Часы и солярная символика в живописном нарративе

The article analyses the structural and stylistic aspects of the motif of the dial as it occurs in Russian pictorial art from Symbolism until the end of the Avant-Garde in the 1920s. The contamination of linear and cyclical time and the various geometric forms of the dial appear as “shimmering” mythology in the visual narrative. The motif of the dial or clock has many meanings and connotations: vanitas in the work of Petrov-Vodkin, the Eternal Return in Chagall, a part of Malevichʼs strategy to gain possession of cyclical time. In the literature of the 1920s–1930s we find the mythopoetics of the clock in, for instance, the work of Mandelʼshtam and Polonskaia.