Photopoetry and phototheory of Russian emigration: V.V. Weidle

The paper considers the contradictions in the theory of photography by V.V. Weidle, which stimulated his later poetry. Weidle was critical about photography and cinema as a substitution of art for entertainment and for perception of the only surface of objects. His thinking about the surface properties of the media itself and changing the situation in art after World War II forced him to change his position. Weidle replaced the historical criterion with a rhetorical one and started to oppose the decorated rhetoric of painting to the simple rhetoric of photography. The historical view of photography through the value analysis was then supplanted by the assessment of the effects of photography as the effects of simple and sincere speech. We prove that such a transition was supported by the poetic work of Weidle, who in the poem “In Praise of Photography” gave the keys to his later theory. A careful analysis of the poem made it possible to reveal references to the history of Tsarskoye Selo Park, the history of Russian dramaturgy and theatrical practice, as well as allusions to the plot of the poem in Turgenev’s prose “We Will Still Fight”, which also essentially disputes the old rhetoric of the gesture for the sake of new rhetoric of right feeling. Thus, the late approve of photography by Weidle looks like a part of such new simplicity, which was justified as the rejection of rhetoric discredited by political abuses and hasty inclusion into the scale of values. The study shows the prospect of research on poetry written by art theorists, which, being cultural and intertextual, can explain the author’s theoretical approach where, in the theoretical text itself, he or she has silence or lacunae caused by the specifics of the essay, its conventions and limitations, or by breakdowns in the very way of producing art, which do not allow developing a theoretical apparatus based on old strategies of argumentation and description.