Art and artists in literary representation of Kizhi island

The purpose of the article is to analyze the layer of references to the fine arts in literary texts about Kizhi Island, which was not previously considered in the studies on the representation of the island. In prose and poetry about Kizhi from the late 1950s, such references appeared regularly. Among the main types (namings and images of artists, ekfrasis) a group of images and namings of artists, fictional and real, is examined in detail. Their appearance in the works about the island is due to its cultural history, which formed a special landscape focused on the Kizhi Pogost, a recognized masterpiece of architecture, as well as to some features of the Thaw period, when many bright works about Kizhi were written and published. Artists appear in the Kizhi plots as characters (from protagonist to episodic persons) and often have a special status, intermediate between the indigenous islanders and tourists. Along with the conventional figures, in this material there are the names of painters who really existed - Kuindzhi, Van Gogh, Goya, Gauguin and Rockwell Kent. The reasons for the appearance of these names and their intermedial functions in the texts about the island are considered in the article. Material for the study are I. Mazuruk’s, E. Nosov’s, Yu. Kazakov’s, V. Pulkin’s, and A. Voznesensky’s texts and memoir sources. The analysis enables us to recognize that the images associated with artists and fine art are the original feature in the literary representation of the island, giving it (along with the sacred meaning of Kizhi churches) the character of a place that concentrates exceptional visual possibilities and non-utilitarian meanings.