도스토옙스키와 뭉크의 대화적 상상력

Abstract

This article is focused on the mutual dialogue taken place between literature and art. The story of meeting and dialogue between literature and art has been a continuously interesting topic for many researchers for a long time. However, a full-scale research, especially on intertextuality between Dostoevsky, a Russian writer, and Edvard Munch, a Norwegian artist, has not yet conducted up to now. Dostoevsky was the most important writer to Edvard Munch throughout his entire life. Dostoevsky’s novels worked as the lingual texts that enriched the artistic imagination of Munch. Even at the very moment of his death, Munch was reading a Dostoevsky’s novel. Damaged in childhood by appalling family tragedies, Dostoevsky and Edvard Munch were obsessed by sickness, insanity and death. Munch found the Russian-Norwegian congeniality and tried to express characters’ actions and their inner world embodied in the dramatic situation in Dostoevsky’s works. If Dostoevsky is the one who scrutinized the deeper regions of the human soul, Munch is the one who pursued “Soul Paintings” which revealed the universality of souls. Munch successfully recreated main themes in Dostoevsky’s literature and images of characters into his paintings, a.k.a. icon signs. In a word, Munch was the artist who creatively understood Dostoevsky’s language and grammar. He reproduced his world of empathy with Dostoevsky into the world of silence. As Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy and dissected the body, these two artists analyzed the soul. This article includes the pieces of Munch: The Scream, Despair, Jealousy, Anxiety, Madonna, Vampire, Death and the Maiden, Evening on Karl Johan Street, Night in St. Cloud, Hans Jaeger, and the works of Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazovs. It concludes that Munch created the new artistic world through dialogic imagination with Dostoevsky.