It was Russian twentieth-century battle painter Vasily V. Vereshchagin, perhaps the only painter who not just perceived art and text in close unity, but painted his works as a literary text (he named his paintings ‘poems’; painted his works so that they are united by a single plot as a kind of movie or, rather, like the changing images-diapositives, which appeared at that time; signed his paintings using quatrains or deployed literary text at engaged frames). So, to understand Vereshchagin’s painting means to be able to ‘read’ his pictures. The subject of my article is such ‘reading’ Vereshchagin’s battle paintings as holistic text. Using historical-genetic, formal and stylistic, semiotic and hermeneutic, iconological, and comparative methods, I examine Vereshchagin’s pictorial techniques and creative method studying cases of two cycles of paintings, such as Turkestan one and dedicated Russian-Turkish war of 1877-78 from State Tretyakov Gallery. In my article, I show ‘reading’ Vereshchagin’s battle paintings means knowing its ‘alphabet’, i.e. specific techniques of its pictorial and plastic language. It is important to take into account what composition artist chooses, why he uses certain format, how he forms rhythm, proportions, ratio of grounds of pictures and their characters, and distribution of the color patches. Adequate perception of each picture and series of paintings takes place when we understand the meaning of each key artistic technique (‘word’) and when we can put them into specific plastic images (‘phrases’). In my article, I step-by-step ‘read’ the most significant paintings of Vereshchagin’s Turkestan and Russian-Turkish War circles. I show their compositions are in epic or sometimes poetic genre. Using composition features of his paintings, artistic technique (including creation of paired paintings), as well as text-epigraphs on the engaged frames (combining meaning of the image and the text), Vereshchagin created historical narrative in which text and image are mutually correlated not on the illustrative basis, but by the complementary principle. I conclude verbal text gives the momentum to plastic image; static images get extra dynamism due to specific Vereshchagin’s artistic language. This one is specific, dramatic, powerful, and rich; it creates atmosphere of immediate presence of the viewer on the battlefield, and thus discloses to him tragic non-parade side of war that has great humanistic anti-war potential.

В статье освещается один из аспектов в изучении живописи русского художника XIX в. В.В. Верещагина «прочтение» картины как текста. Сам мастер называл свои полотна «поэмами» и украшал их надписями на рамах, по аналогии с эпиграфами к литературным произведениям. Изобразительный язык Верещагина, с помощью которого он общается со зрителем, имеет свою специфику и особенные средства воспроизведения. Постижение этого языка делает возможным понимание драматургии батальных сюжетов художника. На примере некоторых картин из собрания Третьяковской галереи автор статьи показывает, как можно «читать» картину и комментировать ее как повествовательный дискурс.