Strategies of Biographical Writing: Irving Stone and His Fictionalised Biographies of Artists in the Development of Biographical Texts

The article is dedicated to the development of the genre of fictionalised biography, its beginnings, the aspects of its evolution and transformation, and inter-art strategies, as highlighted primarily in the material of biographical prose about artists written by the American writer Irving Stone. Starting from 1934, when Lust for Life about Vincent van Gogh came out, and during the upcoming decades, Stone resorted to the genre on many occasions, thus laying the foundation for the development of fictionalised biographies about artists, sculptors and other renowned personalities. In 1957, as a popular biographical novel writer, Stone presented the fundamentals of biographical fiction in a lecture he delivered at the Library of Congress. The paper focuses on the analysis of primary strategies for writing fictional biographies identified in novels about artists, the lecture about biographical novels, and during analysis of the specifics of the development of the genre of fictionalised biographies in a long-term prospect. The article examines the basics of biographical novels in the legacy of Irving Stone and within a wider context of biographical fiction development. The historical and literary approach and intermedial studies have been used to analyse trends in the development of the genre of biographies of artists. The analysis is centred on the essential characteristics of biographical novels about artists by Irving Stone, which feature complicated personalities, exposure of the psychology of the character, and the poetics of inter-art interaction which are revealed through a detailed study of an artist’s studio, description of the creative process, the use of pictorial quotes and ekphrasis, complying with the palette via the use of colour terms. Currently, we are witnessing a resurgence of interest in biographical fiction in Western literary studies, which is attested to by such works as L’épuisement du biographique? еd. by V. Broqua and G. Marche, 2010, a 2014 collection of interviews Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists, a 2012 publication of the special edition of the Critique journal on the issues of biographical genre.