The Mythological Canvas: Stanislav Goncharov's Fusion of Art and Poetry

Joyful and at times so comprehensible nonsense is the language through which an artist conveys aesthetically sacred meanings to the reader. In their portrayal, Goncharov features not the semantics of teaching (a serious genre) but the semantics of fairy tales (an entertaining genre). A fairy tale is such a true-untrue story that means more than the truth of facts, but in its deviation (or even a kind of escape) from facts, it doesn't equal falsehood and serves a mysterious truth, related to myth. It's no coincidence that the mythological Medusa Gorgon or the mysterious Charybdis are related to a fairy tale monster, some kind of Chudo-Yudo. A fairy tale is more entertaining and carefree than myth; myth is more rational and serious than a fairy tale. And yet, there is no rigid, unquestionable boundary between fairy tales and myths.

Therefore, we are vividly interested not in distinguishing labels but in the unified fairy-mythological complex in Stanislav Goncharov's work as an epochal phenomenon. Why does Goncharov's time bring with it an aesthetic need for myth and fairy tale, giving birth to artistic myths and fantastic legends? Myth and fairy tale belong to the collective unconscious. Recognizing himself as a son of the boundless fatherland, a tragic offspring – and victim of a centuries-old empire, an artist who created during the tragic period of the 60s-80s, be it Goncharov or Popkov, Shukshin or Vysotsky, turns to the element of fairy tales and myths as the element of the collective unconscious and at the same time transforms it in his own way.

"Out comes the flight attendant, like a princess, reliable as the entire civil fleet,"

– once hoarsely croaked into the microphone Vysotsky, giving the flying beauty a kind of civic significance, as if not reducible to personal charm. This correlation of an individual – in this case, a beautiful flight attendant – with some patriotic universal – abstractly separated from any material singularity civil fleet – declared by the outstanding bard is a songwriting mythology. The example with the flight attendant may seem singular. However, it says a lot. The written quoted song of Vysotsky "Moscow – Odessa" is a textbook and in its own way programmatic artistic document of the era. For this reason alone, we say that a singular, even fragmentary example of the author's myth is typologically indicative of the time that interests us. It was an amazing time when an airline flight could not be conceived outside of statehood, the older companion of the civil fleet, and at the same time, the collective principle of statehood conversely brought to life, attracted, and literarily willful princess. According to a similar semiotic code and thanks to a similar social genesis, the Komsomol goddess emerged and was born literarily in one of Okudzhava's famous songs. Isn't it true that our ordinary compatriots appear as princesses or goddesses for similar dictates of the time? And here is an unexpectedly literal parallel between the two famous bards.

"All the guys respected Lenka Korolev and awarded him the title of king,"

– Okudzhava, a kind of spokesperson for the domestic intelligentsia, sang lyrically tenderly and soulfully. Princess and king – motifs mutually related not only due to their high hierarchical "bar" or their romantic-fairy tale coloring but also due to their artistic semantics. In all three examples of myth construction – with a goddess, princess, and king – a recognizable everyday character becomes universally significant. The fact that a similar creative process occurs with such different bards – Vysotsky with his courageous hoarseness and Okudzhava with his intelligent voice vibrations (we mention the epithet "intelligent" without the slightest negative connotations) – testifies to their belonging to a single cultural space of the epoch.

It entails fairy tale or mythological constructions in art, and they, in turn, predispose to creative syncretism – i.e., to the potential synthesis of various arts. For example, the bard's song, somehow focused on the audience, designed to evoke an impression with the author's facial expressions, intonations, human voice, and not only (and not primarily!) academic vocals, potentially combines theater, poetry, and music. This indicated synthesis is related to mythology and folklore – creative elements that accompanied humanity in archaic periods and were born before art began to be clearly divided into types.

That is why at first glance, an extraneous conversation about domestic bards, a small excursion into a related topic and area, is almost inevitable where we are not just talking about painting in its guild qualities but about painting directed to the sphere of social mythology. It is no coincidence that Stanislav Goncharov considers himself both an artist and a writer, semiotically equating himself with creative universals – Russian bards. It is also no coincidence that Goncharov, like them, artistically correlates an ordinary woman with some ideal mythological representation or gives ideal beings vitally recognizable features. One of Goncharov's aforementioned paintings is entitled "Northern Song. Muse of the Artist Viktor Popkov." Is the song accidental when we have a video sequence before us? Hardly. With the song, there is a universal representation of the muse (which, judging by the gloomy autumn background and the piercing nature of suffering, is the soul of Russia), not reducible to the tasks of the painting guild. Just as the above-mentioned bards called their compatriots kings, princesses, and goddesses, Stanislav Goncharov paints the muse as one, as simple as everyone else, as a hundred thousand others in Russia (using the words of his beloved Yesenin). Having chosen in this case an excursion into guitar poetry, offering the reader guitar parallels – no wonder it's a song, and no wonder it's northern, i.e., Russian, mournful – let's refrain from long pictorial excursions; briefly, let's just point out that the recognizable dedication to Popkov in the title of the painting is no coincidence. It indicates that Stanislav Goncharov listens to the mysterious calls and dictates of the epoch, which predisposes to artistic myth-making – creates in free co-authorship with Popkov, an epochal figure.

The muse in Goncharov's world of works is not alone in meaning; she exists in a recognizable parallel with another mythological creature – the mermaid. Behind the external echoes of the two motif-images of Goncharov lie the internal fairy-mythological constants of his creativity. It is no accident that the muse in Goncharov's canvas resembles an ordinary woman, charming precisely in her vital recognizability. And at the same time, it is no coincidence that the portrayed people in Goncharov's works are surrounded by a certain literary-mythological halo. Thus, the contours of people in the artist's works are accompanied by a poster-like or icon-painting beginning – this seemingly almost sacrilegious "or" is poetically sinless, since the artist, as already noted, does not attempt icon painting in the proper, direct sense of the word. He only frees human faces and figures from everything everyday and random, as the icon, on the one hand, and the poster, on the other, strive for in radically different ways. Thus, in his self-portrait, the artist with a sad-wise gaze and patriarchal beard is almost a prophet (how infinitely significant this "almost" is), a girl against an emerald background, thanks to her shimmering appearance and vitally recognizable but at the same time plastically conventional contour, is almost a muse. That is why we say that the muse is not an accidental mythological inclusion in the series of female portraits by Goncharov. Next to the muse stands the mermaid, another enchantress; a mythological character is echoed, as it were, by a fairy tale character.

Here is the painting "Mermaid on a Chair." Let's point to the element of play in Goncharov's work: the mermaid sitting on a chair, in outlines, plastic contours, quite resembles a coquettish girl, but the blue color in which the mermaid is painted (she lives in water!) makes the quite recognizable outlines of the human body amusingly strange. This combination of exoticism and vital recognizability is itself a game. An unexpected parallel with Yesenin suggests itself:

"As if in the resonant spring early hours I galloped on a pink horse."

The resonant early morning in its physical tangibility reminds us of a very real troika, and even the pink color of the horse, with its exoticism, is vitally recognizable as the color of the dawn sun, the color of dawn. And yet, formally, pink horses are not found in nature, just as people with blue skin are not found!

Pugachev is also presented as a fairy-tale bewitching creature in one of the artist's works – all bloody-red against the background of a pale-green horse and the same pale-green rider. The Pushkin beginning is guessed, bringing to the bloody history the features of a terrible (and bewitching) fairy tale. The blue mermaid with an emerald-green fish tail is executed in a typologically similar key.

The high play, which is guessed in the color solution of Goncharov's work, passes to the level of meaning! Being seated on an ordinary chair and thereby, as it were, expelled from the sea abyss, the mermaid becomes not scary (who can she drown, sitting on a chair in a room?!), and at the same time, treachery, dangerous coquetry, or some dangerous eccentricity exposes in the portrayal a dangerous creature (she can still, figuratively speaking, drown the one who admires her or listens to her!). The play of the frightening and non-frightening, fancifully exotic and simple, domestic constitutes an entertaining form in which the Russian world appears in Goncharov's painting.

For Goncharov, as already noted, it has a European correlate: the mermaid, as we know, corresponds to the European undine or ancient siren. Goncharov artistically comprehends Russian mythology as part of world mythology, not as an ethnically closed semantic structure. The artist-poet speaks of the multiplicity and, in this sense, the complexity of the universe in simple and entertaining forms, be it word, line, or color. His art is metaphysical and at the same time not haughty, entertaining and at the same time elevated, national and at the same time universally significant.

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The Element of Beauty in Goncharov's Work

Goncharov's artistic mythology is latently directed towards some mysterious aesthetic ideal, simply put – to the unconditionally beautiful. The terrifyingly clear and at the same time infinitely mysterious substance of beauty (related to the mermaid, muse, girl on the canvas) inevitably leads to the tragic question of our time (one of such questions). Is aesthetic genius appropriate in an era of internal (and even external!) cataclysms? Or is Pushkin's poetry with its golden writing too exquisite food for modern man, who needs simple and coarse food, allowing him somehow to morally (and even physically) survive? This is the fatal question facing the world today. What the country and, we are not afraid of big words, humanity is experiencing, is allegorically described by Dostoevsky in the article "Mr. -bov and the Question of Art." The writer analyzes Fet's verses "Whisper, shy breathing," the fact of so-called pure art, i.e., aristocratically closed art, in contrast to the global moral and physical demands of humanity.

"Imagine there's an earthquake in Lisbon, and a poet comes out of the crowd and begins to read 'Whisper, shy breathing...' What do you think they would do to him?" – to this question, Dostoevsky unequivocally answers: "They would hang him." And at the same time, he prophesies a great posthumous future for the author of the seditious verses. The same crowd that tore the poet apart would erect a monument to him in a month. But what if the world is now figuratively (and perhaps literally!) extremely unstable if the world is experiencing a continuous earthquake? Is the aesthetic luxury of Pushkin's poetry needed when the world faces the task of elementary survival? These are the inevitable and indeed tragic questions brought about by the wave of our time. And it's unknown how Dostoevsky would have answered these fatal questions had he lived to our days.

It must be said that our time in its unevenness towards Pushkin is not unique. The slogan "Let's throw Pushkin off the ship of modernity" existed in another catastrophic era, at another historical break that colored the turn of the past and the century before last. The agitator, shouter, and ringleader Mayakovsky, the genius of Russian futurism, opposed himself to chamber aesthetics:

"In your apartment little world Curly lyricists grow for bedrooms,"

– writes Mayakovsky, subconsciously (and perhaps consciously) attacking Pushkin. Pushkin was curly (literally – curly-haired) and very experienced in terms of bedrooms, and the curls were not just a random fact of appearance but a sign of poetic mischief and poetic liberty. And so the futurist Mayakovsky, the overthrower of chamber aesthetics, shockingly shouts, addressing the monument to Pushkin:

"The battles of revolutions are more serious than 'Poltava'..."

...Pushkin subtly felt and knew the boundary of the aesthetic and the sacred, so that along this boundary one can sometimes guess what Pushkin did not express in his work, afraid to address supreme matters in vain. But poets of subsequent eras sought to globalize art. The symbolist Blok, who supported the cult of the Beautiful Lady, or Sophia, created on Russian soil by Solovyov and Vyacheslav Ivanov, almost gave poetry the status of religion. And even Mayakovsky was, as it were, an antipode of Blok, not just a being external to religion. He, as it were, elevated the construction of a new society, a new world, a new – supposedly rejuvenated – universe to a religion. It is no coincidence that he calls himself practically a prophet, acts as

"the loud-lipped Zarathustra of our days."

Both Blok and Mayakovsky objectively claim a messianic role. Only the aristocratically restrained Pushkin would not confidently call himself a prophet. The poetic Silver Age, on the contrary, confirms the common expression "A poet in Russia is more than a poet." This aphorism marks the extreme, almost to a slogan, of those processes that the Silver Age breathed and was founded on at the tectonic level. This is evidenced not only by literary programs or systems containing more or less explicit anti-Pushkin connotations but by the search for the so-called synthetic art, which Wagner was engaged in.

And so in the light (in the light? or perhaps in the darkness?) of tragically destructive processes in culture, the unsolvable question is finally posed: "Is a new Pushkin possible today?" This question requires clarification. It is not whether talent of Pushkin's scale is possible, but whether such talent is in demand by a catastrophic epoch, or, if it suddenly appears (contrary to all expectations), it will simply be inappropriate, as whisper and shy breathing will be inappropriate against the background of a continuous earthquake? Perhaps today what is in demand is that religious art which humanity has managed, if not to forget, then to stop actively caring for in the last few centuries. Let's remember the ancient book of songs by King David, it was called the Psalter – named after a musical instrument. Let's remember the religious creativity of John of Damascus – that ancient art, which did not seek primarily to please the ears of readers, but the aesthetic beginning was not absent in it but, as it were, entered the sacred context. David, the author of the psalms, was also a poet, just like Pushkin later; what if our time demands not an aesthetic genius but a new psalmist, a spiritual genius?

Stanislav Goncharov's creativity bears an active answer to this question. The artist strives (and successfully strives) to create art inseparable from life and religious preaching. The clearly syncretic nature of Goncharov's creativity is no coincidence: he is an artist, a portrayer, and at the same time a wordsmith, a poet. Therefore, everything said about the Silver Age has a direct relation to the creativity of Stanislav Goncharov. He potentially approaches the ancient prototype of a poet, David, or the early Christian prototype of a wordsmith, John of Damascus, through the cultural tradition that was nevertheless based on the Pushkin principle. In Goncharov's work, one feels the poster aesthetics of Mayakovsky, the word creation of Khlebnikov, the sacred symbolism of Blok, and not only the direct voice of antiquity, which Goncharov carefully and gradually acquires, as if making his way through the centuries. This is what motivated the seemingly extraneous preamble.

A touching and, in its own way, significant fact is that, striving for ancient, pre-Pushkin principles of poetry, the artist not only does not want to overthrow Pushkin but, on the contrary, perceives him in an aesthetically sacred context. With his creativity, he seems to say: let's not cross out a flower, a ballerina, or a butterfly just because they do not directly lead to the salvation of the soul, but, on the contrary, let's impartially think about a flower or a butterfly as creations of God, the works of His hands. In this context, a butterfly and a somewhat frivolous, but no less brilliant poet are dotted relatable. It is no coincidence that even Mayakovsky, with all his gigantomania, wrote about the butterfly of the poet's heart. So, Stanislav Goncharov, with his pure moral religious pathos, treats the butterfly carefully and attentively. His poems abound with Pushkin's reminiscences and quotes. Here is one of such most vivid quotes (although far from the only one).

Before the reader is Goncharov's poem "Soul of Russia," presenting a talented and witty paraphrase of one of Pushkin's masterpieces. Clearly and covertly echoing Pushkin's poem "To ***," Goncharov writes:

"Soul, you, finding rear, forgive me for the defeat in the mirrors of noisy vanity..."

Pushkin has it like this:

"In the languor of hopeless sorrow, In the anxieties of noisy vanity, A tender voice sounded to me for a long time And dear features were dreamed of."

Dreamed – means, they were seen in some reflected mirror quality. It is no coincidence that Goncharov adopts from Pushkin not only a taken phrase (with tormentive vanity) but also the motif of the mirror. To reflect or, rather, still to depict, to reflect in images, i.e., in mediated forms, is a common property of the art of poetry, no argument! And yet Goncharov borrows from Pushkin not the general properties of any lyrics and any lyricist, but a special symmetrical clarity, a companion of harmony. As a heir to the Enlightenment, Pushkin is inclined to contrast pairing and mirror symmetry of such opposites as ice and flame in "Onegin" – in this example, noisy vanity, i.e., some everyday confusion and whirlwind, contrasts with the highest clarity, which is given by the genius of pure beauty, a companion of relaxation. Pointedly, i.e., freely, not slavishly, not blindly following Pushkin, Goncharov introduces the motif of the mirror into the text. And a mirror, a mirror is always by nature dual – it implies a positive underside of noisy vanity almost as in Pushkin. Why almost? Because Goncharov does not copy Pushkin one-to-one and comprehends him contrastingly. In Pushkin, the mirror not designated but, as it were, contoured in the text – the idea of reflection or dream – corresponds to the positive pole of his poetic universe. In reality, the lover is pursued by unnecessary noise, and in a dream, he dreams of, he perceives dear features; in Pushkin, the dream is cleaner and more transparent than everyday reality – however, this means that reality is a bit inauthentic, and the poet's imagination, accompanying the dream, sees the unclouded essence of things. With Goncharov, it's formally different, but essentially similar: the mirrors of vanity cloud the authentic reality – some higher reality. Goncharov continues his address to some mysterious soul:

"Having rejected the shield for the back, forgive the betrayed rear, having come true as the BEGINNING's continuation."

So, the rear – the everyday underside of the soul fails, but some higher BEGINNING comes into force (it is no coincidence that this word is written in capital letters).

The poet continues:

"And, being an imperishable good, shine and sing on the throne of decay... EXODUS, the throne of decay – it is US, until awakening thunders!... and the GENIUS OF PURE BEAUTY does not return its features To you, Russia... from oblivion."

We are finally convinced that everyday reality is comprehended by Goncharov as a burdensome dream, and it is opposed by a higher reality. Awakening is not only a Pushkin word, a lexeme, but also a Pushkin motif, a unit of poetic meaning:

"The soul had an awakening,"

– writes Pushkin in poems dedicated to a woman. The lyrical subject of Pushkin is enchanted by her dear features. The modern author performs, it would seem, an incomprehensible metamorphosis: the features of a woman are distinctly replaced by the features of Russia. It would seem, what is common between a sweet and frivolous creature, which now appears, now disappears, and a severe northern country? Why severe and why northern? So, quite in Pushkin's vein, (Pushkin's Tatyana, Russian in soul, loved the Russian winter) Goncharov perceives Russia:

"SHE IS A BLIZZARD. In it are WE and YOU."

The purifying, but inevitably severe element of the blizzard is associated by Goncharov with the element of beauty, seemingly implying effeminacy, alien to the severe Russian winter. Is it so with Pushkin? Can the dear features, praised by the poet, be simultaneously severe, Nordic? Isn't there a nonsense and some avant-garde inversion of everything? Beauty – a companion of tenderness and blizzard – a sister of severity are united and written in capital letters as some poetically sacred concepts (of course, not in Pushkin, but in Goncharov).

However, outwardly altering Pushkin and bringing him almost to unrecognizability, Stanislav Goncharov reconstructs those hidden meanings that hover around Pushkin's text. Directly correlating woman with genius – an ideal and incorporeal being, Pushkin implies that man is a mirror, a mirror of the Divine universe – and a sweetly frivolous creature can carry much and much beyond and apart from sensual reality – apart from arms, legs, and other things that have, outwardly, not the slightest relation to a severe blizzard. However, a soul partaking of love becomes a mirror of universes, and in particular the Russian universe with its upheavals. That is why BEAUTY and BLIZZARD in Goncharov go in a semantic pair!

We are convinced that Goncharov creates in a spirit congenial to Pushkin – isn't this statement literarily sacrilegious and simply insane!? No, it is not, if perceived in a certain semantic perspective – Goncharov does not encroach on Pushkin's aesthetic territory (which would indeed be insane), but elaborates on those artistically sacred meanings that, as it were, hover over Pushkin's text, without being clothed in words for reasons of artistic tact. In parentheses, a clarification suggests itself: can the soul of Russia be attributed to sacred meanings, or is it primarily sacramental (but not holy)? After all, if one is literally accurate, in the Gospel there are commandments of love for God and for neighbor, but there is no commandment of love for the homeland. Is it correct, in such a case, to call the soul of Russia sacred? Hardly. But in this context, we are not talking about the religiously sacred (we dare not reason about this), but about the artistically sacred significance of the Russian soul. It becomes an internal mirror and focus of one who is universally significant – a genius of pure beauty, a companion of poetic deity, which hovers not only in Russia but throughout the universe. It is no coincidence that Pushkin borrowed the motif of the genius of pure beauty (syntactically slightly modifying it) from Zhukovsky's poem "Lalla Rookh" – a free translation from Irish poetry...

Pushkin, and after him Tyutchev, who said "Russia cannot be understood with the mind," are very cautious with the word where it concerns, if not religious truth as such, but a mystery, nevertheless partaking of higher principles. And Goncharov understands that the soul of Russia cannot be exhaustively embraced by words, that the mystery of the blizzard cannot be subjected to an exhaustive description. That is why words in Goncharov are supplemented by a conditional video sequence (writing especially significant words in capital letters), and that is why Goncharov refuses a strictly calibrated classical meter, preferring a somewhat foolish, somewhat faltering, intentionally inarticulate speech: it itself is a solid hint that it is impossible to say something intelligible, exhaustive about the soul of Russia, and the reader is forced to, as it were, make his way through a stream of mysterious words – BLIZZARD, PURE BEAUTY, Russia, some mysterious BEGINNING. Indeed, how are they all connected, and what is this mysterious tangle of word-meanings? The artist is a bit foolish, evasively laughs, and, like Gogol's bird-troika, rushing in all directions, does not give a single and academically incontestable answer.

However, in his intentional poetic inarticulateness, an exquisite inarticulateness, as Tsvetaeva would say, Stanislav Goncharov is artistically punctual and, we would add, culturally erudite, not just arbitrarily sweeping. One feels that, resorting to the experience of the avant-garde (with continuous capital letters in some words and violation of meter), Goncharov has comprehended Russian literary classics and is a bit amused, plays with the word, not at all simply from inability to write. Blizzard in its symbolic, almost sacred meaning is a Blok motif. Introducing it into his text, written in the footsteps of Pushkin, Goncharov skillfully connects certain beginnings and ends of Russian poetry. Blok is retrospectively addressed to the abstract metaphysics of Zhukovsky – Pushkin's literary teacher. It was from Zhukovsky, a distant forerunner of Russian symbolism, that Pushkin borrowed the phrase "genius of pure beauty," changing only the case from nominative to genitive. Resorting to a quote from Zhukovsky, Pushkin points to the mystery and understatement that lies behind the external and at first glance understandable phenomenon of a woman. If Zhukovsky speaks of an intelligible phenomenon in intelligible quantities of the poetic language of the Enlightenment era, the era of Reason, then Pushkin depicts the mystery of the relations of the sensual and the intelligible. In Pushkin, genius is not presented flat and visibly; it hovers, as it were, over the external impression – to this mysterious "over" Pushkin comes not without the mediation of Zhukovsky. And Blok, as it were, reconstructs, artistically resurrects the metaphysics of Zhukovsky, veiled in Pushkin by classical clarity, transparency, and impeccable elegance of form. Goncharov doesn't simply "rewrite" Pushkin in some foolish language, but artistically takes into account the experience of symbolism, which in a certain sense elevated dear features to the sacred rank of Sophia or Eternal Femininity. That's where Goncharov gets Blok's blizzard from, as if bursting into the harmonious world of pure beauty and perfect proportions of the world. Mediating Pushkin's experience with the Silver Age and modernity with its unevenness, ruts, and potholes, Goncharov, nevertheless, predominantly follows the Pushkin path of sacralization of the erotic principle.

Pure beauty in Goncharov is accompanied by a religious motif:

"Soul, foreseen in your GAZE: flight... and THE WORD OF THE WORD – dawns... heard in our prayer, like Russian speech – the creak of a gate in the windless silence of the sleeping COUNTRY on the eye's bottom..."

Through the poetic inarticulateness, we hear some WORD and an enthusiastic prayer. How can one not recall Pushkin's:

"Not for worldly agitation, Not for profit, not for battles, We are born for inspiration, For sweet sounds and prayers."

In Pushkin, prayers, as we see, appear in the same row with sweet sounds and constitute, nevertheless, an "off-screen" level of art, its sacred primary source, while the contemporary poet directly invokes the WORD, written entirely in capital letters – and parallel to it is prayer, sanctifying earthly eros, implied by the very phenomenon of BEAUTY. Stanislav Goncharov sometimes takes to foolish extremes what Pushkin gives in academically streamlined forms.

That is why in Goncharov, eros goes alongside prayers – and all this happens not without some reliance on the poetry of Pushkin (and partly Zhukovsky, and partly Blok).

"...the maiden light of the heart lies in the snows of the gray sun,"

– writes Goncharov in the poem "Through the Blizzard," and the maiden light is followed by a mention of Holy Russia...

"Paths of fate... They dust... They dust... about them, barefoot memory grieves... She looks back from the darkness... Where sleeps the Most Pure Holy – Holy Russia, leafing through snows, Which, showing Pushkin the rear, Appeared, resurrecting the soul Of Russia, through 'Blizzard' shining, like the GENIUS OF PURE BEAUTY."

A parallel with Blok suggests itself:

"Oh my Russia, my wife, painfully The long path is clear to us..."

We distinctly hear: Blok calls his homeland his wife. As implausible as it may seem, Stanislav Goncharov is, in his own way, more daring than Blok. Blok's wife, who has lived for many centuries, is associated with Eternal Wisdom, Sophia, in whose image erotic mischief is reduced or completely inactive, while Goncharov's maiden light is something fresh, sanguine, physically real, and at the same time transformed by all-purifying Russian snows.

Oh no, what is said literally does not mean that Goncharov should immediately be placed on the same bookshelf as Blok. No, he should not. In this case, it is not the scales of creative personalities that are compared, but aesthetic platforms. We do not claim that Goncharov is a personality surpassing Blok in scale – Blok, as Alexander Galich sings about him, is a god in poetry. Is it realistic to surpass a god, and is it even necessary to strive for this? So, we do not say that the contemporary poet is necessarily higher than Blok (what does "higher" or "lower" mean in art? Poetry is not sport and not science), but only assert that Goncharov's aesthetic platform is less bookish and, in its own way, more alive than the aesthetic platform of symbolism, which Blok adhered to. Akhmatova writes in "Secrets of the Craft":

"And the verse already sounds, spirited, tender."

In symbolism, there is too much poetic abstraction, too many celestial heights for the verse to be necessarily spirited and sharp. And Goncharov's verse, with its maiden light, is spirited, tender. The matter, of course, is not that Russia – Blok's wife is many centuries old and she is already an old woman – no, Blok's metaphysical wife is not subject to astronomical time and, in this sense, is no older than the maiden light. However, Blok's poems, in their globality, contain a journalistic note and imply a wide audience, while Goncharov's poems (perhaps it is no coincidence that they are published not in weighty collections but in small compilations) carry chamber confidentiality and personal nerve (although we do not in any way claim that one is good and the other is bad – just two aesthetic platforms differ).

Blok does not consistently declare himself as an erotic poet, while Goncharov quite declares, but declares not in a purely aesthetic but rather in a sacred context. He distantly echoes the biblical "Song of Songs," which has a living and tangible eros, but there is nothing teasingly voluptuous, but there is spiritualized physicality and the highest chastity – an inviolable mystery – of love. Thus, through the secular literary tradition, Goncharov carefully and indirectly turns to the experience of biblical poetry and latently draws strength from it.

Goncharov seems to try to guess and reveal in Pushkin, a secular poet, some religious prototype... Let's carefully read Goncharov's poem "Irresistible Reality."

"Your face is the moon, smoothed by a cold iron. You are wise with indifference, again called being,"

– writes Goncharov, unequivocally pointing to the property of man to absorb, as it were, all that exists and in the indicated sense to be not equal to himself, but equal to the universe.

The poet continues to depict the beloved:

"Again you call me for a moment, shining with careless mischief... You give happiness from empty hands, Taking away peace and freedom..."

The last lines, by the principle of a peculiar palindrome, mirror-reverse the Pushkin epigraph to the poem "There is no happiness in the world, but there is peace and freedom." It turns out, on the contrary, peace and freedom are irrevocably taken from the lover, and in return, he is given happiness. And again, behind the external refutation of Pushkin's phrase lies its allegorical confirmation. After all, she, equal to being, is endowed with that wise indifference which is akin to peace and freedom, and the happiness given by her relates to the subjectively emotional perception of wisely feminine being. In its highest tranquility, it is free from everything teasingly sensual – we are once again convinced that Goncharov gradually, by touch, moves from secular poetry to its sacred sources, to the "Song of Songs" with its majestically epic foundation. And in this movement, he is freely accompanied by the seemingly quite earthly and secular Pushkin. Behind his secular texts, the contemporary artist-poet seeks to capture higher subtexts...

Why do we claim that the smooth, like an ironed cloth, female face in Goncharov's poem has not only a life prototype but also a Pushkin literary genesis? After all, in Pushkin's time, there were no irons as a fact of poetry – this is so obvious! And yet, before us is a distinctly Pushkin reminiscence, which can be placed in one row with the genius of pure beauty and the Russian blizzard, celebrated by Goncharov. The fact is that smoothness, the smoothness of an ironed surface is akin to purity, inherent in both Russian snow and the genius of beauty hovering over the mortal world. That is why the seemingly strange and avant-garde comparison of a woman's face with an ironed cloth in Goncharov's poem is not offensive but flattering for the literarily portrayed face! The semantics of Russian snows or genius, not thematically related but deeply correlated, is also present in the quoted love poem by Goncharov. In a sense, it is built as a paraphrase of Pushkin's epigraph with peace and freedom, and the epigraph, by a kind of rebus principle, implies the ending of Pushkin's poem omitted by the contemporary poet:

"Long ago, a tired slave, I conceived an escape To a distant abode of labors and pure pleasures."

Pure pleasures echo pure beauty not only associatively but quite literally. However, what is important is not the linguistic "trick," according to which in Pushkin's lyrics with their varied and repeated motifs there is the potential for a poetic cycle – and it is even more clearly guessed in a series of Pushkin quotes and reminiscences in Goncharov. What is more significant is that Goncharov follows in Pushkin's footsteps towards an inner purity, akin to Holy Scripture and the "Song of Songs," although it would seem (and not only seem) that Pushkin, who sang of women's legs, was not pious, for which he was sometimes subjected to reproach. The thought of subjecting Pushkin to religious anathema or, in any case, oblivion, swarms in the head of one of the heroes of Dostoevsky's novel "The Brothers Karamazov," who has a distant relation to monastic circles. He owns such a verse:

"I don't long for legs, Let Pushkin praise them. I long for the head, That doesn't understand ideas."

In the eyes of the author of this rhymed passage, Pushkin is merely the author of frivolous trifles. Stanislav Goncharov subjects Pushkin's lyrics – and in particular, love lyrics – to an alternative artistic reading; he acts not only as a poet but partly as a literary scholar, discovering in Pushkin's poetry, with all its clarity and simplicity, the potential of symbolism, and in particular, such a facet of future symbolism as the sacralization of femininity.

Beauty is consistent with femininity, and it is embodied by flowers. Considering the syncretic nature of the artist's creativity, let us point in parallel to his poems on his cosmic bouquets. The exhibition features works "Monumental Bouquet" and "Twilight Bouquet" – both bouquets are immersed in a kind of shimmering space, signifying the metaphysics of the beautiful, and not just the external contours of flowers. Due to some pictorial vagueness of twilight (especially in the second work), the mysterious, spread-out petals slightly resemble butterfly wings – and butterflies and flowers, as we have found out, are a phenomenon akin to the poet's heart – of course, not only the heart of Mayakovsky but also the heart of Pushkin.

Pushkin – Goncharov's lyrical addressee – appears in a kind of artistically sacred semantic field, acts in accordance with those deep needs and requests of people of the current epoch, which sometimes outwardly coincide and get confused with conjuncture or superficial malice of the day. But malice corresponds to murky water, and the artist is directed not to the changeable malice of the day, but to the eternal principles of the beautiful – to maiden light and the genius of pure beauty. If Pushkin's creativity interacts predominantly with the spiritual element, then Goncharov carefully discovers and in his own way voices that spiritual space which, as it were, surrounds Pushkin's poetry. It is no coincidence that in the verses of the artist-poet Goncharov there are so many mutually adjacent motifs of ascetic silence, snow, and mysteriously shining white sheet – this radiance mirror-reflects the metaphysical motifs of Pushkin's poetry, distantly preceding the experience of symbolism.

New symbolism and the inevitably related artistic esotericism are those artistic "prisms" in which Goncharov perceives Pushkin's ideas about the beautiful. In the hymn to beauty, which Goncharov's creativity represents, mysteriously contradictorily combines a healthy principle akin to Pushkin, Renaissance integrity, and metaphysical abstraction. Stanislav Goncharov's ideas about the beautiful are free from both the morbid fractures of decadence and everyday connotations – or, in Pushkin's expression, from prosaic ravings, the motley litter of the Flemish school, inherent in the luxuriously earthly painting of the Renaissance. Goncharov celebrates and depicts a healthy and optimistic, but unearthly, at times even mystical, beauty.

What kind of creative testament did Stanislav Goncharov leave to grateful posterity? What do his painting and poetry tell us, modern connoisseurs of the elegant? The artist with colors, lines, and words tells us about private life in its almost icon-painting mystery. The moods of the faces in numerous portraits by the artist correspond to elevated sadness or ennobled joy – a companion of creatively spiritualized and metaphysically meaningful life feast. Goncharov's artistic anthropology in spatial relation corresponds to the domestic hinterland as a focus of inner purity, inner truth – that higher truth that is not reduced to simple everyday facts and therefore bears the imprint of mystery. Fairy tale and myth are akin to mystery... And to fairy tale and myth – play, allegory, merry riddle. All these qualities are inherent in the element of the beautiful, inseparable from eros – the sensual principle – and at the same time colored by metaphysics – the unearthly, inconceivable, supersensual element.

The spectrum of values and meanings that Goncharov's creativity carries is located in two contrastingly interconnected dimensions of the world. On the one hand, private existence in its sometimes artlessness, literally – independence from art (involuntarily we begin to play with words almost in the manner of the artist), on the other – what is present outside our everyday experience and above the earthly world. It would seem that the polarity (and/or adjacency) of the ideal and reality constitutes the inevitable content of any art; but the uniquely concrete creative personality of Goncharov knows how to combine motifs of private life, even private everyday life, such as a mirror or an iron, with ideal symbols and representations, such as a muse, a mermaid, or death, inclined to tragic laughter. The artist is cordially engaged, deeply interested not only in the earthly state but also in metaphysical Russia, not only in the visibly beautiful but also in inner beauty, mysteriously shimmering in a fragile vessel, not only in human life but also in the elusive fateful forces hovering over it – mysterious fate, providence, and providence.

Stanislav Goncharov is creatively inspired by all that Pushkin named as the mysteries of happiness and the grave.

And so a creative miracle is performed, a creative transformation of the world takes place: we see how, through the faces of the artist's contemporaries, the faces of our compatriots, ordinary people – evening passers-by, tired people returning from work, participants in modest but creatively spiritualized home feasts – gradually emerge thin, shining countenances.

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