Nostalgic impulse : Marc Chagall’s trilogy of illustrated books in France

Abstract

This research takes Marc Chagall’s three illustrated books during

his second stay in France as the example to explore the possibility of

the visual realization of nostalgic ideas and the interaction between

words and images. These trilogy of illustrated books, namely Les Ames Mortes (Dead Souls) by Nikolai Gogol, Les Fables de la Fontaine and La Bible, could be discussed respectively but would achieve a much wider dimension and interpretation when viewed as a whole. Completed between the Wars, this trilogy convincingly exudes a sense of nostalgia. It is according to the two categories of nostalgia suggested by Svetlana Boym that I develop my interpretation of Chagall’s works. In the restorative nostalgia, this trilogy points to the return of a certain place which corresponds to a place central to the artist’s personal backgrounds. In the reflective sense, the theme of the trilogy reflects the spiritual longing of different human conditions—of being intuitively responsive to one’s desires, of being naive as a child, and of being spiritually connected to the divine existence. This research therefore aims to highlight Chagall’s illustrations as an independent realm of art, and subsequently, to examine this realm of art with modern theories for interdisciplinary studies.