Volume 11, 2013 year

The article reviews the relationship between the rationalism, inherent in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, and the Russian Orthodox traditon. The author raises the question whether it is true that in the Russian literature of the 18th century the Old Testament's God (and, therefore, the Law) prevails, as it was postulated by Y. Lotman and other researchers, or whether the Old Testament texts themselves seen by Russian writers through the perspective of New Testament's Grace due to such dominant concepts of the Russian culture as sobornost, paskhalnost, and Christocentrism. Thus, in the Russian Orthodox tradition the Psalter does not represent the God of the Old Testament, but rather it shows the Christianized understanding of the God in the New Testament. In the cultural unconscious mind of a Russian person, which had a strong influence on the individual creative work of our poets, the Psalter is an integral part of the very Orthodox Church, the Orthodox divine service. When analyzing the versification of psalms by Russian poets of the 18th century, one should not ignore this situation. This article demonstrates the influence of the Orthodox tradition on the poetics of a fable as one of the most ancient genres.The author reconstructs the cultural context of the last decade of the 20th century and outlines new perspectives in the study of a transition period between the Russian Middle Ages and the early modern period.

Keywords: Christian tradition, Enlightenment ideology, sobornost, paschalnost, Christocentrism

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This article is devoted to a classic of the 16th century North Russian hagiography — The Life of Alexander Oshevensky, which is preserved as a large number of various copies and editions. The 19th-century materials recently found in the Russian archives enabled researchers to raise a question of the late period in the literary history of this Life. Three editions of this piece of writing created in the 1820's and 1830's by Tikhvin Monastery's Archimandrite Hilarion (Kirillov), Alexander Svirsky Monastery's Archimandrite Barsanuphius (Morev) and Archbishop of Olonets Ignatius (Semyonov) are in the focus of this paper. The new editions were written with the intention to be published to glorify of St. Alexander across Russia, though respective petitions to the Most Holy Synod were not approved. This article detects sources of these editions and shows the pattern of processing of the initial texts. As the text analysis has shown, the 19th-century editions primarily developed the topoi of book learning and relationships between St. Alexander and his family. The Life used to be revised stylistically and compositionally, as well as supplemented with historical information. The published material is of interest for the research in poetics and topics of the Lieves of the Saints and their perception by the church writers of the 19th century.

Keywords: north Russian hagiography, poetics and topics of the Liеves of the Saints, reverence of Saints, church writers of the 19th century

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This article examines Vilhelm Kyukhelbekker's narrative prose of the first half of the 1820s. For the analysis we have chosen the most significant works of this period — his book of travel notes The Journey and the novel Ado. The study reveals the writer's attitude to Christianity and Christian values in his early period of work. In this research the axiological approach is used, as well as the methods of historical, typological, structural and semiotic study of literary texts. Studying The Journey, we performed a detailed analysis of the author's letters which describe the paintings by the artists of Flemish and Dutch schools, as well as German and Italian painters of the 17th and 18th centuries exhibited in the Dresden gallery. The writer prefers the paintings of biblical subjects to those of naturalistic everyday scenes. He pays special attention to the evangelical themes. He is attracted by Christ the child's divine nature and the heavenly purity, high humility of the Mother of God's image, and the fact that St. Sebastian is portrayed as joyfully suffering for Christ. Historical events of the novel Ado date back to the time of the Baltic peoples' forced Christianization by the Order of the Brothers of the Sword. Baltic peoples are trying to keep the faith of their ancestors and rebel against the cruel governor of the Order. The novel focuses particularly on one knight, Michael, who stood up for the oppressed and like Archangel Michael found himself on the cutting edge of Good and Evil. This character of the novel is connected with the idea of Christian sacrificial love and eternal spiritual life, which was very important for Kyukhelbekker. We concluded that even in his early prose Kyukhelbekker expressed the main spiritual and moral values of Christianity.

Keywords: Kyukhelbekker’s early prose, world perception issues, book of travel notes "The Journey" (1821), novel "Ado" (1824), Christian values

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Prayer in Alexander Pushkin's lyric poetry appears in its natural ecclesiological context. In his prayerful poems devoted to a woman the motif of turning Love into Divinity in the light of Christian understanding of Beauty plays the most important role. Pushkin's personal prayers are very close to the patristic idea. In his poem Akathist to Ekaterina Nikolaevna Karamzina Pushkin embodied the prayer-praising; in his poem I loved you — and love it may yet be Deep in my soul... he embodied the prayer-blessing; in his sonnet Madonna the reader can find benediction and in the poem To the Beauty (1832) one can feel the state of religious reverence. The heroine of these poems is considered to be a divine creature, a sacral image. In Pushkin's lyric poetry these profound evangelical ideas are renewed. The hymnologic genre and Christian divine service in his poems become obvious. The artistic embodiment of a prayer becomes possible with the help of an iconic word and image. A prayerful word in Pushkin's poems contributes to idealization of the form that evolves from emotional and sensual state to spiritual and ascetical world-view, from the artistic and figurative word to the iconic clarity.

Keywords: Alexander Pushkin's lyric poetry, Christian tradition, prayer, hymnologic genre, poetic Beauty

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The article deals with the Christian code of Alexander Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum, which is a style forming factor for the whole story, featuring a large thematic diversity. The genre of this book is similar to Old Russian pilgrimage stories. It includes an ethnographic sketch, a battle, Oriental and situational impressions of moving in space. All these are balanced with the biblical names and allusions, as well as the existential experience of the sacred. According to Pushkin, the Gospel is the foundation for real politics and an effective means of annexation of the Caucasus to the Russian Empire. Journey to Arzrum had an impact on the image of the war created by Leo Tolstoy in his War and Peace, as well as on the creation of such pilgrimage stories of the 20th century as A Journey to Armenia by Osip Mandelshtam and A Journey to Mount Athos by Boris Zaytsev.

Keywords: Gospel, historical concept, war, the Caucasus, border, subtext, style, series of essays, travel genre, pilgrimage story

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This article raises the question of the Old Russian sources of Alexander Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter and presents an attempt to identify the traditions of Ermolay-Erazmus’s The Tale of Peter and Fevronia in it. The main purpose of the research was to identify the parallelism between Pushkin’s novel and The Tale at the imaginative, narrative and thematic levels. Therefore, it was based on application of the comparative method. The main characters of both the books are compared in succession: Prince Peter and Peter Grinyov first, and then Fevronia and Masha Mironova. The results of the analysis lead to the conclusion that the male images reflect the spiritual evolution from being self-willed to obtaining Christian humility, and the key moment of the characters’ spiritual evolution is the meeting with wise virgins, etc. As far as the female images are concerned, the key parallel between them is the praise of their wisdom at the end of both stories. Thus, the material of the research enables us to speak about the traditions of The Tale of Peter and Fevronia being preserved in Pushkin’s last novel.

Keywords: family values, Old Russian literature traditions, the problem of responsibility

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Pushkin's overcoming of death is represented by two aspects of his work: stoical Christian acceptance of death and identification of immortality of a soul with creative heritage. A special role in understanding of this issue is given to the Kamennoostrovsky cycle of poems. Choosing the semantic counter-poles of the cycle, Pushkin opposes absolute spiritual death (Italian Imitation) against redemptional death which introduces people to Eternal life (Temporal power). Poet’s final contemplation of his past ideals in the poem From Pindemonti shows the alteration of the ideological emphasis in his artistic consciousness: An antique vector is transformed into pure aesthetics, whereas his fear of death is relieved by Christian values. These ideas reach their apotheosis in the poem Exegi Monumentum (I have erected a monument to myself), which accomplishes Pushkin’s spiritual quest of his final years, though it is not a part of his Kamennoostrovsky cycle of poems. It has been pointed out that Pushkin's bequest/manifesto themes and motifs first appeared in his Lyceum works and can be traced throughout all his creative periods.

Keywords: death, poet, memory, immortality, Christian teaching, overcoming death

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The article studies the function of Russian folk speech and its evangelical implication in Nikolai Gogol's poetics. Folk proverbs and parables is the key source of national identity in Gogol’s aesthetics, which should inspire all Russian poets. The paper asserts that the proverbial method of generalization is one of the most significant principles of typification in Gogol's novel Dead Souls. The author expresses the essence of this or that phenomenon, a situation or a human type using imaginative pictures and traits of characters. The more generalized form they take, the more they resemble the traditional folk and poetic formulas. The article also reveals the hidden message of a Russian proverb Russians are good at thinking in hindsight (“Russkiy chelovek zadnim umom krepok”). This characteristic of the Russian mind is the one with which Gogol connects the great destiny of Russia. At the end of his first volume the author resorts to the allegorical form of a parable that plays a key role in the perception of the novel. Transforming into the generalized symbol, its characters accumulate the most significant generic features and qualities of Dead Souls’ characters. The grotesque images of Kifa Mokiyevich and Mokiy Kifovich help to look at the characters of the novel from every possible side, not from one side only that shows them as small-minded and worthles people. Gogol’s characters do not possess definitely disgusting and ugly qualities, which should be eliminated for the sake of people's improvement. Sobakevich's powerful physique and pragmatism, Plushkin's thrift, Manilov's meditativeness and cordiality, as well as Nozdryov's valor and energy are not bad qualities at all and do not deserve condemnation. However, all of them as Gogol used to say are carried to extremes and take perverse and exaggerated forms.

Keywords: Gospel, poetics, Gogol, proverbs and sayings, parable, folk speech

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The article examines literary and aesthetic views of a wellknown theologian and church historian Alexander Ivantsov-Platonov. The study traces crucial milestones of his scientific and creative biography which can not be always found in reference books. His work About positive and negative attitude towards life in Russian literature published in a Slavophil periodical Russkaya Beseda is the main subject of this study. The ideas stated in this article develop Slavophiles’ aesthetic programme. On the one hand, Ivantsov-Platonovs's conception of positive and negative literary directions repeats some of Konstantin Aksakovs' ideas. On the other hand, however, the church publicist develops the Slavophiles’ theory with new concepts of Russian literature. This article studies the problem of correlation between Christian values and secular art as it was seen by Ivantsov-Platonov. It also analyzes his attitude to Dostoevsky's creative works. All Ivantsov-Platonov's contemporaries describe him as a soft man, tolerant to opposite views and opinions, and always ready to help “his neighbours”. The author of the article comes to a conclusion that Ivantsov-Platonov predicted the way Russian literature would develop. The works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky proved that he was right in his vision.

Keywords: Alexander Ivantsov-Platonov, positive and negative directions, the Slavophiles

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The author questions the perception of Ivan Turgenev as a “non- Christian writer” and studies the problem of the prodigal son motif functioning in a series of his novels. In his novels, Turgenev pictured different phases of the archetypal story, originating from the Gospel parable of the prodigal son. In the novel Rudin he depicted the phase of spiritual wanderings of the hero who had lost touch with his native land — Russia. In his next novels (Home of the Gentry, Fathers and Sons and Smoke), after leading his hero in circles and sending him back to his paternal home, Turgenev reconstructs the model of human behavior, represented in the parable, thereby recognizing the immutability of the idea formalized in the Gospel. The motif of the return to Russian land gets its completion in Turgenev's last novel Virgin Soil, in which the author paradoxically connects the Westernist idea with the Gospel imperative. Solomin, the son of a deacon, sent by his wise father out to Europe “to get education”, studies in England, masters the European knowledge and returns back “to his native land” to establish his own business in inland Russia. Thus, a series of Turgenev's novels, in which he portrayed different phases of social life, are interlinked with the motif of the prodigal son, who is represented by novels' main characters.

Keywords: Gospel motif, archetype, the prodigal son, Ivan Turgenev

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Dostoyevsky proposed a new conception of Man in the world literature. Critics have described such psychological discoveries of the writer as irrationalism, dualism, and underground. Many aspects of his Christian anthropology remained beyond the attention of the researchers. In his conception of Man there are such essential concepts as the common pseudo-human (obshchechelovek) and the panhuman (vsechelovek). The common pseudo-human is a special type of a Russian man that appeared after the reforms of Peter the Great. Unlike the British, the Germans, the French, who maintain their nationality, the Russian “common pseudo-human” strives to be anyone but Russian. Being a common pseudo-human is to be an abstract European without roots and soil. Vsechelovek is a rare word in the Russian language. Nikolai Danilevsky used this word with a capital letter to call Christ (1869). Dostoyevsky used the word pan-human without capitalization to denote a perfect Christian. It expressed the inner sense of his Pushkin Memorial speech. It was Dostoyevsky who introduced the word panhuman in Russian literature and philosophy. Konstantin Leontiev did not understand the meaning of this word. He represented “the terrible, in his opinion, pan-human” as a common pseudo-human, European, liberal, and cosmopolitan. This mistaken substitution (obshchechelovek instead of vsechelovek) is typical for Russian literary and philosophical criticism of the 20th century. For Dostoevsky, each person carries the image of God. The verbs obrazit' (to restore the image) and obozhit' (to divinize) imply the restoration of the image of God and thereby the humanization of a person. To be Russian is to become pan-human (vsechelovek), Christian. Dostoyevsky’s hero carries all possible completeness of the Creator and the Creation.

Keywords: Christian anthropology, Dostoyevsky, Danilevsky, Leontiev, new categories, common pseudo-human (obshchechelovek), pan-human (vsechelovek)

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This article presents Dostoyevsky to readers as an author praising happiness and felicity. Having lived through deep sorrows he acquired insight into another dimension of life. Like a longing pathfinder, he states the unfeigned grace of life. “Life is a gift, life is mercy, and any minute may be the age of happiness”, – this is the essence of his great novels. People are not lonesome on Earth; they are bound by invisible threads. A loner may not succeed. One heart or one consciousness attracts another one like a magnet, as if claiming: thou art... Christ, with his Love and his Sacrifice, the greatest miracle on the Earth. It is impossible to be aware of Christ’s existence and not to be joyful. Dostoyevsky reveals one of the main principles of life: when you love someone and sacrifice yourself to this person you satisfy your aspiration for a beau ideal and feel like in heavens. In this article the author analyzes selected scenes of happiness in Dostoevsky’s novels: Arkady’s and his sister Liza’s admiration for the sacrifice of their father Versilov; Alyosha and Grushen’ka, saving each other instead of committing sins and transgressing moral standards; Alyosha’s dream about the Christ’s first miracle in Cana of Galilee; Stavrogin’s dream of the Golden Age of the blessed mankind... In Dostoyevsky’s tragic novel The Possessed (The Devils, or Demons) a reader faces an image of love – mutual, sacrificial, fulfilling, and blithe. There is probably nothing similar in the history of the world literature. One can eminently feel the interconnectedness of Dostoevsky’s heroes with another, higher world that penetrates into every aspect of their lives. All of his creatures are illumed by the light of other worlds. It is clear that there cannot be darkness, despair, or hopelessness in Dostoevsky’s works, because even in the hell full of demons there is a place for righteous people, luminous (as Nikolai Berdyaev called them) and capable of love and personal sacrifice that means that the light is still shining in the darkness, and the evil darkness did not envelop it.

Keywords: Dostoyevsky, joy, happiness, Christ, scenes, novel poetics

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During the summer of 1862 Dostoyevsky made his first trip abroad across Europe. This journey was reflected in his feuilleton Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), as well as in the memoirs and letters of the author and other people. In some cases one can describe the trip of Dostoyevsky not only day by day, but hour by hour. The literary chronotope is very different from the real journey. Dostoyevsky only designated the facts: he described his thoughts during travels, made occasional travel notes, recounted his Paris and London impressions and concealed his visit to Herzen and his philosophical dispute with Strakhov. There are no tourist descriptions in Winter Notes. The narrative is developed in two dimensions of time and space: in summer and winter, in Europe and Russia, in London–Paris and St. Petersburg, in “European” and “Russian” Europe. The key problem posed in Winter Notes is the problem of “the Russian attitude” to Europe, which is interpreted as the problem of the choice of Russia’s historical path. Dostoyevsky created a satirical image of bourgeois Europe. The author suggested an alternative to the principles of 1789. His pathos is determined by Christian sermon. Dostoyevsky hoped that the outcome of the Russian way was in adherence to the Sermon on the Mount.

Keywords: Dostoyevsky, Bakhtin, journey, essay, feuilleton, the poetics of the genre, chronotope, paradox, Christian sermon

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The article raises a question of Christian symbolism in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed (Demons). The introductory part identifies the purpose of a symbol in Christian poetics through the parallel with ancient symbolism. The author makes a conclusion that the functional role of a symbol in the ancient world and Christian tradition is different. Therefore, the ancient symbol involves a number of interrelated categories, such as fate, intuition or conjecture, inspiration, and predictions. Christian symbolism is based on the idea of redemption and moral innocence. Methodologically, the article is based on a cultural and historical approach, as well as on the comparative academic tradition. The overview of Dostoyevsky’s pre-materials for The Possessed (Demons) enables us to suggest the use of Christian symbolism in this novel. Hence, the objective of the study is to investigate a composition of images and symbols in this piece of writing, with a special focus on the image of a chronicler since the storyline of the novel is developed through his perception. We make a supposition that there are several levels of Gospel perception in the artistic vision or consciousness of the chronicler, that form the basis of the symbolical composition of the novel. The article sequentially examines the examples of Christian symbolism, including the connection of ideas, characters and storylines of the novel with the Gospel. Then it gives evidence and reasons for the thesis that the Gospel gives the characters of the novel the grounds for shaping their destiny.

Keywords: Gospel text, symbol, poetics, thematic and lexical parallelism, spiritual laws

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The question of catharsis was first brought up by Aristotle in his Poetics. Aristotle used to interpret catharsis in an extended sense. For him it could be tragic or musical, but it always meant purification or purgation as a dialogue between a poet and a spectator seen as one of the aims of art. In Dostoevsky’s thesaurus there is no such a category as catharsis, but there is this word’s equivalent in the Russian language: ochishchenie (which can be translated as purification). Purification through suffering is one of the key ideas of Dostoevsky’s works. He expressed this idea in his prose beginning with Notes from the House of the Dead, but it was first stated directly in the third chapter (entitled Environment) of A Writer’s Diary of 1873. Dostoyevsky contrasted the socialist doctrine of environment with the Christian idea of personal responsibility for our own and other people’s actions. Liberal journalists didn’t accept Dostoevsky’s idea of “purification through suffering” and met it with derision (e.g., L. K. Panyutin, A. G. Kovner, V. P. Burenin, A. S. Suvorin). Instead of understanding and a justifiable dispute, Dostoyevsky faced malediction and rudeness. Conservative critics, on the other hand, overlooked this episode of A Writer’s Diary. This idea started to be appreciated only in the 20th century, long after the writer’s death, and was developed in the works of S. Zweig, N. Berdyaev and others. Notwithstanding the fact that contemporary critics question the presence of catharsis in Dostoevsky’s prose, one should admit that it is one of the categories of his poetics. The purification through suffering is the essence of the aesthetic empathy between the author and his reader. It implies the meaning of his creative works.

Keywords: Aristotle, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, catharsis, purification through suffering, criticism, polemics, feuilleton

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The article examines the intertextual relations in the manuscript and in the printed text of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Raw Youth, using an example of the allusion to the Vasily Zhukovsky’s elegy A Country Churchyard and analyzing the specifics of its functioning in the context of the novel’s narration. The main objective of the work was to establish the internal trends of the author’s ideas’ development in the novel. The tasks were to investigate the problem of studying intertextual relations in the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (since the theoretical aspects of the problem were not specifically addressed in previous studies) and to analyze the literary material using the textual approach. The source text, which is important for the formation of intertextual relations, is examined not as an individual piece of writing but in the context of the The Raw Youth manuscripts that helps to clarify the nature of its artistic interpretation and the conjunction of folkloristic and biblical concepts in the novel.

Keywords: Dostoyevsky’s work, textual criticism, text poetics, intertext

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Dostoevsky was a writer who actively introduced literary criticism into his novels by adapting critical comments to the nature of the characters. The same principle of the novelization of criticism was used in his Diary of a Writer. Dostoevsky went beyond expressing his opinions about other people’s works, and used to develop “fictitious persons” of critics, to compose their dialogues, to carry on polemics with real and fantastic opponents. The novelization of literary criticism is natural in the poetics of the Diary of a Writer. In the Diary of a Writer of July-August 1877 Dostoevsky argues with Tolstoy about the eighth and the last part of the novel Anna Karenina, rejected by the publishers of The Russian Messenger and was soon published as a separate book. Dostoyevsky highly appreciated the literary value of the novel, the genius of its author, but did not accept his political assessments of the Russo-Turkish war. His polemics with Tolstoy is original: he levels criticism not at the author, but at the hero. Dostoevsky takes in the Christian pathos of Tolstoy, the didactic sense of the epigraph, but blames Levin for his isolation and turning away from Christ as well as for the fact that he refuses to empathize and help his neighbor in the name of abstract principles. Dostoevsky asks Tolstoy a rhetorical question which gives a new meaning to their polemics: what does the writer teach the readers? What does literature teach them about? The answer implies responsibility which the author of the Diary calls the author of Anna Karenina to. In the final dispute an unexpected effect arises: the polemics appear as a dialogue of two geniuses, in which the disagreement makes the opponents achieve consent in front of the truth of the people.

Keywords: Dostoyevsky, the Diary of a Writer, Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, the Russo-Turkish war of 1877—1878, polemics, dialogue, literary criticism, Christian ideal

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The article deals with Byzantine quotes in Konstantin Leontyev’s novel Odysseus of Polihroniades. The author regarded this novel to be the best of all his works. The Byzantine influence was discovered through analyzing the Athos regular readings including the typicon of the St. Panteleimon Monastery, where Konstantin Leontyev spent 18 months. It is emphasized that the text of the novel contains some of the Athos. The paper analyzes the topic of time recurrence, developed in the novel, which is different from the Christian conception of linear time. The article examines both the sacred text of regular readings and the quotes and reminiscences connected with the names of St. John Chrysostom and St. Isaac the Syrian. The article concludes that some elements of Leontyev’s future Doctrine of a New Eastern Culture are presented in his novel Odysseus of Polihroniades. The Byzantine quotes, therefore, help to understand the mechanism of the authors’ ideas implementation in the novel.

Keywords: Konstantin Leontyev, Odysseus of Polihroniades, Athos

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Chekhov was born in a very religious family and since early childhood became familiar with church practice. In the letters he wrote as a middle-aged man, he called himself an unbeliever. However, a lack of faith did not prevent him from using the Biblical words in his letters and works. This paper examines using the words from Acts and Epistles of the Apostles in Chekhov’s letters. We consider all the forms of this use: quotes, reminiscences, allusions, idioms of the New Testament’s origin, etc. The research enables us to evaluate the degree of Chekhov’s familiarity with Acts and Epistles of the Apostles, as well as the frequency and the context of his references to them. We also try to answer the question why Chekhov, being an unbeliever, uses the scriptural words so often, and we make a conclusion that scriptural words formed an integral part of his thesaurus. This, therefore, leads us to a conclusion that the researchers and readers of Chekhov need to know the Bible to understand the writer’s language.

Keywords: Anton Chekhov, Chekhov’s letters, the Bible, the New Testament, Acts of the Apostles, Epistles of the Apostles

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The article examines the genre clash of a prayer and stanzas in Alexander Blok’s poem A girl was singing in the church choir... (1905). Prayer is the main ecclesiastical source, shaping the poem’s lyric model. The genre canon of stanzas with the strophes detached substantially and compositionally, transforms the central musical theme into four scene-developments linked by dissonance. Each of the strophes in A girl was singing in the church choir... has its own semantic point (prayer – singings – illusion – enlightenment) and reveals a different content of the event, intensifies and develops the tragic theme of two worlds, intended and unintended substitutions, spiritual quest and time losses. Blok’s stanzas are poetic evidence of a modern man’s exit from a prayerful concentration. The model of “conflicting synthesis” of ecclesiastical and literary genres reflects the religious/mystical opposition in symbolism aesthetics and strengthens the tragic pathos of Blok’s lyric poetry.

Keywords: prayer, stanzas, genre, lyrics, tragic pathos, Alexander Blok

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The Battle of Kulikovo is one of the most significant events in Russian history. This article studies five poems by Alexander Blok and Sergey Orlov devoted to this battle. Alexander Blok's cycle of poems On the Field of Kulikovo prophetically predicts future changes in Russia. Sergey Orlov's poems devoted to this historical event can be seen as a certain indicator of his creative evolution. The image of the homeland, as well as the image of his wife (widow), both in Blok's and Orlov's poems originates from the image of the Mother of God. Images of a celestial body used by both poets are associated with military paraphernalia and arise from the evangelical images, while the warrior image is based on the evangelical image of brotherhood. Poetic experience of Alexander Blok and Sergey Orlov reveals Orthodox roots that nourish the entire Russian culture.

Keywords: an evangelical image, the Battle of Kulikovo, Sergey Orlov, Alexander Blok, image of the Motherland

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The article examines Christian images in war-themed poems of Nikolai Gumilyov's poems collection The Quiver (Kolchan). The author analyzes some peculiarities of chronotope, determines Christian categories which are significant for the interpretation of the war topic. The title of the book defines the subject and the role of the war-themed poems in the system of the entire collection. Connection between the title and the Old Testament images adds new meanings to the interpretation of the war topic. Chronotope images play an important role in the comprehension of the war theme. The present is related to the historical past and eternity: the man at war, implementing his destiny and mission, builds life in the context of history, God's will, becomes a part of the Creator's conception, finds a connection with eternity. Thus, the theme of the unity of the divine plan, purpose, man's connection with history is one of the key themes of the poems collection. Gumilyov presents the loss of destiny as a transitional state or illness. Healing is given by divine powers. Salvation is associated with the search for faith and the attainment of spiritual power, the knowledge of the destination. According to Christian tradition, any war is a misfortune, a terrible, painful phenomenon, but it can bring the atonement through suffering and strengthening of the soul. Nikolai Gumilyov praises heroic deeds, courage, honor, and self-sacrifice. War is a way to find faith and a right way for a Christian warrior poet.

Keywords: N. Gumilyov, chronotope, the war theme, Christian categories, a Christian warrior poet

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The article mainly raises a question about the representation of a character that we call "humble", his specific features, and the typological ties between the texts which are both within the framework of Russian national cultural tradition. The Testament of Vladimir Monomakh to his Children, written in the 12th century, presents an ideal image of a man — an Old Russian Prince. And in the medieval Russian booklore, liturgical originally, such an ideal character could be only humble - like its Gospel Archetype. The portrayal of Vladimir Monomakh is defined by the dominant idea of repentance, that brings forth a genre of "confession and self-evaluation" (as termed by Mikhail Bakhtin). The idea of the Last Judgment motivates the Prince's deeds and his axiological choice. The inner conflict is in Monomakh's realization of his sinfulness, of his inconformity to his Archetype. The resolution of this inner conflict lies in the principle of synergy, or, in other words, a free union between human's and God's will, which actually is the main typological characteristic of the image of a humble man. Gorkin's character in the novel Summer of the Lord is another perfectly positive character of Russian literature - a humble-type character (or a hagiographycally-idyllic supertype, by the definition of V. Khalizev). Gorkin is deep rooted in the Church, lives according to the Holy Tradition and this is what determines the type of his attitude towards the world. Like in Monomakh's Testament the whole narration of Shmelev’s novel is formed from the standpoint of the Last Judgment, and it is inseparably connected with the idea of meekness. For both Monomakh in his Testament and Gorkin in Shmelev’s Summer of the Lord, Christ is the Archetype of meekness and their life principle is to follow Christ's example. The narrative is also built on the principle of synergy. Due to the fact that both texts are included into the Holy Tradition context, there is typological similarity between the image of a humble man in the Old Russian text and the literature character in Ivan Shmelev’s novel.

Keywords: a character typology, Christianity, the church, tradition, meekness, synergy

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The attempts to build the typology of Shmelev's female images have been repeatedly made by researchers. However, we think that the author in his works and correspondence, relying on classic literature and questioning it at the same time, shapes his own whole unity, and his own unique female character — the "Shmelev's girl". So, the analysis of the poetics of several Shmelev's works (The Inexhaustible Cup, Mirage, A Foreigner, Nanny from Moscow and Heaven's Ways) using comparative, historical and inter-textual methods reveals their close interrelationship. The gallery of women's characters — from Anastasia to Darinka — represents the unique type of a woman — the so-called "Shmelev's girl", who, is on the one hand a pure and enlightened princess, a baby and a maiden with iconic world perception, extraordinary charming and feminine (sophistic), but, on the other hand, very powerful, totally devoted to her high spiritual ideals and capable of overcoming tragedies and trials of her own destiny.

Keywords: a type, tradition, Shmelev

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The article is devoted to one of the central episodes of Ivan Shmelev's short novel The Inexhaustible Chalice (Inexaustible Cup, or Non-intoxicating Chalice). The source of this episode was a legend, recorded by a priest Yakov Brilliantov. In 1912 he published the text of the legend calling it a Story of the Miraculous Icon of the Mother of God Called the “Inexhaustible Chalice”. The legend existed in the folk tradition for a long time. The paper presents a hypothesis that Ivan Shmelev reproduced an oral version or edition of the legend in his short novel. Comparison of Shmelev's novel and the old legend reveals similarities and discrepancies of texts, analysis of which can serve as the basis for important observations on lingvopoetics of the short novel and the author’s style. Ivan Shmelev uses the legend as a source of pious history: he connects it with his main text at all narrative levels, while leaving only functional elements in the recipient text. This type of creative editing can be defined as a form of a condensed narrative. Moreover, analysis of sources leads to a conclusion about the poetics of the chronotope and the main characters of the tale.

Keywords: a legend, a story, tale, source, citation, author's style, linguopoetics

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The article analyzes the lexemes with the root “rad” in the short novel The Inexhaustible Cup by I. S. Shmelev. Lexemes are systematized on the basis of functional thesaurus. In the process of analysis there is detected the concept of Joy. The study of the Joy's concept enables us to make important observations in the field of Church liturgical tradition, a literary form, poetic images in the investigated text. The concept generalizes the values contained in the lexicon of the eleven ideological and thematic groups (the good force, prayer, icon, space, freedom/ will, pleasure, fun, boredom, sadness, love, art), which are grouped into two main correlated topics: the sacred and the secular. The intention of the concept of joy defines the ideological perspective of the tale as the text of spiritual life of the heroes.

Keywords: concept, functional thesaurus, lexeme, semantics, poetics, artistic image, theme, idea, idiostyle

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The article examines the influence of the Orthodox hymnography on Ivan Shmelev's works, using his short novel The Inexhaustible Cup as an example. The author analyzes the hymnographic level of the novel; identifies specific features of adapting liturgical poetry to the literary (fiction) text; defines the functionality of liturgical texts in the ideological and thematic, as well as imaginative and motive structure of a literary work. Comparative analysis shows that novel's poetic attributes are similar to theological terminological metaphors typical for hymnography. Moreover, the content plane of The Inexhaustible Cup, due to the semantic parallelism with Akathist and, more broadly, with the hymnographic tradition, forms the Christian dogmatic metatext, which can be called Being in Christ. This enables the reader to identify intuitively Shmelev's novel as a piece of writing, related to poetic and didactic Christian texts in its spirit and language.

Keywords: hymnography, easter canon, heirmos, akathist, quote, metatext

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In the research on Shmelev, the second thesis in Pushkin speech is usually commented on — the one about Pushkin's mystery. The famous Dostoevsky’s speech is concluded with words about a mystery and revealing this mystery. Shmelev's reply is that "we seem to have revealed this mystery". However, the first thesis of this speech — containing a complete agreement between Shmelev and Dostoyevsky — is usually ignored. In this paper, the author polemizes with his predecessors who studied Shmelev's publicistic writings and interprets this agreement between Shmelev and Dostoevsky. The Truth of God is brought up, which is not only an individual peculiarity of Pushkin but the high road of Russian literature in general. Applicable as well to Russian culture in general. The Truth of Russian people, also known as the Truth of God, is the truth accepted by us from the font of Orthodoxy — and this is the central idea of Pushkin, which became clear to Russian exiles. In particular, it became clear because an almost thousand-year-long Russian history was forcedly interrupted in the homeland they left; this is something that, naturally, Dostoyevsky could not even think of.

Keywords: contexts of understanding, Shmelev, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky

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The article analyzes Andrei Platonov' short novel Dzan and sees the concept of an "act of faith" as the central element of its plot. The article provides evidence that the idea of socialism, being refracted through the Zoroastrian myth, is tested in the story for strength and genuineness. As a result, this test reveals Christian subtext in the novel, with the main character not accepting utilitarian earthly Paradise, where there is no free will, and where love to one's neighbor is contrasted with love to the distant humanity. At the end of the novel two evangelical commandments are mentioned - not by bread alone and love thy neighbor. In the late 1920s — the middle of the 1930s Andrei Platonov comes up with his own idea of soul's socialism, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable - the Christian ideal and socialism.

Keywords: short novel Dzhan, plot, faith, socialism, myth, christian subtext, Andrei Platonov

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The author identifies, describes and interprets the biblical allusions in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle (V Kruge Pervom). It is assumed that many of the biblical characters and stories, mentioned (Moses, Jesus Christ, Holy Mary, Mother of God, or Judas) or implied in the novel, are prototypical to its heroes and storylines. Biblical allusions form the overarching storyline (metaplot), and create the religious and philosophical perspective of understanding the value orientations and behavior of the characters. The article reveals the significance of the biblical context for understanding the moral and philosophical search of its heroes, their reflections on happiness, well-being, soul, conscience, friendship, creativity, truth, genuineness and authenticity of marxism as "leading-edge thinking". Special attention is given to the subject of Christmas: the article explains what it means for the formation of artistic time or images of individual characters (Volodin and Rubin), and draws a parallel betweem Stalin and Herod. It is emphasized that Solzhenitsyn as a writer did not copy reality, but portrayed it in light of the Bible and the Gospel ideal, creating the original concept of man's destiny in a totalitarian society and reintroducing to readers religious valueswhich were excluded from a human being by Soviet ideology.

Keywords: theme, artistic image, allusion, reminiscence, the Bible, character, value orientations, literary classics

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