Rzeka Wołga w rosyjskim malarstwie pejzażowym XIX i początku XX wieku

The analysis of various painterly representations of the Volga River as well as its visual shape and meaning in Russian landscape painting of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, conducted at the level of iconography, perception and reception of the visual work, as well as at the deep structure level of iconic texts, has revealed the issues of vividness, semantics and emotional saturation of the Volga concept. The changes in the way space is presented, constructed, coded, perceived and felt diversify painterly representations of the Volga, its appearance and functions. Their interpretation, which is determined by two factors: the visual code (the aesthetics of a landscape) and the key to understanding the ‘system of a landscape’, together with the revealing of the diversity and complexity of contexts in which the painterly descriptions of the natural world take shape, and the basic characteristics of poetics and artistic language (formal and functional analysis of the principles and the constant of the landscape: space, the seasonal nature, light, colour, rhythm, etc.) show that in Russian landscape painters’ consciousness, the concept sphere of the artistic natural national landscape is shaped by means of metaphoric-and-symbolic perception of its objects in terms of homogeneous values − sacred, undeveloped, wild and ‘one’s own’ though ‘foreign’. This incorporates the category of an artistic landscape into the context of the semantic unity of ‘nature and culture’, which is important for cultural studies. The discovery of the merits of native landscapes is the most significant element of national self-identification.