The poetics of visual imagery in A.I. Ertel’s story “The Spiritualists” (1893)

Context and relevance. The relevance of the article is justified by the understudied nature of A.I. Ertel’s legacy and especially his “mysterious” story “The Spiritualists”, published in 1893. The purpose of the study is to analyze the poetics of visual images and examine the implementation of the problem of vision, representation, and visualization in the story, whose title provides a unique key for its reading and understanding. Methods and materials. The material for the study was the text of the story “The Spiritualists” by A.I. Ertel, which is considered in the context of Russian literature of the last quarter of the 19th century. The study resulted in an understanding of the visual images in the work. Conclusions. Like Chekhov, in “The Spiritualists”, Ertel touched upon the fine line between a person’s talent, their ability to see hidden meanings and emotional movements, and madness or illness. The visual imagery in the story allowed the author to portray the clash and intersection of not only spiritually blind individuals and those with spiritual vision, but also to draw conclusions about the profound crisis in the latter’s lives. Ertel saw the problems of life and the deep disorder of Russian reality in the fact that the active forces of talented and sensitive people were being spent on fighting external facts, historical conditions, and circumstances in which they found themselves.

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