Painting, Icon, Sonnet, and Text: a Comparative Analysis of Pushkin’s Sonnet “Madona” and an Episode of Dostoevsky’s Novel “The Brothers Karamazov”

The article offers a comparative examination of A. S. Pushkin’s sonnet “Madona” and the description of the cell of elder Zosima in F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov” as vivid examples of visual representation of the idea of “universal responsiveness” in the works of both authors. They are united by verbal and figurative images that visually embody it. In this case, it is Pushkin’s ekphrastic image of the “Russian Madonna,” which bears the mark of ethno-confessional cultural synthesis. Pushkin’s sonnet contains an intermedial contamination of two artistic traditions — poetic and pictorial. The former is associated with sonnets by Dante and Petrarch, as well as Orthodox prayers; the latter – with Raphael’s painting “The Bridgewater Madonna” and the icon of the Mother of God of Kazan. In Dostoevsky, a similar example of a visual embodiment of the idea of “universal responsiveness” is the description of Zosima’s cell, in which the Orthodox image of the Mother of God neighbors the Catholic image of Mater Dolorosa. From an axiological point of view, the attribute of Catholic iconography purposefully introduced by the writer into the interior of the cell is fundamentally significant. It is absent in the cell of the Optina elder Amvrosy, reproduced by Dostoevsky with great, but not literal, accuracy in order to portray the elder Zosima as the embodiment of the image of the “Russian all-man” who understands everything and everyone and accommodates everything. His iconostasis represents the entire history of Christian culture: the period before the schism in Russia (the image of the Mother of God), ancient Orthodoxy (icons of saints and martyrs), Catholicism (Catholic ivory cross and engravings) and modernity (portraits of bishops). The religious and cultural syncretism of Zosima’s religious feeling, which in cultural terms was in many ways close to Dostoevsky himself, is apparent.