Title of the article:

GOSPEL STORY ABOUT THE BIRTH OF A BABY AND ITS TRANSFORMATION IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MYTHOLOGY OF ANDREI BELY

Author(s):

Elena V. Glukhova

Information about the author/authors

 Elena V. Glukhova — PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaia St. 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia. E-mail: elenagluhova@mail.ru

Section

Philological sciences

Year

2018

Volume

Vol. 50

Pages

pp. 197–215

Received

April 08, 2018

Date of publication

December 28, 2018

Index UDK

821.161.1

Index BBK

83.3(2Рос=Рус)53

Abstract

The article offers consideration of the archetypical motif of the birth of a miraculous child as variations of the Gospel plot of Christmas in the work of Andrei Bely — from his early “Symphonies” up to his articles of the revolutionary years. A semantic shift of the traditional spatial-temporal model of the archaic narrative came to play a key role in the culture of Russian symbolism, which implies that the events of the Gospel history are perceived as synchronous modernity. As the paper revealed the eschatological motif of the waiting for a miraculous baby, borrowed from the Revelation of John the Theologian, occurs in the early works of the writer most frequently, but at the same time this motif is supplanted by its travesty variant — the appearance of a false / other baby. Then, using the example of journalistic articles by Andrei Bely and his memoir-autobiographical documents from the period of the First World War and Revolution, the author proves that during the anthroposophical period of his work, the motif of the birth of a miraculous child is replaced by the esoteric motif of the birth as death, or resurrection. The study presumes that this motif is not only metaphorically reinterpreted as the birth of an “inner”, spiritual person, but has also a systemic frequency in the context of the writer's autobiographical mythology. As the author notes the story of the birth of a miraculous child is transformed into semantically similar mythological scenes of a dying/resurgent deity. The study concluded that the motif of the birth of a miraculous child in the context of the autobiographical mythopoetics of Andrei Bely was replaced by a closely related esoteric plot of spiritual transmutation.

Keywords

Andrei Bely, Gospel plot of Christmas, mythopoetics, motif of the birth of a miraculous child, autobiographical mythology. 

References

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