Peasant Wedding in the Oeuvre of E.V. Chestnyakov (Based on Paintings and Graphic Works)

The article attempts to study the works of the original Kostroma artist E.V. Chestnyakov (1874–1961) for the presence of the elements of folk poetry and, in particular, to discover the principles and techniques of conveying the images of a traditional peasant wedding in his graphic works and paintings. The author carries out source and formalstylistic analyses of both the completed major paintings and the little-known series of graphic works illustrating folklore texts of the lamentation tradition of the Kologrivskiy region. The research reveals the artist’s desire to show the multicompositional nature and the semantic fullness of the wedding ceremony, as well as its local uniqueness. Moreover, it has been established that by incorporating the images of a North Russian wedding in his works Chestnyakov did not strive for ethnographism but poetized and aestheticized its traditional plot.