M. Kundera's preface to 'Die Prager Moderne' (Prague Modernism). One is tempted to prove Kundera's theses on Strauss' works. It is also supported by all techniques of the traditional literary comparatistics, including the genetic relations. Similarly to Rilke, in Strauss' poetry one can find the first phase of poetic expression of the aesthetic ideal. Strauss encountered Rilke's work in its final phase, as a whole. In Strauss' times, i. e. between the two World Wars, the status of poetic expression is naturally confronted with a different reality. Rilke's 'Dinggedicht' , which is related to Husserl's phenomenology, is concerned with a new view of looking at the objects of the real world. The central theme of Rilke's relation to fright and beauty can also be seen in the Strauss' poetics. The poetry means mainly a relation to oneself and by the means of it to the world to Paul Strauss, as it does to Rilke and Valery. Strauss registers the outside world of the things through his own inner experience. The motive of death, which is considered essential to Rilke's poetry, is the principal theme in Strauss' poetry, the initial impulse to write. The motive of death is also present in Franz Werfel's works, but not as an existential entity, as part of the speculations about one's existence as is the case with Rilke and Strauss. Strauss is close to Werfel in motives of pain and childhood. One can also find the common themes or motives in Rilke's and Strauss' poetry: death, God, time, loss, pain. Strauss came from Vienna to Prague at the beginning of the '30s (1932-37). He brought with himself a compact bound form, Rilkian 'impressionism' and eflectiveness, Werfelian expressionism. To sum up, one can conclude that Strauss' collections of poetry, on account of their form, language and poetics, definitely belong into the context of the Central European lyrical poetry.
The paper describes the theoretical and literary-historical aspects of European modernism. It focuses on the issue of neo-romanticism and modernism in Latvian literature, both artistic streams developed in it side by side from the turn of the 19th and 20th century to approximately the year 1914. The author places neo-romanticism and modernism into the wider literary context, attempts to define common features and differences between them and draws attention to updating of antique Greek literature and philosophy. The paper explores the character of Latvian neo-romanticism and modernism, describes Latvian modernism via the individual streams – decadence, impressionism, symbolism and secession. It deals with the question of contribution of neo-romanticism and modernism for the literary context of the times.
The article was written as an outcome of the international scientific colloquium The Forms of Melancholy in the Arts organized by the Institute of Slovak Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences, in Bratislava (15th May 2014) and, at the same time, is a partial outcome of the VEGA grant project titled Hyperlexicon of Literary and Scientific Terms and Categories, designed as a reflection on the genre theory and the forming of the genre invariants in modern prose of the 20th century. The methodological basis of the article is the interpretation analysis of the text structure of a particular short story chosen from the prose cycle Dark Avenues (1939-43) by the Russian Modernist Ivan Bunin with respect to literary as well as non-literary contexts. The article is supported by primary sources (original texts of Bunin´s short stories and their Slovak translations by renowned Slovak translators – the cited samples) as well as secondary literature on the subject of the research carried out by Russian, Czech and Slovak literary scientists, and, in addition to that, by the author´s own previous research into the work of Ivan Bunin. The result of the interpretation analysis of one of the most significant short stories in the cycle titled Rusya (1940) and its non-literary background proves the hypothesis of the narrator´s ambiguous position on the author – narrator - character axis and, at the same time, tries to define the genre particularities of Bunin´s text oscillating between lyric, epic and drama with regard to the author´s intention and the use of the means of expression to convey the artistic message. The well-thought-of way of handling time and space, the writer´s narrative strategy brings an original aesthetic and psychological effect in reader text reception. In the context of Bunin´s work of the later emigration period, the presented interpretation analysis proves the assumption that the short story structure features genre vagueness being an open and continuously developing composition system.
The article provides a close reading of two one-act plays on love by Vladimír Hurban Vladimírov (1884 – 1950): “Keď sa schladí” (When it gets colder, 1905) and “Boj” (Fight, 1907). The plays were significantly influenced by Modernist poetics: they are markedly subjective (the same applies to Modernist Slovak poetry and fiction in the late of the 19th and early 20th centuries), stylised as symbolic, the plot is pushed to the background, and psychological and emotional life of the heroes is foregrounded. Accentuating inner life in drama is intimately connected with the problem of the categories of the subject (internal dramatic subject) and time (temporal frame bearing meaning) and, on the level of composition, also with the degree of compactness and unity. The composition of the plays is fragmentary and discontinuous and they tend towards open endings. The dramatic potential of classical drama got distilled into the fragmentary genre of one-act play. Overlaps of the artistic styles (Symbolism, Impressionism, Secession) and the technique of synaesthesia result in an overlap of various artistic methods and techniques which were used to achieve a nuanced realisation of prominent personal and subjective themes.
All biographies of the prominent Latvian landscape painter Vilhelms Purvītis (1872–1945) and almost every overview of early 20th century Latvian art briefly outline the period between two dates in his career – 1906 when he left Riga for Tallinn (old Latvian: Rēvele; German: Reval) to teach drawing in two secondary schools and 1909 when he returned to head the Riga City Art School. Nevertheless, Latvian authors in their representation of Purvītis’ Tallinn period have left unnoticed that this city was not only the object of his impressions painted alongside his teaching duties but also a cultural centre where Purvītis’ art was highly appreciated by critics and the public alike. This continuous ignorance has resulted in misinterpretations and unverified assumptions. Exploring the inner network of Baltic art life beyond the borders of present day national states, the author has attempted to fill in the existing gaps of knowledge. The sources of this study include originals and reproductions of Purvītis’ paintings of the Tallinn period, notices, reviews and advertisements in Baltic German, Latvian, Estonian and Russian periodicals from 1906–1909, catalogues of exhibitions and museums, documents in Estonian and Latvian archives as well as the memoir of Purvītis’ Tallinn pupil Alfred Rosenberg whose shameful role in the history of the Third Reich does not detract from the fact that some episodes of his Last Notes give illuminating evidence about the activities of the Latvian painter in the Estonian capital. The main intertwined questions in the article refer to Purvītis in the art scene of Tallinn and the representation of Tallinn in his painting while also tracing the aftermath of this period in his later life and work.
The contribution of Latvian authors not only to the study of the local artistic heritage but also in raising the general cultural level of society is an important aspect of history of this branch. Art historian Kristaps Eliass' (1886-1963) publications are mostly dedicated to the popularization of the most renowned phenomena of 18th - 20th century Western European art and French art in particular. The main sources of Eliass' theoretical principles came from the then influential but today less known writers on art (Julius Meier-Graefe, Richard Muther, Werner Weisbach, Ludwig Coellen etc.); this allows us to define Eliass' approach as scientifically grounded, especially when compared to the local setting of the social sciences. (Karl Marx's ideas, although found in many quotes, could hardly provide him with a consistent example of writing on art). Since becoming a follower of the ideas of social democracy in his early youth, Eliass' leftist stance placed him in almost perpetual opposition to the ruling state system. These ideas were hated in tsarist Russia as well as during the local nationalist authoritarian regime after 1934 and equally under Stalin's rule after the Soviet occupation. After the end of the Soviet era his leftist phraseology also seems outdated. Nevertheless, his books 'French Contemporary Painting' (written together with his brother, painter Gederts Eliass, 1940), 'Dutch Old Masters' (1957) and 'Honoré Daumier and His Time' (1960) belong to the few comprehensive sources on Western European art published in Latvian during the 20th century. Their informative and educational role, unlike scattered articles in periodicals, reaches far beyond the audience of contemporaries.
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