Abstract
The topoi of the idealization of childhood, ultimately an extension of the classic pastoral idiom, seems a product of romanticism. The Wordsworthian “spots of time” and the Blakean “Songs of Innocence” are either formulated in nostalgia for a lost, sacred presence or juxtaposed to a dislocating, profane presence. How is one to confront the Heideggerian “Rift” and make a space for the sacred in a so-called post-modern, post-humanistic, post-Christian, post-capitalistic, post-nuclear age whose central emblems are anxiety, disruption and schizophrenia? How may the imaginative consciousness find tropes appropriate to express this disruption and to exorcize it? To mend the “Rift” and celebrate sacred presence?
Our times have destroyed the ability to experience beauty. Mass culture has numbed the soul. The artist, however, must hear the call of truth within himself; only then can he convey his beliefs.
Andrei Tarkovsky1
The child is the father of the Man: And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. William Wordsworth, “My heart leaps up when I behold”
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Notes
“Tarkovsky Reflects”, World Press Review (May 1984), p.75.
The New York Review of Books (February 27, 1986), pp. 40 ff.
Ibid., p.45.
Ibid., p.42.
Ibid., p.42.
See George L. Kline’s “Introduction” to Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). Unless otherwise noted, the poems cited are from this edition or from Joseph Brodsky, Elegy to John Donne and other Poems, selected by Nicholas Bethell (London: Longman’s, 1967).
The New York Review of Books (February 27, 1986), p. 44.
See “Introduction” to Elegy to John Donne and Other Poems.
“Virgil: Older than Christianity, A Poet for the New Age”, Vogue (October 1981), p. 180.
Reprinted in Harpers (February 1985), pp. 24–5. 11 The New Yorker (December 31, 1984), pp. 24–5.
The New Yorker (January 28, 1980), p. 32.
See Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems, p. 92, f.n. 1.
Chagall, A Biography (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Son’s, 1978), pp.17–8, ff.
Chagall, with notes by the artist and an introduction by Michael Ayrton (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), p. 8.
Ibid., p. 18.
Ibid., p. 18.
Marc Chagall, My Life (New York: The Orion Press, 1960), p. 96.
Marc Chagall, My Life (New York: The Orion Press, 1960), p. 38.
Marc Chagall, My Life (New York: The Orion Press, 1960), p.40.
Chagall, p. 18.
My Life, p.115.
See Raissa Maritain, Chagall ou L’Orage Enchante (Paris: Editions des Trois Collines, 1948), pp. 93–4.
Compare the early, cubist “Calvary” (1912) with “White Crucifixion” (1938), “Martyrdom” (1940), “Blue Crucifixion” (1941), “Descent from the Cross” (1941), “The Yellow Crucifixion” (1943), “The Crucified” (1944) and “Flayed Ox” (1947).
Chagall (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1965), p. 24.
See Chagall’s study for “The Drunkard” (1911–2) in which the drunkard’s head floats above his body, perhaps, likewise, startled by the cow-horse that has stuck its head through his window.
Cited in Sam Hunter, Modern Art (New York: Harry Abrams, Jr., 1985), p. 65.
Cited in press materials for “The Sacrifice” during the 1986 Toronto International Film Festival.
“Tarkovsky Reflects”, p. 75.
Cited in “Tarkosky Reflects”, p. 75.
Cited in press materials for “Nostalghia” during the 1986 Toronto International Film Festival.
Cited in press materials for “The Sacrifice” during the 1986 Toronto International Film Festival.
Ibid.
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Ross, B. (1990). Nostalgia and the Child Topoi: Metaphors of Disruption and Transcendence in the Work of Joseph Brodsky, Marc Chagall and Andrei Tarkovsky . In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Elemental Passions of the Soul Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition: Part 3. Analecta Husserliana, vol 28. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2335-5_10
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