Story oval portrait. Edgar Allan Poe "The Oval Portrait"

I was suffering from a strong fever. Only my servant looked after me. A servant broke into this abandoned castle and dragged me, wounded by bandits, so that I would not freeze to death on the street. We chose one of the small dark rooms for temporary accommodation.

The servant did not dare to bleed me, since I had already lost so much of it, or to ask someone else for help. But I remembered in time about the opium stored in my bins. I had once smoked it mixed with tobacco in a pipe, but now I had doubts about the dosage. Before that, I only used morphine, and never opium in its pure form. I then decided to start with a very small dose and increase it if necessary. I did not take into account that an insignificant amount of pure opium in my condition could turn out to be enormous.

At night I lay down, dreaming of falling asleep or at least quietly reading a book found in the room next to the bed. This volume contained descriptions and histories of the creation of all works of art stored in the castle. The servant was already asleep. In a candlelit corner I suddenly saw an unusual picture. It was a portrait of a young woman in an oval gold frame. For almost an hour I gazed at her face. It seemed that she was alive. This both delighted and frightened me. From the point of view of skill, the artist's work was impeccable.

I quickly found a portrait of a girl on the list. The description said that this beautiful young beauty fell in love and married the painter. But the artist was not captivated by his young wife: his heart completely belonged to Art, which caused bitterness and jealousy of his wife. Even her husband’s desire to capture her on canvas was annoying for her, but, being submissive and in love, she posed for him for a portrait for long days.

Every day she seemed to become more and more weak and wasted away from melancholy. It seemed to everyone that this amazing portrait was direct proof of the artist’s love for his wife. But no one knew that when work on the painting was already nearing completion, the painter practically did not look at the girl, but with burning eyes and painful excitement he peered at his work.

And so he waved his brush for the last time and made the final stroke on the canvas. The man was fascinated by his work and looked at the canvas for a long time in admiration with some kind of reverence and awe. Finally, he exclaimed: “This is life itself!” And only then did he glance at his wife and notice that she was already dead.

In “The Oval Portrait” one can hear the idea, already familiar to Edgar Poe, that art competes with life, and art and death have the same nature.

Picture or drawing Oval portrait

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Edgar Allan Poe stood out among his compatriots in everything: talent, destiny, and philosophy of life and creativity (which for him, as a true romantic, were inseparable).
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809 into a family of actors and was left an orphan at the age of two. The little boy was taken in by a childless, wealthy tobacco merchant, John Allan. There is a legend (one of the many that surrounded the name of Edgar Poe during his lifetime) that Poe’s parents were burned alive in a fire in the theater. As a child, he himself had repeatedly heard this story from his black nanny, who loved to tell the boy scary stories. Perhaps this had an influence on his work.
In the house of John Allan, Edgar grew up in prosperity, never being denied anything. He received an excellent education, visited England with his adoptive father, where he came into close contact with romanticism and absorbed its spirit. Upon returning from England, Edgar begins to feel mental instability for the first time due to the realization that he is a stepson and is completely dependent on the favor of his stepfather. Ultimately, this leads to the fact that in 1825, while a student at the University of Virginia, he quarreled with his adoptive father because he refused to pay his “debts of honor” - Poe played cards and was very unsuccessful.
Having quarreled with Allan, Poe runs away from home and leaves for Boston, where he publishes his first collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems of a Bostonian. The poems were not successful. Poe was left completely without a livelihood and was forced to enlist in the army, where he served for two years. After returning from the army, he briefly reconciled with John Allan, but after the death of his adoptive mother, the last thread that somehow connected them broke, and they finally quarreled; Allan crossed out Edgar from his will.
Edgar Poe lives in Baltimore with his aunt, his father's sister, and meets her daughter, young Virginia, who is destined to become his wife and the great love of his life. Edgar would later reflect the features of his beloved Virginia in many portraits of his heroines, as refined, gentle, incredibly beautiful and almost unreal as Virginia herself.
Left without money, Poe tries to publish, and is saved from starvation by the fee for the short story “The Manuscript Found in a Bottle,” published in the Saturday Visitor magazine in 1833. Later, Poe wrote short stories and worked for various publications as a journalist and editor.
Virginia's death in 1847 was a blow from which he never recovered and died mysteriously in 1849.
The work of Edgar Allan Poe is contradictory: “romantic influences and extremely rationalistic creative theory and practice; “aristocratic” isolation and pronounced features of “Americanism”, images of otherworldly ideal beauty and artistic providence” 4 are its main features.
As mentioned above, American romanticism is characterized by optimism. At first glance, Edgar Allan Poe falls outside of this definition. If a romantic poet should be unhappy, a dissident, a brawler, a brute - According to them, he was. And a romantic must be incomprehensible to his contemporaries. And he was. Poe “returned” to America as a poet and writer after his death and in a roundabout way, through Europe.
His work is characterized by an irrepressible fantasy, and a morbid fantasy; he even seems too mystical a writer at first glance. However, if we take a closer look at his work, we will see that in fact his mysticism receives a more or less rational explanation, through painful states of the psyche and consciousness into which the hero enters due to illness or intoxication.
His prose was the prose of a romantic poet, the requirements for it were the same as for poetry, so mystery and enigma were a prerequisite. Prose has become the realm of fantasy. But everything supernatural is subject to harsh logic, the mysterious is overgrown with carefully selected details. For the impossible, a pattern is established. “The most implausible plot, the frightening and mysterious atmosphere, the terrible events in his short stories are supported by such real, vitally truthful details and details that they create the impression of the real” 5. Many works are written in the form of a philosophical mystery, explicit or hidden, they seem to be broadcasting about what -that knowledge that can only be granted to the poetic imagination.

American literature began with the novella. A short story is “a small genre of epic, a short story in prose, distinguished by a sharp plot, often paradoxical, compositional precision, and a lack of descriptiveness” 6. And it was with the short story that the recognition of American literature began as an independent literature, having the right to exist and capable of confirming it. Edgar Poe is one of the founders of the short story genre in American literature; he can rightfully be called one of the fathers of American literature. “By the turn of the century in America, a somewhat canonical form of the story had already developed - an action-packed short story, full of dynamism, with an unexpected ending in which all the power of the narrative is concentrated. Often a short story is built on the contrast between content and ending. All these features, which can be called stable features of the genre, were defined and artistically demonstrated by Edgar Poe” 7. In Edgar Poe’s definition of the essence of the short story as a genre, the generic feature of the short story – novelty – retains its meaning. Only the qualitative content of the concept of “novelty” is somewhat transformed in connection with the peculiarities of the romantic worldview. The element of exclusivity comes to the fore. For romantics, the new is identical to the exceptional, unusual, and through it the romantic tries to understand reality. In Edgar Allan Poe's novella, the focus is always on the exceptional situation around which everything revolves. Moreover, Poe expands the sphere of the exceptional by depicting pathological states of the psyche, “this determines the content of the effect, the requirements for which form the basis of the theory of Edgar Poe’s short story.”8 For Poe, the plot is not so important as the atmosphere, the general emotional intensity, and novelty in them.
Conventionally, Edgar Poe’s short stories can be divided into two groups: “logical” short stories, where the novelty and sharpness of the plot lie precisely in logical riddles (it was these short stories that formed the foundation of the detective genre), and “Gothic” or “fantastic”. It was in them that the unique aesthetics of Poe’s work was most fully expressed. The basis of this aesthetics is a deep and specific perception of death. Death is an ominous figure constantly standing behind the poet’s shoulder, a symbol not only of the end of life, but also of suffering and pain. Poe's category of the terrible is inextricably linked with this special, personal perception of death. Poe’s terrible is not otherworldly horror, but the inner world of man, the pain of his soul and suffering from disharmony and emptiness.
But at the same time, Poe’s aesthetics is in a certain sense optimistic, because death for him does not mean the irrevocable end of everything that we see, for example, in the short story “The Oval Portrait.”
The world of Edgar Poe’s “Gothic” short stories is populated by ghosts, an atmosphere of fear dominates here, everything is permeated with decay. In the short story “The Oval Portrait,” the action takes place in an old abandoned castle, which “was gloomy and majestic... the decoration here was rich, but ancient and dilapidated,” in the room where the nameless hero of the short story was located, the bed was with a heavy canopy of black velvet. Mystery appears from the very first words - and not because something incomprehensible and strange is happening, no. The beginning of the story is quite prosaic: the hero was sick and wounded, and his servant found him refuge in a deserted abandoned castle. The illness does not let go of the hero, he suffers from a fever and is forced to take opium in order to somehow alleviate his suffering. This is the first part of the story, like an introduction. The novella itself consists of two parts of different sizes.
The writer is not interested in intrigue, he is curious about something else - the “undercurrent of thought”, not circumstances, but the “philosophy of circumstances”, not objects, but the shadows of objects. We see all this in the short story “Oval Portrait”. Poe's fantasy has no boundaries, but it is a painful fantasy. The beginning of the story, although full of dark colors and images, is quite prosaic and there is nothing supernatural in it, despite the fact that there are all the prerequisites for this. The situation is presented in such a way that the reader is constantly waiting in suspense for the appearance of this supernatural, and the author gradually leads the reader to the phenomenon of the otherworldly. The otherworldly is a traditional image for Edgar Allan Poe’s work - as soon as the hero takes opium and his consciousness approaches a borderline state, the play of light from many burning candles reveals to him a portrait in an oval gilded frame. And here is the culmination of the action, because the plot was the hero’s acceptance of opium and, as a consequence, an altered state of consciousness of the hero, in which he becomes most receptive to the touch of the eternal.
The portrait depicts a beautiful young girl - like all of Poe’s heroines, she is beautiful with an inhumanly ghostly, heavenly beauty. Moreover, the artist’s art is so great that the hero is even frightened by this portrait - it seems so alive. The girl’s shoulders, chest and head seem to protrude from the shadows, as if she is looking at the nameless hero of the story from the other world - yes, however, maybe that’s how it is? After all, what follows is the denouement, the second part of the story, in which we learn the story of the portrait - mysterious and frightening. The denouement also conveys the central idea of ​​the short story about the great power of art, capable of immortalizing through death: “The magic lay in the extraordinary living expression with which I was at first amazed, and in the end confused, depressed, and frightened. I no longer had the strength to see the sadness hidden in the smile of half-open lips, and the genuinely bright shine of fearfully dilated pupils.” The portrait appeared before the hero alive and real, much more real than everything that surrounded him. But (as always in his short stories) Edgar Allan Poe does not assert anything on his own - we see what is happening through the eyes of the hero, immersed in a borderline state of consciousness due to fever and opium. Here, as is very often the case with Poe, there is an element of autobiography, and not even a very hidden one - it is known that the writer himself often smoked opium, therefore, the symptoms of this condition were familiar to him. Poe does not scare the reader with truly “Gothic horrors,” as the European romantics, especially Hoffmann, did; no, his horrors do not come from somewhere outside, but lie within the person himself, in his fantasy and imagination, under the influence of illness or drugs, creating monsters. Poe is too rationalistic for a romantic, but this makes him no less “Gothic” than the same Hoffmann. In the “Oval Portrait” we see not the appearance of people from the other world in the world, but an echo of the catastrophe of consciousness, which was much more clearly shown in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The illusion of authenticity fostered by first-person narration does not mean that Poe actually wants to tell us what we at first think he is saying. He leaves the right to decide what is reliable and what is not shown in what is shown - they say, “believe it or not.” It is not so important to the writer himself how much we believe him; it is important to him whether we hear what he really wants to tell us. Uncertainty, uncertainty and mystery begin to accumulate from the very beginning, and the denouement comes at the end. Edgar Allan Poe needs the terrible, the unusual in order to introduce the reader into a state of horror and thereby “tear him out of everyday integrity and make him shudder from contact with the world of eternity, with the “supremacy of novelty” of it” 9. This contact is in the short story “The Oval Portrait” "happens in the second part.
The second part of the short story is three times smaller in volume than the first, and is something like an insert story, a short story within a short story. At the same time, this is organically combined with the general property of Poe’s short stories, in the composition of which the last paragraph is the key to the entire work, reveals the author’s intent, and formalizes the idea. The hero, fascinated and frightened by the appearance of a living portrait, leafs through a notebook in which the paintings are described and their stories are told. Together with the hero and in his perception, we learn the secret of the portrait.
The denouement comes, and the reader touches the world of eternity. The artist who painted the portrait madly loved his art, but he also madly loved his young wife. And these two feelings were mixed in his mind. In a supernatural way, without noticing it himself, he took away the earthly, mortal life from his beloved and gave her eternal youth on canvas: “the colors that he applied to the canvas, he took away from the one who sat in front of him and became paler and more transparent hour by hour " That is why the portrait was alive - the whole life of the person from whom the portrait was painted went into the image captured on the canvas. Here we again encounter the idea of ​​the horror of a lonely soul, the discord between the harmony of reason and feelings, which is endemic to Poe’s work, expressed in Poe’s characteristic opposition of life and death, love and art, and the idea of ​​“envious,” “vengeful” death, always standing behind the creator’s shoulder. . No matter how ambiguous the figure of death is for Poe, its main semantic content is the cruel “never.” This doom, however, is also imaginary - after all, the beauty of the artist’s nameless wife has not disappeared anywhere, she is immortal, because she was given from above, as well as art, thanks to which there is no death. The tragic key point of the novella is actually optimistic: death, having won in the fleeting world of the flesh, lost the battle in the imperishable world of art: “And then the artist said: “But is this really death?”

1- M. Anastasyev “Budivnychi (American romanticism)” // Vikno in the world, 1999 No. 4, p. 33
2- ibid.
3- ibid.
4- Eyshiskina N. Edgar Poe, his life and work // Questions of literature, 1963, No. 10, p. 206
5- Gordeeva L.V. Lock yourself in the dark depths of information. Edgar Po // Foreign literature in the beginning, 1997, No. 3, p. 22
6- Modern dictionary-reference book on literature. M. 1999, p. 259
7- Akhmedova U. Edgar Poe - master of the short story // Soviet Dagestan, 1980, No. 5, p. 69
8- ibid., p. 70
9- Nefedova T. Some features of plot situations in E. Poe’s short stories // Problems of poetics and history of literature, Saransk, 1973, p. 248

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Edgar Allan Poe

Oval portrait

The castle, which my valet dared to break into so that I, stricken with a serious illness, would not have to spend the night in the open air, was one of those heaps of gloom and pomp that frown in life among the Apennines as often as in the imagination of Mrs. Radcliffe. Apparently, he was left for a short time and very recently. We stayed in one of the smallest and least luxurious apartments. He was in a remote tower of the building. Its rich antique decoration is extremely dilapidated. On the tapestry-covered walls hung numerous and varied weapons, together with an unusually large number of inspired paintings of our day in golden frames covered with arabesques. I felt a deep interest in these paintings, hanging not only on the walls, but also in the endless corners and niches inevitable in a building of such bizarre architecture, perhaps caused by the fever that was beginning to develop within me; so I asked Pedro to close the heavy shutters—it was already evening—to light all the candles in the tall candelabra at the heads of my bed, and to open the fringed curtain of black velvet as wide as possible. I wished this so that I could devote myself, if not to sleep, then at least to the contemplation of the paintings and the study of the volume found on the pillow and dedicated to their analysis and description.

For a long, long time I read - and looked closely, intently. The swift, blissful hours flew by, and it was deep midnight. I didn’t like the way the candelabra stood, and, stretching out my hand with difficulty so as not to disturb my sleeping valet, I placed the candelabra so that the light fell better on the book.

But this had a completely unexpected effect. The rays of countless candles (there were a lot of them) illuminated the niche of the room, hitherto immersed in the deep shadow cast by one of the canopy pillars. Therefore, I saw a brightly illuminated picture that I had not noticed at all before. It was a portrait of a young, just blossoming girl. I quickly looked at the portrait and closed my eyes. Why I did this was not clear to me at first. But while my eyelids remained drooping, I mentally searched for the reason. I wanted to gain time for reflection - to make sure that my vision had not deceived me - to calm and suppress my fantasy for the sake of a more sober and confident look. Only a few moments passed, and I again looked intently at the picture.

Now I could not and did not want to doubt that I was seeing correctly, for the first ray that hit the canvas seemed to drive away the sleepy numbness that had taken over my senses, and at once returned me to wakefulness.

The portrait, as I already said, depicted a young girl. It was just a full-length image, done in what is called a vignette style, much like the style of heads Sally favored. Hands, chest and even golden hair disappeared imperceptibly into the vague but deep shadow that formed the background. The frame was oval, heavily gilded, covered with Moorish ornaments. As a work of art, nothing could be more beautiful than this portrait. But neither its execution nor the imperishable beauty of the image depicted could so suddenly and strongly excite me. There was no way I could mistake him, half asleep, for a living woman. I immediately saw that the features of the drawing, the manner of painting, the frame would instantly force me to reject such an assumption - would not allow me to believe it even for a single moment. I remained in intense thought for perhaps a whole hour, reclining and not taking my eyes off the portrait. Finally, having comprehended the true secret of the effect produced, I leaned back on the pillows. The picture absolutely fascinated me life-likeness an expression that first startled me and then left me confused, depressed and afraid. With deep and reverent reverence I returned the candelabra to its original place. No longer seeing what had so deeply moved me, I eagerly grabbed the volume containing descriptions of the paintings and their history. Having found the number under which the oval portrait was listed, I read the following unclear and strange words:

“She was a maiden of rare beauty, and her gaiety was equal to her charm. And the hour marked by evil fate was when she saw the painter and fell in love with him and became his wife. He, obsessed, stubborn, harsh, was already engaged - to Painting; she, a maiden of the rarest beauty, whose gaiety was equal to her charm, all light, all smile, playful like a young doe, hated only Painting, her rival; she was afraid only of the palette, brushes and other powerful instruments that deprived her of contemplation of her lover. And she was horrified when she heard the painter express his desire to paint a portrait of his young wife. But she was meek and obedient and sat for many weeks in a high tower, where only light streamed from above onto the pale canvas. But he, the painter, was intoxicated by his work, which lasted from hour to hour, from day to day. And he, obsessed, unbridled, gloomy, indulged in his dreams; and he could not see that the spiritual strength and health of his young wife were melting away from the eerie light in the lonely tower; she was fading, and everyone noticed it except him. But she smiled and smiled, without complaining, for she saw that the painter (famous everywhere) drew a burning rapture from his work and worked day and night in order to capture the one who loved him so much and yet became more dejected and weaker every day. Indeed, some who saw the portrait whispered about the resemblance as a great miracle, evidence of both the artist’s gift and his deep love for the one whom he depicted with such unsurpassed skill. But finally, when the work was nearing completion, outsiders were no longer allowed into the tower; for in the heat of work the painter fell into a frenzy and rarely took his eyes off the canvas even to look at his wife. And he doesn't wished to see that the shades applied to the canvas were taken away from the cheeks of the woman sitting next to him. And, when many weeks had passed and all that remained was to put one stroke on the lips and one half-tone on the pupil, the spirit of the beauty flared up again, like a flame in a lamp. And then the brush touched the canvas, and the halftone was laid; and for just one moment the painter froze, spellbound by his creation; but the next, still not looking up from the canvas, he trembled, turned terribly pale and, exclaiming in a loud voice: “Yes, this is truly Life itself!”, suddenly turned to his beloved: - She was dead!

"The Oval Portrait"

translated from English by K. D. Balmont

Egli e vivo e parlerebbe se non osservasse la rigola del silentio *.

The inscription under one Italian portrait of St. Bruno.

* He is alive, and he would have spoken if he had not observed the rule of silence.

My fever was persistent and prolonged. All means that could be obtained in this wilderness near the Apennines were exhausted, but without any results. My servant and my only comrade in the secluded castle was too excited and too inexperienced to decide to let me bleed, which, however, I had already lost too much in the battle with the bandits. I also could not with a calm heart let him go to look for help somewhere. Finally, unexpectedly, I remembered a small bundle of opium, which lay along with tobacco in a wooden box: in Constantinople I acquired the habit of smoking tobacco along with such a medicinal admixture. Pedro handed me the box. After rummaging around, I found the desired drug. But when it came to the need to separate the proper part, I was overcome with thought. When smoking, it made almost no difference how much was consumed. I usually filled the pipe halfway with opium and tobacco, and mixed both - half and half. Sometimes, after smoking this whole mixture, I did not experience any special effect; sometimes, having barely smoked two-thirds, I noticed symptoms of a brain disorder that were even threatening and warned me to abstain. True, the effect produced by opium, with a slight change in quantity, was completely alien to any danger. Here, however, the situation was completely different. I had never taken opium internally before. I have had cases where I had to take laudanum and morphine, and regarding these drugs I would have no reason to hesitate. But opium in its pure form was unknown to me. Pedro knew no more about this than I did, and thus, being in such critical circumstances, I was in complete uncertainty. Nevertheless, I was not particularly upset by this and, having reasoned, decided to take opium gradually. The first dose should be very limited. If it turns out to be invalid, I thought, it will be possible to repeat it; and this can continue until the fever subsides, or until a beneficial dream comes to me, which has not visited me for almost a whole week. Sleep was a necessity, my feelings were in a state of some kind of intoxication. It was precisely this vague state of mind, this dull intoxication, that undoubtedly prevented me from noticing the incoherence of my thoughts, which was so great that I began to talk about large and small doses, without previously having any definite scale for comparison. At that moment I had absolutely no idea that the dose of opium, which seemed unusually small to me, could in fact be unusually large. On the contrary, I am well aware that with the most imperturbable self-confidence I determined the quantity required for intake in relation to the whole piece at my disposal. The portion that I finally swallowed, and swallowed fearlessly, was undoubtedly a very small part of the entire quantity in my hands.

The castle, into which my servant decided to enter by force rather than allow me, exhausted and wounded, to spend the whole night in the open air, was one of those gloomy and majestic buildings of masses that have so long frowned among the Apennines, not only in the imagination of Mrs. Radcliffe , but also in reality. Apparently it was abandoned for a while and quite recently. We settled into one of the smallest and least luxuriously furnished rooms. She was in a secluded tower. The furnishings in it were rich, but worn out and ancient. The walls were upholstered and hung with various types of military armor, as well as a whole host of very stylish modern paintings in rich gold frames with arabesques. They hung not only on the main parts of the wall, but also in numerous corners that the strange architecture of the building made necessary - and I began to look at these pictures with a feeling of deep interest, perhaps due to my beginning delirium; so I ordered Pedro to close the heavy shutters - for it was already night - to light the candles in the tall candelabra that stood by the bed near the pillows, and to completely draw back the black velvet curtains with fringes that enveloped the bed itself. I decided that if I couldn’t sleep, I would at least look at these paintings one by one and read the small volume that lay on the pillow and contained a critical description of them.

For a long, long time I read and looked at the creations of art with admiration, with reverence. The wonderful moments quickly fled away, and the deep hour of midnight crept up. The position of the candelabra seemed inconvenient to me, and, with difficulty stretching out my hand, I avoided the unwanted need for me to wake up my servant, and myself rearranged it so that the sheaf of rays fell more fully on the book.

But my movement produced a completely unexpected effect. The rays of numerous candles (for indeed there were many of them) now fell into the niche, which had previously been shrouded in a deep shadow falling from one of the bedposts. In this way, in the brightest light, I saw a picture that I had completely missed before. It was a portrait of a young girl just developing into full womanhood. I quickly glanced at the picture and closed my eyes. Why I did this was not clear to me at first. But while my eyelashes remained closed, I began to feverishly think why I closed them. This was an instinctive movement, in order to gain time - to make sure that my vision did not deceive me - to calm down and subordinate my imagination to more sober and accurate observation. A few moments later I again fixed my gaze on the painting.

Now there was not the slightest doubt that I was seeing clearly and correctly; for the first bright flash of candles that illuminated this canvas seemed to dispel that drowsy stupor that had taken possession of all my senses, and immediately returned me to real life.

As I said, it was a portrait of a young girl. Only the head and shoulders - in the style of a vignette, technically speaking; many of the strokes were reminiscent of Sölly’s style in his favorite heads. The arms, chest, and even the ends of the radiant hair imperceptibly merged with the vague deep shadow that formed the background of the entire picture. The frame was oval, luxuriously gilded and filigree, in the Moorish taste. Considering the picture as a creation of art, I found that nothing could be more beautiful than it. But it was not the performance itself or the immortal beauty of the face that I was struck so suddenly and so strongly. Of course, I could not possibly think that my fantasy, evoked from a state of half-asleep, was too vividly tuned, and that I mistook the portrait for the head of a living person. I immediately saw that the features of the drawing, its vignette character, and the quality of the frame, should have destroyed such a thought at first glance - should have protected me even from a momentary illusion. Thinking persistently about this, I remained, perhaps for a whole hour, half sitting, half lying, fixing my gaze on the portrait. Finally, having had my fill of the hidden mystery of artistic effect, I leaned back on the bed. I realized that the charm of the picture lay in the extraordinary vitality of expression, which, at first astonishing me, then confused, conquered, and horrified me. With a feeling of deep and respectful fear, I moved the candelabra to its original place. Having thus removed from view the cause of my deep excitement, I eagerly found a volume where the pictures were discussed and the history of their origin was described. Opening it to the page where the oval portrait was described, I read a vague and bizarre story: “She was a girl of the most rare beauty, and was as beautiful as she was cheerful. And the hour was ill-fated when she saw and fell in love with the artist, and became his wife. Passionate, completely devoted to his studies, and strict, he almost had a bride in his art; she was a girl of the most rare beauty, and was as beautiful as she was cheerful: all - laughter, all - a radiant smile, she was playful and playful as a young doe: she loved and cherished everything she touched: she hated only Art, which competed with her: she was afraid only of the palette and brush and other intolerable instruments that took her beloved away from her. It was terrible news for this woman to hear that the artist wanted to paint a portrait of the newlywed herself, but she was humble and obedient, and she sat resignedly for whole weeks in a high and dark room located in a tower, where the light, sliding, streamed only from above onto the canvas. But he, the artist, put all his genius into the work, which grew and was created, from hour to hour, from day to day. And he was a passionate, and whimsical, crazy man, lost in his soul in his dreams; and he did not want to see that the pale light, flowing so gloomily and gloomily into this tower, was consuming the gaiety and health of the newlywed, and everyone saw that she was fading away, but not he. And she smiled and smiled, and did not utter a word of complaint, for she saw that the artist (whose fame was great) found fiery and burning pleasure in his work, and day and night he tried to create on the canvas the face of the one who loved him so much, who day by day became more and more languid and pale. Indeed, those who saw the portrait spoke in a quiet voice about the resemblance as a powerful miracle, and as proof not only of the artist’s creative power, but also of his deep love for the one he created so wonderfully. But finally, when the work began to draw to a close, no one could find access to the tower anymore; because the artist, who devoted himself to his work with self-forgetfulness and madness, almost did not take his eyes off the canvas, almost did not even look at his wife’s face. And he did not want to see that the colors that he had spread across the canvas had been removed from the face of the one who was sitting near him. And when the long weeks had passed, and only a little remained to be completed, one stroke around the mouth, one sparkle on the eye, the soul of this woman flared up again, like a dying lamp that had burned out to the end. And now, a stroke has been laid, and now, a sparkle has been laid; and for a moment the artist stood, overcome with delight, before the work which he himself had created; but immediately, still without taking his eyes off, he trembled and turned pale, and, full of horror, exclaiming loudly: “But this is Life itself!”, He quickly turned around to look at his beloved: “She was dead!”

Edgar Allan Poe was the very first professional American author. Before him, no writer had tried to live by his craft. He endlessly edited and rewrote his texts, so every word in Poe's stories is at least the result of a third or fourth edit. He knew the value of art very well. Of course, if you do not read it in the original, you will lose a lot of pleasure from reading the story “The Oval Portrait”. A brief summary of it will allow you to notice that the work is built according to the “story within a story” scheme, unusual for that time.

Plot

The narrator, being wounded, finds himself in a chateau abandoned by people. The one on whose behalf the story is told cannot be considered a completely reliable source, since he feels unwell, is tormented by a fever, and reality seems a little distorted. There are many decorations and paintings in the house. The narrator finds a notebook that describes the history of the creation of many paintings. Suddenly he draws attention to the portrait of a beautiful girl-woman, who for a moment seems to him absolutely alive, and not drawn. The summary of the story “The Oval Portrait” that you are reading will allow you to penetrate into the mystery of the portrait.

Who is this girl? The narrator learns about this from the notebook. The girl painted on canvas was a girl of rare beauty, distinguished by her great cheerfulness and energy. She married an artist out of love, who created an oval portrait depicting her. The summary does not allow us to describe in detail the features of how impressive the artist’s creation looked. The creator paid a huge price for it. But more on this a little later.

The artist is not just a genius, he is a dedicated genius who devotes long hours to his craft. He loves him no less than his young wife. But over time, she develops an aversion to the artist’s work and his tools, because the woman has to compete for her husband’s love with his brush and paints. Although, in general, negative feelings are not typical for her - she is naturally kind and cheerful.

What else is described in the story “The Oval Portrait”? The summary also includes a description of the history of the creation of the portrait. One day, not at all wonderful, the husband wants his wife to pose for him to create a spectacular picture. She doesn't like the idea. But she is obedient and loves her husband, and therefore agrees to spend long hours in the dark tower, where he decided to draw her. By the way, it is in this tower that the wounded narrator of the main story spends the night, reading the story of the creation of the portrait.

When it is almost finished, the artist and his wife lock themselves in the tower and try to complete it with dignity. He is so obsessed with his passion for drawing that he does not notice that his wife is looking worse and worse. The portrait becomes bright and full of life, while the wife turns pale and weaker. He completes his work and exclaims, “This is life itself.” And suddenly he realizes that his wife died when he made the last movement of his brush.

This is how Poe’s work “The Oval Portrait” ends. A summary cannot convey all the language and details, so you should read it in full, especially since the story is not large in size. This work is characterized by a frequent motive for Poe - the destruction of a loved one. The story “Oval Portrait” tells about the betrayal of life and love in the name of art.