Visual projections of historically-cultural contexts in book illustrations

The artist, working to create book illustrations, mostly fulfills for his reader the function of visually-descriptive interpretation of the literature text. The basis of this interpretation is forming his own over-text, which is being created by him in virtue of discovering and understanding the undertone, depicted by the author. The artist’s process of creating illustrations for literature texts is being influenced by the whole spectrum of socio-cultural contexts. The article is devoted to the search for a range of historical and cultural contexts that affect the creation of book illustrations. Besides general social circumstances this process is being also sealed by more local contexts of diverse character: political, economic, artistic ones. Book illustrations reflect directly and indirectly visual and lexical aspects, modern cultural processes and, simultaneously, phenomena of the historical past. From one side, the artist is being influenced by actual cultural aspects, but, looking for expressive means, he often addresses stylistics of other epochs, historical past and its visual embodiments. Thus, the result of illustrating is interaction of cultural aspects both in synchronic and diachronic plane.