Tvano pėdsakais: priešistorinės katastrofos įvaizdinimas.

Trilupaitytė, Skaidra

This text explores the imagery of the global flood catastrophe, not primarily from the perspective of collective politics, but through the lens of geological, cultural, and artistic imagination. By examining nightmare descriptions by various artists, an effort is made to comprehend the functions of subconscious visionary images within systems of knowledge. For instance, the works of Lithuanian painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911), a Neo-Romanticism and Symbolism representative, and Howard Phillips Lovecraft, or HPL (1890-1937), a prominent figure in weird fiction, feature motifs of horror associated with global cataclysms. These motifs indirectly reflect fragmentary scientific knowledge, palaeontological evidence, parallel pseudo-scientific narratives, myths, and fairy tales. The missing painting series "Storm" from 1904 is cited as a specific example. In the works of Čiurlionis and his contemporaries, akin to early modern horror fiction, the threats of (anti)modernity manifest through global catastrophes and scenarios of the pre-human past and post-human future. In a broader sense, experiencing the global Flood as both a catastrophe and a significant event in a dream may directly resonate with a traumatic psychological state. This psychological state serves to awaken the rational mind in the face of global calamities, prompting it to "come to its senses." The daily influx of scientific, political, and other knowledge through today's media tends to overshadow - or submerge us deeper into - an existential reflection on rare events of immense scale, which have the potential to fundamentally transform the Earth, leaving almost no conditions for survival. The text concludes that the dreams of the mentioned artists can serve as a "mediating" psychological medium - a specific state aiding the modern individual in understanding the nightmare induced by (super)natural cataclysms. In today's world, traumas caused by humanity itself, along with an increasing number of wars, suggest that relying solely on the narrative of technical progress to "solve everything" may be misguided. Terrible events of great magnitude may indeed be experienced in an irrational and non-temporal manner - as traumatic archetypes that shake one's psyche in dreams, captured by a subject mediating between various modes of literary or artistic thought.

SCIENTIFIC knowledge; DREAMS; HORROR tales; TECHNOLOGICAL progress; FAIRY tales; IMAGINATION

Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis, 2024, Issue 113, p120

1392-0316

Academic Journal

10.37522/aaav.113.2024.232