‘The Dream of a Deity’: The Estate Palimpsest and the Metaphysics of the Sleeping Cupid in the Painting of V.E. Borisov-Musatov

This article interprets V.E. Borisov-Musatov’s panel “The Dream of a Deity,” created for the Derozhinskaya mansion, within the context of the Russian estate as a cultural topos. Approaching the work as a visual elegy, the author explores its connection to a Pushkinian worldview “without Pushkin,” analyzes the motif of the “ineffable,” and draws a parallel between the sleeping Cupid and the crisis of the Romantic consciousness. Through the prism of mythological allusions (Orion, Hymen), the conceived panel emerges not merely as a depiction of a winter season, but as a philosophical statement on the nature of love, memory, and loss in the “estate romance” of fin-de-siècle Russian culture.