Visual aspects of literary landscape

Straipsnio tikslas - konceptualizuoti vizualiuosius literatūrinio kraštovaizdžio aspektus tarpdalykinių peizažo diskusijų kontekste, motyvuoti jo analizei pasirenkamas vizualumo studijų prieigas bei meninio tyrimo eksperimentą - dailininko Giedriaus Jonaičio atliktas gamtinių aprašymų vizualizacijas. Tyrimo medžiagą sudaro rusų rašytojo Nikolajaus Gogolio (1809-1851) kūryboje susiformavęs peizažo žanras, kurio pavyzdžiai laikomi unikaliais žodinės tapybos ir kalbos harmonijos kūriniais, įspūdingomis neegzistuojančių paveikslų ekfrazėmis, drąsiais vizionieriškais meninės erdvės (ir jos kalbos) eksperimentais, leidusiais teigti, kad rašytojas siekė paversti prozą erdvinio meno objektu, galinčiu konkuruoti su natūraliais gamtovaizdžiais ir architektūra.The article is based on the idea by W. J. T. Mitchell that in the 19th century a landscape became a media broadcasting the imperial and colonial ideology. This interpretation of the genre is extended by an assumption that a landscape also conveys a romantic conception of a nation’s relationship with the land it inhabits. These ideas were further developed also in geography of that time. The research presented in the article focuses on the assumption that geography is a visual discipline which uses maps and descriptions of landscapes as means for representing the knowledge of the Earth, and therefore could be discussed within the field of visual culture studies. On the other hand, instruments of visual studies could be applied to the analysis of a literary landscape as well. In the article, the concepts of the observer, the techniques of the observer and the scopic regimes are used in the research of literary landscapes by Nikolai Gogol. These concepts allowed the article author to disclose how Gogol’s interest in geography enabled him to form a cartographic scopic regime borrowed from maps and moved into his literary landscapes. In his story Terrible Vengeance, Gogol used two cartographic images - the relief map of Europe by Karl Ritter (1806) and map of Ukraine drawn by French engineer Guillaume Levasseur de Beauplan in the first half of the 17th century. The genre of the geographic landscape, basically formed in the treatise Views of Nature by Alexander von Humboldt, back in 1808, proposed another scopic regime to Gogol. In the geographic landscape, which is the subject of the geographic research, two scopic regimes - cartographic and Cartesian perspectivalism - are combined