The intertextuality of visual and verbal works by naive artist Nadezhda Spirina

Sholicheva Anastasiya ORCID: 0009-0002-3260-993X Graduate student of the Department of Cultural Studies, Institute of Languages and Culture of the Peoples of the North-East of the Russian Federation, North-Eastern Federal University 677013, Russia, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Yakutsk, Kulakovsky str., 42, room 226 dpi_okmckt@mail.ru

The author expresses gratitude for the help in writing the article:

- scientific supervisor, Candidate of Cultural Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Cultural Studies at the Institute of Languages and Culture of the Peoples of the North-East of the Russian Federation, Federal State Educational Institution of Higher Education named after M. K. Ammosov, S. V. Nikiforova,

- to the head of the naive art sector of the Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, curator of the Museum of Naive Art, Candidate of Philosophical Sciences A. A. Bobrikhin,

- to the master of the MBU "Yuzhsky House of Crafts", the artist E. B. Generalova,

- employees of the Yuzhsky district archive,

- to Svetlana Fomina, the author of the Youtube channel "The Vienna Chest of the Pharaoh Svetlana",

- to the authors of the documentary film "Fairy Tale", film directors Vladimir Chuprikov, Ekaterina and Oleg Galaktionov,

- to the author of the Youtube channel about travel, the artist Vladimir Bykov,

- Vasilisa Alexandrova, editor of the Musicologists community on the Vkontakte social network, and Elena Pridanova, a member of the community.

Introduction. Among the many works related to naive literature, texts written by naive artists are the most promising group to study, since the texts and paintings they create, as a rule, often complement each other in meaning, content, artistic context and narrative. Thus, the analysis of the artistic methods of naive visual art using a narrative approach allows us to explore its plot, plot, precedent texts, composition and narrative space, revealing the uniqueness of this genre. By creating paintings, naive artists find themselves immersed in the culture of linguistic and written forms that allow their creative and social identity to find a way out and expression.  However, until now, a comprehensive analysis of the verbal and visual creations of naive artists has been poorly presented in the scientific literature.

In this study, we intend to systematize and analyze the poetics of verbal and visual texts by naive artist Nadezhda Ivanovna Spirina (Ivanovo region, the city of Yuzha) in order to better understand the artist's mission, which has a direct impact on the creative and ideological message of his naive utterance. We actualize the need for contextual study of visual and verbal texts of naive authors. The object of this research is paintings and poems by the naive artist Nadezhda Ivanovna Spirina (Ivanovo region, the city of Yuzha). The subject is aesthetics and poetics of intertextuality of N. I. Spirina's works. The research uses synchronistic, comparative, biographical, psychological, semiotic, cultural and historical research methods. The analysis of the stylistics and composition of paintings in combination with the poetic texts of the author makes it possible to more accurately interpret the social mission of the artist, which forms his naive statement. In addition, this technique allows us to test the hypothesis of expanding the status of a naive artist's work as a cultural text, taking into account the semantic features of a verbal utterance for the perception and reading of a visual text, that is, the intertextuality of works of naive art.

Let's turn to the definition of the term "naive art". In the broadest sense, this is how visual art is designated, characterized by simplicity (or simplification), clarity and formal immediacy of a figuratively expressive language, with the help of which a special vision of the world, unencumbered by civilizational conventions, is expressed. The concept appeared in the New European culture at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries, therefore it reflects the professional positions and ideas of this culture, which considered itself the highest stage of development. From these positions, naive art is also understood as the archaic art of ancient peoples (before Egyptian or ancient Greek civilizations), for example, primitive art; the art of peoples delayed in their cultural and civilizational development (indigenous populations of Africa, Oceania, American Indians); amateur and non-professional art on the widest scale (for example, the famous medieval frescoes of Catalonia or the unprofessional art of the first American immigrants from Europe); many works of the so-called "international Gothic"; folklore art; finally, the art of talented primitive artists of the 20th century who did not receive professional art education, but felt the gift of artistic creativity and devoted themselves to its independent realization in art ^[5].

Naive literature should be understood as one of the types of folk literature, namely samples of written literary creativity (poetic and prose, journalistic, semi-scientific, philosophical texts), which are created by non-professional authors.

The authors of fundamental research V. N. Prokofiev, L. I. Tananaeva, A.V. Lebedev ^[29] addressed the issues of naive art in the artistic culture of Russia for the first time, starting with the study of the primitive as an integral phenomenon of Russian culture of the XVIII-XX centuries and consideration of its individual types in the early 1980s. The work of naive artists is dedicated to the book by N. S. Shkarovskaya ^[42], which is an extensive information and factual material about naive art in the USSR. In it, the author, for the first time isolating naiv and labeling it as "amateur folk art", introduces this artistic phenomenon into domestic art criticism practice. This fact was largely facilitated by the introductory article by the largest art historian M. B. Alpatov ^[15]. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, research was published by P. D. Kornilov ^[28], G. G. Pospelov ^[34], D. V. Sarabyanov ^[35], A.V. Povelikhina ^[33], G. S. Ostrovsky ^[32], O. D. Baldina ^[16], K. G. Bohemskaya ^[21], devoted to the problems of the relationship of professional art at the beginning of the XX century with the primitive, with urban fine folklore and other types of "grassroots" art. In addition to the above-mentioned authors, the problems of naive art were studied by such authors as O. V. Dyakonitsyna ^[24], S. D. Tarabarov ^[38], A. A. Bobrikhin ^[20], N. A. Musyankova ^[31], T. A. Sinelnikova ^[36], L. D. Rtischeva, I. P. Vovk, A. A. Suvorova and others specialists. At the same time, the issues of naive art in the regional artistic culture of the XX century remained virtually out of the field of view of researchers. The naive visual art of the Ivanovo region at the turn of the XX–XXI centuries had not previously become the subject of independent study (with the exception of the life creation of the artist P. P. Leonov, to whom a number of O. V.'s studies were devoted. Diakonitsyna, K. G. Bogemskaya, A. A. Suvorova). Therefore, the further perspective of the research initiated in this article is seen by us in an extensive study of biographies, personalities and creativity of naive artists of the Ivanovo region of the 1990s-2020s in the context of historical, socio-political and socio-cultural phenomena in the region and the country at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries.

If we talk about the degree of scientific elaboration of the problem of naive literature and naive writing, then among the significant works should be named the works of N. N. Kozlova, I. I. Sandomirskaya ^[27] and S. Yu. Neklyudov ^[30], as well as the issue of the journal "Living Antiquity" (2000, No. 4) with publications of texts by naive authors and comments on them and collections "Naive Literature: studies and texts" edited by S. Yu. Neklyudov, "Before and after literature: texts of "naive literature" ^[23], "Bricks: Cultural anthropology and folklore studies today" ^[26]. The authors conclude that it is impractical and unpromising to separate naive painting and naive literature by spheres of scientific interest (painting to art historians, literature to philologists and linguists) and talk about the need for their comprehensive analysis. But at the same time, they do not engage in such analysis in their work. One of the few works concerning a comprehensive study of verbal and visual narratives of naive authors was written by A. A. Bobrikhin and N. B. Grammarchikova ^[20] using the example of an analysis of the work of several Ural naive artists.

S. Yu. Neklyudov in the article "Naive literature": studies and texts" writes: "Apparently, it is advisable to define the desired phenomenon ["naive" literature - author's note.] as literary creativity (or writing) of "literarily unqualified" authors. In this case, the question arises how to measure the degree of this qualification" [30:18]. "... in my opinion, it is the "non-reader" who becomes a "naive" writer, which is determined not so much by the amount of cultural information consumed as by the quality of consumption. In other words, "naive" literary products (and it's not just about literary texts) are created only by "discursive amateurs" [30:20].

The fact that we conduct scientific activities within the framework of the discipline "Cultural Studies. Visual culture", unties our hands and does not forbid us to consider naive art and naive literature as related, complementary phenomena, since cultural studies studies the most general patterns of cultural development as a system and discovers cultural knowledge as sections of philosophy, history, aesthetics, literary studies, art criticism, semiotics, etc. That is why in this article we are going to to conduct a study of human artistic imagination and figurative (verbal) art in a complex.

The experience of studying the work of several naive artists of the Ivanovo region (N. I. Spirina, I. F. Chapkin, N. I. Medvedev, S. V. Volkov, P. P. Leonov) allows us to assert the existence of many intertextual references and reminiscences in their works. Intertext is the main type and method of constructing a literary text in the art of modernism and postmodernism, consisting in the fact that the text is built from quotations and reminiscences to other texts. This means not only verbal texts, but texts of any art (painting, music, cinema, theater, modern art practices) ^[4]. We can talk about intertextuality not only in individual paintings or poems by a naive author, but also about the mutual complementation of some by others, when the poetic text can be an explanation to the picture or the picture plays the role of an illustration to the text. But at the same time, the plot of verbal and visual texts is inextricably linked with a reminiscence of earlier sources.   

The concept of intertextuality was invented and then firmly established in literary science with the light hand of one of the influential theorists of poststructuralism, Yulia Kristeva. The researcher summarized popular ideas about world literature (more broadly, culture) as a universal intertext, all the components of which are in a continuous dialogue. Here, of course, there was a modernized interpretation of the well-known position of M. M. Bakhtin, according to which almost all literary works are in dialogical relations, interacting not only with the reality reflected in them, but also with the author, the reader and the literary process of the past and present ^[11]. R. Barth holds the same opinion, calling any text a "quoted quotation" [17:428].

Aesthetics and poetics of the naive artist's text. This article will examine the intertextuality of visual aesthetics and the poetics of verbal works by naive artist N. I. Spirina, showing how her approaches to creating works of art give a complex idea of self-expression, social structure and personal narrative. The analysis of the intertextual elements of naive art provides an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the artistic process and the variety of expressive means that it generates.

Fig. 1 Spirina N. I. at the opening of a personal exhibition at the Yuzhsky House of Crafts, October 2018, photo from the archive of the MBU "Yuzhsky House of Crafts"

Nadezhda Ivanovna Spirina was born on January 3, 1952 in the city of Yuzha, Ivanovo region. Ivan Andreevich's father, originally from Kazan, was a self-taught artist who earned money by painting rugs. Mother Klavdia Iosifovna was born in the South and worked at the Yuzhskaya factory all her working life. Nadezhda is the third oldest of the 14 children in this large family. After graduating from the 8th grade of school, after studying at the factory school, she began working as a weaver at the Yuzhskaya factory. Then she became a nurse in the hospital, a milkmaid on a collective farm, a laundress at a bakery, a seamstress in a cooperative. She has three sons. In the mid-1990s, exhausted by forced unemployment and a sense of her own lack of demand, she began to read books that she borrowed from the library. So she got her hands on the book "Morning of the Gods" (an anthology of fiction, authors – Vladimir Shcherbakov, Andrey Dmitruk, Igor Larionov, Andrey Falkov and others). The book made a great impression on her. Unexpectedly for herself, N. I. Spirina rethought her life, her destiny and unexpectedly became passionate about creativity. At first, she began to sculpt toys for her granddaughter out of clay and paint them with watercolor paints, but even then, according to her, she felt a strong desire to make larger sculptures. After some time, another Southerner nugget artist Ignatiy Chapkin, with whom N. I. Spirina was on friendly terms, introduced her to the technique of working with oil paints ^[13].

"Chapkin gave me the first colors. And my brother also has a son. He said: "Aunt Nagy, I will bring you paints from Ivanov" ^[6].

Ignatius Fedorovich explained to her that it was necessary to dilute the pigment with linseed oil, told her how to work with a brush, apply strokes, and how to store paints. This prompted her to start looking for ways to work on canvas. She made the first brush from a bunch of dog tail hairs, tying them to a ballpoint pen.

"I didn't even have a brush then. Wax, you can say, I made it out of a dog's tail, I twisted it myself, I would not have guessed to go to the store to buy, somehow I was not smart" ^[2].

Not knowing the technology of preparing the canvas for work, the artist often violated the sequence of actions. Sometimes the canvas was attached to the frame, painted with basic oil paint (often with ordinary oil paint for finishing works – with what the husband could get and bring), and then painted with paints for painting. A light pencil sketch was previously made.  And sometimes, the desire to write a plot that arose in her head was so strong that she skipped the preparation stage and wrote directly on the cloth spread out on the floor.

"I used to write on an unstretched fabric, the paintings turned out uneven, and then my sister pulled them out and glued them with glue [to the stretcher – ed.]. We did not know how to do it correctly. Therefore, I have paintings on a blackboard, on plywood, on material, on anything, just to write" <...> "My mother, I remember, even gave me her almost new sheet so that I could paint a picture." <...> "My husband Valera, he brought cans of oil paint from somewhere. And my son sold bottled oil [sunflower oil – author's note], and he brought the remnants of this oil (dark, with sediment) home, and I diluted the paint with it and dyed the fabric. And only then I drew with a brush. And my sister gave me the brushes."^[6]

Nadezhda Spirina has never traveled outside the Ivanovo region, has not been to any museum, has not seen real sculptures, knows nothing about the methods of work used by professional sculptors and painters. Of the books that had a great influence on her, she names poems by Fet, Tyutchev, Akhmatova, a collection of short stories "Morning of the Gods", "Meetings with the Mother of God" by V. Shcherbakov and D. Andreev's religious and mystical work "The Rose of the World". ^[13]

The first solo exhibitions of N. I. Spirina were organized at the cultural center "Juventa" of the Ivanovo State Textile Academy (today it is the Ivanovo State Polytechnic University) by IGTA professors S. G. Smirnov and F. A. Kagan under the names "Earthly and Heavenly" (1998) and "The Seed of Truth" (2000). Her works have been exhibited twice at the international festival of naive art "Festnaiv" in Moscow.

It can be assumed that factors such as low level of education, low social status, poorly developed critical thinking, economic instability of the family against the background of events in the country in the 90s of the XX century, and at the same time the internal search for answers to questions influenced Nadezhda Ivanovna's sudden fascination with fantastic stories dedicated to the astral world of the gods, and documentary and artistic essays about the alleged meetings of the Mother of God and the gods with people, about the civilization of the gods and its difference from the civilization of aliens [39:2].

 And in this context, it is necessary to recall S. Y. Neklyudov's definition of a "discursive dilettante". This is a person who is not a qualified consumer of literary products, and who is in different socio-cultural spaces with the producers of these products ^[30]. Therefore, according to Neklyudov, Nadezhda Spirina can be defined as a "discursive dilettante" who is capable of becoming a naive writer. 

"You can't write a song, it will be born… You don't invent the plots of the works. When I start making them, I don't know what I'm going to do. Well, let's just say that. How it goes with my hands is reflection, my condition at the moment" ^[2].

The paintings and sculptures of the naive artist visualize mainly esoteric and symbolic subjects. They reveal the author's reflections on Christianity, on Buddhism, on the modern search for a "universal religion", on mysticism dating back to the ancient Egyptian priestly tradition. There is a "dialogue of cultures" in these works - the desire to express one's attitude to the cultural heritage of the past. And this convincingly shows that the "primitive" art of the author is by no means primitive in its essence, but is full of deep meanings and abounds in intertextuality.

The creators of the release of the television program "Letters from the Province" about the inhabitants of Yuzhi captured the moment when Nadezhda Ivanovna turns on a vinyl record with a recording of the aria "Quia respexit" from the Magnificat by Johann Sebastian Bach: "This melody gives me the mood. I'll listen to it, and I'll sort of lose myself completely, and I'm already completely at work."^[2]

Referring to the website "Catalog of Soviet Records" ^[3], we found out that the Melodiya record company released 7 records with music by J. S. Bach from 1964 to 1990, containing the aria "Quia respexit". It can be assumed that N. I. Spirina listened to one of these records while working, being inspired by the music of the great composer. It is symbolic that in the aria we are talking about the consent of the Virgin Mary to the feat of Motherhood. "The humility of the chosen slave is conveyed by descending motifs depicting worship; it turns out to be accompanied by an indescribable charm — the authentic image of the Madonna in music" ^[12]. The content of the aria and the translation of words from Latin were most likely unfamiliar to the South African poorly educated artist. But, possessing a subtle mental organization, she easily fell under the influence of Bach's organ works, harmonizing space and her inner state, giving her the mood for creativity.

According to the stories of the artist herself, she wrote mostly at night, when she came home from work and finished all household chores.

"The children were growing up guys back then. Well, they said, "Mom is doing nonsense." And my husband is drunk. He's lying down and sleeping. I say, "Hush, hush, Valera." And while he sleeps, I write."^[6]

The breath of the night for me

A mile of breath of the day

The noise is some kind of fuss

Drops of evil are dripping

I bear it with patience

Slaps on the cheeks

I want to love

Don't hit back.

(From N. I. Spirina's notebooks, the year of writing is unknown, spelling and punctuation are preserved).

Does such an ability to disconnect from the outside world, such detachment, have genetic roots? Ignatius Fedorovich Chapkin, another self-taught Southern artist, whose engravings, etchings, graphics and diary entries we have yet to study in a complex, left this entry in his diary dated March 3, 1998: "On the way back I went to Nadia Spirina. She was at home finishing a new painting. I looked at her previously made things again, that's the originality, that's for sure. And how she explains them with words and feelings, well, no worse than the glorified Chestnyakov. [E. V. Chestnyakov (1874-1961, Kostroma region) – a professional artist who worked in the genre of pseudonyms - approx. the author]. According to her story, I found the connection of human destinies. Once upon a time, I knew her father, kept friendship with him and considered him a very interesting and intelligent person, although in the city he was considered a "man with greetings." Before his death, he gave me the first volume of the Decameron from the Golden Library edited by Gorky. Half of our intelligentsia had never even heard of this book at that time, and the "man with greetings" had a whole chest of them. Nadia was three years old then, when their family and life fell apart, well, what kind of woman would live with a "fool"... And then Nadia's wanderings through life began, which now resulted in these religious-mystical paintings and sculptures that completely captured her and did not give her peace... When I came home, I began to watch his paintings. Alas, mine are less interesting, more far-fetched and dry, although also from the heart and for the soul, however, I clearly see that her work is much higher, much deeper than mine..." [37:214].

It was noticed that each viewer of N. I. Spirina's paintings interprets them in his own way, in accordance with his picture of the world and the vastness of contextual knowledge. This is directly influenced by the peculiarities of visual perception. The Soviet design theorist E. Chernevich shared the concepts of "looking" and "seeing". He called simple looking passive perception, when the eye captures something by itself, without a specific task. By vision, he understood the process of active perception, which involves correlating an image with an object and making sense of it. According to E. Chernevich, "to see an image means to read it like a text, specifically attuned to the disclosure of all kinds of symbols and relationships that are contained in it, i.e. to discover the context in which this image appears" [41:19].

Intertextual connections of the work "The Virgin (the Bird of the Nea)".

Fig. 2 Spirina N. I. Bogoroditsa (Nea Bird) year unknown, 41x55, plywood/oil, in a private collection, photo by Generalova E. B.

N. I. Spirina – about the painting "The Virgin" (see Fig. 2): "She was painted on the floor on her knees. And she looked like she was standing on the ground with her paws. And when I put it on, I look, and it flies! And on the sides of it is a flame, a fire. And she saves the Earth. This is the Mother of God over Russia. I wrote it as a Bird of the Swa" ^[6].

The intertextual reference here is Andrei Falkov's story "The Mother Bird of Swa" from the collection "Morning of the Gods": "The Mother Bird of Swa is one of the names of the Great Goddess. I guessed that. Svanur is an Icelandic swan. The root "swan" is included in other words that are associated with the name of the snow-white bird. Swa is a swan, a swan in the ancient dialect. The Icelandic scientist Snorri Sturluson wrote about the country of Great Svityod, which is located in the south-east of Europe. In the Old Norse work of the XIII century "What lands lie in the world", the Great City is called the easternmost part of Europe" ^[10].

There are also poems in Nadezhda Spirina's poetry that can be interpreted as a semantic or intertextual continuation of the mentioned picture. We give it below (the spelling and punctuation of the author is preserved):

I'm dancing with a swan song

The dance of the dance of being

Tambourine sounds

They called me

I see an image

Dancing in the open

To the music of heaven

Somewhere far away

I feel it here.

Requiem

Requiem sounds in the universe

It's like the air is saturated with it

Echoes of planetary disasters

It sounds secret

It is worth listening carefully

The soul will hear

It will flap its wings

Like Mother Eve

The requiem sounds very quiet

It cuts through the sky again

A groan, a sob of anguish

Echoes up

Like inaudible music

He calls the earth to him

She knows, poor thing

How it hurts her

Listen to this music

She can't stand it.

(From N. I. Spirina's notebooks, January 2000, spelling and punctuation are preserved).

The use of symbolism and metaphors in naive art adds complexity and meaning to this art form. Naive artists often use these methods of artistic expression borrowed from their personal or cultural context (and more often they use symbols and metaphors completely unconsciously, without having a preliminary intention to decorate their visual or verbal work in this way). These symbols serve as a gateway for the viewer to deeper themes, social issues or spiritual ideologies embedded in art, creating a vast intertextual field.

Intertextual connections of the work "The Eternal Mother of the World".

Fig. 3.

Spirina N. I. The Eternal Mother of the World 1998, plywood/oil, 50x85, in a private collection, photo by Generalova E. B.

Let's consider the painting "The Eternal Mother of the World" (see Fig. 3). We are more than sure that the symbolism of flowers, adopted in Christianity, was chosen here unconsciously. When asked why warm tones prevail in her paintings, N. I. Spirina replied: "I do not know if they are warm or hot, I was not taught this."^[9]

In Christian culture, the symbolism of the primary colors has its own characteristics associated with such sources as the Old Testament and the Holy Gospel, church tradition and traditions. Green is life, the earthly path; yellow is sunlight and gold, divinity and royalty; white is purity, light, incorruption; red is life, strength, energy; blue is holiness and eternity ^[14]; brown is humility, the pliability of clay, from which the first man was sculpted by divine hand. [40:312]

In the hands of the baby is a flower with eight petals, which is visually divided into four red and four yellow. The number 8 in Christianity is the embodiment of harmony, balance, order and stability, the number of eternity [25:70], the number 4 determines the flow of time – daily and annual [22:384].  We can assume that the flower here symbolizes the Star of Bethlehem, which announced the birth of the Savior to the world. The clothes of the Mother of the World are modern, unlike the maforium, in which it is customary to depict the Virgin in the Orthodox tradition and the tunic in which she is depicted in the Catholic tradition. She is wearing what looks like a knitted woolen blouse and possibly a red dress. This speaks to the timelessness of this image.

The following is a poem by Nadezhda Ivanovna, which has very similar intertextual references (the author's spelling and punctuation are preserved):

The Virgin was seen

With a baby in her arms

All dressed in swan's down

Gently hugging the child covered with white down,

The stars are shining with their night blue surrounding.

I bowed to them mentally,

I didn't even notice how she left.

(From N. I. Spirina's notebooks, September 18, 2001, spelling and punctuation are preserved).

Intertextual connections of the work "Heir".

Fig. 4 Spirina N. I. Heir year unknown, 42x82, plywood/oil, in a private collection, photo by Generalova E. B.

N. I. Spirina about the painting "The Heir" (see Fig. 4): "Here is a painting called "The Heir". And why? Why is the sky dome an arc? And the Egyptians and the pyramids? And what's the window in the middle? I repeat, you can't tell pictures. They must be felt."^[6]

We see that the artist intentionally does not give ready-made answers to the audience, is reluctant to explain the plots of her paintings and welcomes when the viewer himself offers his own interpretation based on his cultural experience. So, it can be assumed that the painting "The Heir" refers to the idea of Jesus Christ as the biblical incarnation of the son of the sun, characteristic of many ancient religions, including the Egyptian one.

When working with the verbal texts of a naive author, one should make "every effort not to disrupt the course of the original letter in any way, not to put, for example, according to a bad intellectual habit, a comma where it was neglected by the mysterious author" [27:11], and then it is highly likely that it will be possible to find "that screw by unscrewing which you can see how the whole machine works" [27:12].

The edge of nothingness

Very close

No need to go anywhere

And I see it with my third eye

I really want to go there

Maybe it's far away

They will not wave malice

There will be no worries about bread

Where can I get the money

Living on handouts

I haven't been able to for a long time

I know it's a challenge

We must overcome it.

(From N. I. Spirina's notebooks, the year of writing is unknown, spelling and punctuation are preserved).

"Let's define what we mean by visual text. A visual text is a visible (perceived by the eye) structural and functional model in which the values and norms of a certain culture are codified and presented in the form of signs, symbols and images interconnected by various contextual connections; the model of visually perceived reality is "built" according to the subject-subject/subject-object principle using extralinguistic funds. The visual text does not allow a person to ignore it: in the vast majority of cases, a person is "doomed" to read the visual text. This type of text is already implicitly designed for a special type of reader" [8:183]

Naive artists often rely heavily on narrative elements in their visual and verbal works. Their art serves as a means to tell stories, folk tales and myths, to depict cultural traditions and express personal experiences. This focus on storytelling contributes to the intertextual quality of naive art and the deep connection between the artist, the audience and the broader human experience.

Intertextual connections of the work of "Sappho". Let's consider N. I. Spirina's painting "Sappho" (see Figures 5 and 6).

Fig. 5 Sappho. Fresco from Pompeii. 1st century A.D. Naples. National Archaeological Museum, photo from the site "History of Ancient Rome" ^[7]

Fig. 6 Spirina N. I. Safo 1995, plywood, oil, 41x55, in a private collection, photo by Generalova E. B.

It is obvious that the image of Sappho was copied from the fresco of the same name from Pompeii, dating from the 1st century AD (this is evidenced by the pose of the heroine, and the circle with which her portrait is framed, by analogy with the rounded shape of the fresco). Wax tablets and a stylus turned into a notebook and pencil in the painting of a naive artist. The author's hand also added additional details to the painting, which impressed her when she got acquainted with the work and biography of the ancient Greek poetess: columns, a vase made of white marble and a rocky seashore. The author herself speaks briefly about the painting: "Sappho is an ancient poetess. She was very talented, but unhappy. She drowned in the sea. There's a spot here, the water that is [pointing to the upper right corner] – here she drowned. I feel sorry for her, of course. But I think there was nothing to fool my head about."^[6] The artist's poem seems to continue the visual text of the painting:

She was a poet

Sappho from the Greek tragedy

From the love grain

She went to the bottom of the sea

The poems were read in ecstasy

Lovers of the far side

And now a story has come about her

To our far side.

(From N.I. Spirina's notebooks, the year of writing is unknown, spelling and punctuation are preserved).

Naive artists often use verbal narratives to accompany their visual works. Descriptions, explanations, names of paintings written by the author's hand directly on the front of the painting, as well as poems and prose serve as interpretations of visual works of art, give viewers an additional idea of the intentions of the naive artist. They help the viewer to understand the plot depicted in the painting, "unravel" its intertextuality and establish a deeper connection with the artist's vision. (Two-day scientific readings in memory of K. G. Bogemskaya, held by the State Institute of Art Studies in March 2023, were devoted to auto-commentaries in the works of naive artists and outsiders). Whereas visual narratives refer to stories or messages conveyed solely through the artwork itself.

The intertextual connections of the painting "Repentance. A sinner." Such an example is N. I. Spirina's emotionally loaded painting "Repentance. The sinner" (see Fig. 7)

Fig. 7 Spirina N. I. Repentance. Sinner year unknown, 50x85, plywood/oil, painting lost, photo by Generalova E. B.

This is a portrait of a young woman standing in a summer meadow against a stormy sky, wringing her hands in despair and looking up. The color scheme in which the heroine of the painting is depicted echoes the colors of the birch tree: a green dress and a white handkerchief are painted with the same simple pigments as the trunk and foliage. This makes the heroine visually similar to the birch tree, which was a sacred tree among the Slavs (as well as almost all Ugro-Finnish and Turkic peoples), a symbol of maiden purity, and the cult of birch worship was exclusively feminine in nature. This is probably why the artist depicted the penitent sinner not in a temple, but in a field, under a stormy sky, near a birch tree, which semantically is her second self. In addition, the cult of the birch tree, which has a pure heavenly white bark color, has since ancient times been associated with the Bereginya or the Great Goddess, the mother of all things. "And the word "bereginya" meant "land." Thus, the Goddess of the Earth, which in embroidery is often replaced by the image of a Birch Tree, was called Beregin, i.e. the Earth. Among the Eastern Slavs, she was also called a Peasant Woman, a Rozhanitsa, Earth, Lada, Glory" [19:77]. The symbol of the response of higher forces to the woman's plea is a barely noticeable ray of sunlight piercing a cloud in the picture.

Next, we present a poem by N. I. Spirina, in which she deciphers the plot depicted in the painting:

A woman was standing on the field

She woke up to the rain

How painfully her soul screamed

About what she could have done.

How can she live with this pain

How will she appear before Him?

She didn't like heaven.

Hell must have been loved by her.

And the rain won't wash away those sins,

And it won't get any easier for her.

How heavy they are

The burden of a sinful soul.

(From N. I. Spirina's notebooks, the year of writing is unknown, spelling and punctuation are preserved).

Any text (verbal or visual) is a system with many inputs and outputs. "To interpret a text does not mean to endow it with some specific meaning (relatively legitimate or relatively arbitrary), but, on the contrary, to understand it as an embodied multiplicity" [18:33].

A naive artist has an amazing ability to convey his ideas to the viewer through simple artistic methods, not through logic, but through sensory perception. This ability speaks to a deep, unconscious understanding of the power of images and the art of interaction.

"Every naive artist is, say, not Flemish, who are generally similar to each other, they are all separate, because they have no art education, no methodological, technological framework, they take professional skills from secondary schools, from what they have seen, work or write intuitively" ^[1].

Nadezhda Spirina is a vivid example of a naive artist, but her reward consists only in the fact that she is independently looking for ways to master the art of modeling, oil painting and poetic style, otherwise her work is full of depth, constant search for the meaning of being, reminiscences to esoteric texts and to her own life experience.

Conclusion.

Visual narratives refer to stories or messages conveyed solely through the artwork itself. Using bright colors, dynamic compositions and symbolic elements (often unconsciously), a naive artist can evoke strong emotions in the viewer and effectively convey his messages.

The naive artist has an amazing ability to transform complex concepts into simple but evocative compositions. The simplicity of their visual narratives provides an instant emotional connection, eliminates unnecessary details and, with the help of intertextuality, conveys the author's ideas directly into the viewer's heart. This simplicity testifies to a deep understanding of the power of images and the art of communication.

In this study, our hypothesis about the expansion of the status of a naive artist's work, taking into account the intertextuality of his works, was partially confirmed. The goal has been achieved - the stylistics and composition of several paintings in combination with the poetic texts of the author have been analyzed. It was possible to solve a number of instrumental tasks outlined at the beginning of the research work: the search for intertextual references and reminiscences in the works of N. I. Spirina, the disclosure of various practices of author's self-reflection in her works, an interdisciplinary study of verbal and visual works of a naive author. The perspective of the research initiated in this article is seen by us in an extensive study of biographies, personalities and creativity of naive artists of the Ivanovo region of the 1990s-2020s in the context of historical, socio-political and socio-cultural phenomena in the region and the country at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries.

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