EAST AND WEST IN CONTEMPORARY BURYAT LITERATURE AND ART

Abstract

The paper is dedicated to the contemporary Buryat artists, the representatives of various arts in the works of which the opposition of East-West takes a significant place. The authors pay attention to the specifics of the interaction of eastern and western cultural codes in the works of Buryat poetry and fine arts. The subject of the research is to establish the similarities and differences in the approach of the representatives of different generations, such as the poet Bair Dugarov (born in 1947), and the painter and sculptor Zorikto Dorzhiev (born in 1976). It is noted that the synthesis of cultures, Buryat or Oriental, and Western or European, takes place in their works. It was revealed that this synthesis allowed each of the artists to express their creative “self” in the most complete and original way. It is stated that, being the representatives of the ancient Buryat-Mongol ethnos, they abandoned the narrow national vision of this synthesis and presented their vision from the wider Eurasian perspective. The spatial organization of the Great Steppe and the aspects that unite Dugarov’s poems and Dorzhiev’s picturesque paintings are analyzed. The music of the verse combining the memory of the lyrical hero inherited from the ancestors of the steppe life and the nostalgia of the modern poet for the lost beauty, are shown in Dugarov’s poetry. The images of a nomadic horseman, an oriental woman, plots of everyday life, rituals, replaced by new images of contemporaries, are considered in Dorzhiev’s painting in the symbiosis of Orientalism and Western tradition. The contact of national and European plots, in comparison of archaism and modernity, are presented in their works. Despite the difference in generational contribution, the relationship between Dugarov’s poetry and Dorzhiev’s fine arts is seen in the “literary” of the painter and the “picturesqueness” of the poet’s word, in the originality of lyricism and irony. It is concluded that the image of the Artist appears in the dialogue between Eastern and Western traditions.