“ALL OBJECTS AT ONCE”: STILL LIFE IN RUSSIAN POETRY

Abstract

The article analyzes still life as a form of representing the visual in twentieth-century Russian poetry. The focus is on the ways in which the pictorial genre is poetically appropriated and its semantics transformed within the lyric text. Drawing on poems that include the words “still life” in the title or the body of the text, the study examines the main models of this image’s functioning: still life as a work of painting, as a composition created by nature or the world, and as a juxtaposition of objects that organizes poetic utterance. It is shown that recourse to still life activates visual imagery while simultaneously engaging other sensory modalities and fostering reflection on the relationship between the living and the non-living, the thing and the human being, art and reality. The analysis demonstrates that in poetry still life is rarely realized in the form of direct ekphrasis; rather, it structures the lyrical plot and activates the reader’s visual imagination.