Amazement as a way of discovering artistic essence: ambivalence of the living and the dead in M.Y. Lermontov’s poem “Portrait”

In the poem of M.Y. Lermontov “Portrait”, amazement is considered: 1) as the reaction of the lyrical hero-artist to his own creation; 2) as a suggestive strategy; 2) as a reader’s reaction to a number of paradoxical characteristics. The ambivalence of the living and the dead serves as the basis for the realization of amazement. The tension between these semantic poles is revealed at several levels: the portrait and its viewers, art and life, spiritual experience and physical shell. Romantic duality and romantic irony give rise to a number of intertextual addresses to the work of J.-G. Byron, F.-R. Chateaubriand and O. Wilde.