The Distinctiveness of Ekphrasis in “Letters from the Russian Museum” by Vladimir Soloukhin

The article investigates the distinctive use of ekphrasis in Vladimir Soloukhin’s essay “Letters from the Russian Museum”. The focus is on narrative elements and the depiction of aspects of reality that refer to visual art sources. The aim of the study is to identify the dominant type of ekphrasis present in the essay. To achieve this goal, the paper explores modern literary scholars’ typologies of ekphrasis in terms of volume and content. The relevance of the topic for both Russian and international academic communities lies in the fact that the phenomenon of ekphrasis remains a subject of on-going literary research, while the works of Soviet-era writers require contemporary scholarly interpretation and reinterpretation. Moreover, to date, there have been no studies in either Russian or international literary criticism that examine the function and types of ekphrasis in Soloukhin’s “Letters from the Russian Museum”. The article concludes that the use of direct, complete, and descriptive ekphrasis in the essay ena-bles the fullest and most accurate transmission of the author’s viewpoint to the reader. In Soloukhin’s work, ekphrasis serves various functions, including characterizing main figures and providing expressive evaluations of socially significant phenomena.