Ballerina Sofia Fedorova II in the Russian sculpture of the silver age (Stepan Erzia, Marina Ryndzyunskaya, Natalya Danko)

The main aim of the article is to present an art historical and cultural analysis of three portrait images of Sofia Fedorova II (1879-1963), the outstanding ballerina of the Silver Age of Russian culture, created by masters of Russian sculpture Stepan Erzia (portrait bust, 1915, marble), Marina Ryndzyunskaya (statue, 1916, marble) and Natalya Danko (figurine, 1921, porcelain). The research materials are previously unpublished documents from the archives of Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Saransk, as well as articles from Russian periodicals of the 1910s; reviews of professional critics and memories about the ballerina. Based on the use of comparative historical, biographical, and semiotic methods, the article reconstructs Fedorova’s biography, considers various aspects of the reception of her personality and work by contemporaries: figures of literature (Vyacheslav Ivanov), theater (S. Giatsintova, E. Gogoleva, K. Stanislavsky, V. Telyakovsky), ballet (S. Grigoriev, B. Nizhinskaya), art critics and historians of ballet (Yu. Belyaev, P. Liven, S. Mamontov), other representatives of the humanitarian intelligentsia (S. Grigorov). Sofia Fedorova is known as an unsurpassed performer of characteristic dances in ballet and opera performances, as well as a ballerina who embodied the images of the innovative choreography of A.A. Gorsky and M.M. Fokin. Vyacheslav Ivanov claimed that the ballerina had “two faces”: the “daytime”, “galloping” Fedorova and the “nighttime” Fedorova, whose sphere was the “dark mysticism of the soul”. The author of the article traced the history of the creation of the three sculptures and revealed their artistic features and semantic content. The three sculptors created completely different sculptural images of Fedorova: a monumental marble figure (Ryndzyunskaya), an easel marble bust (Erzia), and a decorative porcelain figurine (Danko). According to the findings of the author of the study, Danko portrays Fedorova as “daytime” and “galloping” (nevertheless, she manages to create an ethereal image). Ryndzyunskaya also shows Fedorova as “daytime”, the sculptor is attracted by the ballerina’s grace, the beauty and expressiveness of her movement: portraying it, she focuses on purely plastic problems. Erzia is the only sculptor of the three who managed to see and capture the “nighttime” Fedorova. He is not interested in the ballerina’s dance, but in her complex deep inner world: he reflects the “dark mysticism” of her soul, conveys the state of tensity and anxiety that engulfed the woman, revealing not only signs of her incipient mental illness, but also her keen sense of the catastrophic state of the world (during World War I and the impending revolution).