"An old, far-flung garden, which stretched beyond the house, emerged beyond the estate and then lost itself in the fields, was all that seemed to impact a freshness, overgrown and overrun as it was, to this far-flung estate, and all that was perfectly picturesque in its picture-like desolation. In green clouds and in irregular quivering-leafed cupolas, the conjoined summits of trees which had burst into full and free growth lay against the horizon. The colossal white trunk of a birch, deprived of a top which had been broken off by a storm or a tempest, rose out of this green thicket rounded like an erect and gleaming marble column in the air; the angled, sharp-ended fracture, in which it terminated instead of a capital, showed dark against the snowy whiteness, like a hat or a black bird. The wild hop that choked the elder, rowan-berry and hazel bushes below, and then ran over the top of the entire palisade, at last ran upwards to twine round the broken birch tree. Having reached the middle, it was dangling and already beginning to clutch at the tops of other trees or hung in the air, twining its delicate, clinging ringlets into tendrils gently swayed by the wind. In places green, sun struck thickets parted to reveal a hollow between them, untouched by light and gaping like a dark maw, it was cast all in shadow, and its black depths afforded but the faintest glimpse of a coursing narrow path, the ruins of a railing, a tumbledown gazebo, a hollow, decayed trunk of a willow, and from behind the willow a gray thicket which thrust out a dense bristly of leaves and twigs, entangled and enmeshed, withered by the fearsome wild, and finally the young branch of a maple that had stretched from one side its green paw – leaves beneath one of which the sun had made its way. Lord knows how, and was turning it suddenly transparent and fiery, a wondrously shining thing in this thick darkness. Off to one side, at the very edge of the garden, several high-reaching aspen, taller than the others, raised enormous crows’ nest on their tremulous crowns. From some of these, branches, broken but not fully detached, hung down with their withered leaves. In a word, all was somehow desolate and splendid, as it is given to neither nature nor art to devise, but as it happens only when they join together, when across the often senselessly accumulated toil of man, nature passes a finishing touch of the chisel, lightens the heavy masses, eliminates the crudely palpable symmetry and the beggarly rips through which peers the unconcealed, bare plan, and confers a wondrous warmth on everything that has been created in the chill of calculated purity and tidiness."
Gogol, em Dead Souls, daqui.
"The difference between human vision and the image perceived by the faceted eye of an insect may be compared with the difference between a half-tone block made with the very finest screen and the corresponding picture as represented by the very coarse screening used in common newspaper pictorial reproduction. The same comparison holds good between the way Gogol saw things and the way average readers and average writers see things. Before his and Pushkin's advent Russian literature was purblind. What form it perceived was an outline directed by reason: it did not see color for itself but merely used the hackneyed combinations of blind noun and dog-like adjective that Europe had inherited from the ancients. The sky was blue, the dawn red, the foliage green, the eyes of beauty black, the clouds grey, and so on. It was Gogol (and after him Lermontov and Tolstoy) who first saw yellow and violet at all. That the sky could be pale green at sunrise, or the snow a rich blue on a cloudless day, would have sounded like heretical nonsense to your so-called "classical" writer, accustomed as he was to the rigid conventional color-schemes of the Eighteenth Century French school of literature. Thus the development of the art of description throughout the centuries may be profitably treated in terms of vision, the faceted eye becoming a unified and prodigiously complex organ and the dead dim "accepted colors" (in the sense of "idées reçues") yielding gradually their subtle shades and allowing new wonders of application. I doubt whether any writer, and certainly not in Russia, had ever noticed before, to give the most striking instance, the moving pattern of light and shade on the ground under trees or the tricks of color played by sunlight with leaves. The following description of Plyushkin's garden in Dead Souls shocked Russian readers in much the same way as Manet did the bewhiskered philistines of his day."
Nabokov em Lectures on Russian Literature, todo em .pdf aqui.
No comments:
Post a Comment