Joan of Arc by D. S. Merezhkovsky: sources and imagery

The article examines the eternal image of the warrior maid in the works of D. S. Merezhkovsky, its constant features and evolution. His later book Joan of Arc (1938) is compared in this aspect to his early poem “A Legend from T. Tasso” (1882). Special attention is heeded to the analysis of the sources of Joan of Arc and the interpretation of the heroine as a warrior maid in comparison with the preceding texts, on the one hand, and “A Legend from T. Tasso,” on the other hand. Merezhkovsky’s creative reception of the historiographic tradition depicting Joan of Arc combines the topoi of its different versions (he reproduces a number of ideas characteristic of the texts written for the rehabilitation trial of Joan; the heroic discourse of the Renaissance historiography; the position of the 17th-century historians with Providentialist views; the representation of Joan of Arc as a folk heroine, typical for the liberal historians of the 19th century), but this conglomerate is subject to his own concept of the Kingdom of the Third Testament. It is established that, although in Joan of Arc Merezhkovsky sticks closer to the prior texts than in “A Legend from T. Tasso” on the superficial level and seeks to create the impression of documental accuracy, in fact, he uses the same mythologization method, as in his earlier work. The direction of modifications made by the author to the historiographic canon depends on his religious, mystical, and historiosophical notions.