#3 2020 (68) Special edition "Maria Yakunchikova and Symbolism"

The interaction between an artist and the dominant artistic tendencies of their time - tendencies that reveal the individuality, the soul, of an age - can take different forms. The question of the self-determination of an artistic personality, and its relation to the psychologically sophisticated aesthetics of Symbolism, was one that occupied Maria Yakunchikova over the course of her mature artistic career (from about the end of the 1880s to 1902, the year of her death). A focus on Yakunchikova’s dialogue with spiritual impulses hidden in time is a logical and appropriate approach, on both the internal and external levels, especially considering that she was linked, in one way or another, with the two main phases of the development of Art Nouveau in Russia.