Volume 16, Nº 2 (2018)

This article investigates the interpretation of the raising of Lazarus in early Christian literature. The author presents new data taken from the writings of St. Athanasius and other untranslated theological sources by S. Cyrill of Jerusalem, Pseudo-Clement, Didymus the Blind. The research focuses on the interpretation of the motif of the raising of Lazarus in Byzantine literature of the 2d–4th centuries. The research question concerns the writings of the authors of the given period that contain the interpretation of this evangelic motif. The author comes to the conclusion that the raising of Lazarus is an important theme in the writings of early Christian theologists. In PseudoClement’s writings the name of Lazarus is nothing but mentioned for making the work more plausible, while St. Athanasius deeply reflects over the 11th chapter of the Gospel of John, seeking for anti-arian arguments in it. Didymus the Blind leaves classical some typical commentaries on the resurrection of Lazarus, thus, disclosing the ties of the Biblical narration with the Letter of Paul to the Romans. St. Cyrill of Jerusalem in his Catechesis emphasizes the fact of faith of Martha and Mary, Lazarus’s sisters, who saved him.

The costume in the artistic world of N. M. Karamzin is an important semiotic system. It appears as a means of characterizing the hero’s social status, social role, his connection with a sacred reality, and in this way, the costume is certainly symbolic. The material world is a tool of idealization of everyday life, it has a symbolic completeness related to ritual and ceremonial aspects, its image serves as a method of visualization of history. The details of the costume are always clearly marked and have no random character. With the help of the hero’s costume the national color is reconstructed, the spirit of the era is transmitted, historical reality is modeled. The peculiarity of poetics of “The History of the Russian State” is conveyed through the description of the costume, which is characterized by attention to details, the change of close-up and long-distance plans while creating portraits of the characters as well as biblical allusions. The deceleration of the action by the introduction of a character’s costume puts corporeal ekphrasis in the same line of historical events. Thanks to the ethnographically accurate description of clothes, the historical interpretation is perceived by the reader as a historical reconstruction.

The subject of the study is the motif of unauthorized “escape from Paradise”, as the one opposing to the motif of “exile from Paradise”, common in Western literature. Considering two asynchronical samples — of the manifestations of this motif (in A. N. Ostrovsky’s play “The Forest” and in the fairy-tale by K. N. Batyushkov “A Wanderer and a Stay-at-home”), the author comes to the observation that it appeared as a romantic opposition to sentimental separation between “sustainable” and “moving” life: the poetry of sentimentalism favored the value of the “sustainable” position, whereas the supporters of romanticism saw the “movement” as the key sign, which later took paradoxical forms, giving new opportunities for developing national psychology of the Russian person and opposing the ideology of former Russian literature. This paradox was adopted by A. S. Pushkin and conceptualized by F. M. Dostoevsky in the “Pushkin Speech”. Further development of this motif led to the appearance of the ideal of a “restless” wanderer, consistently embodied in comedies by A. N. Ostrovsky.

This article considers the anthroponyms and the ways of naming characters in Tolstoy’s povest’ “Hadji Murad” and proved that onyms, patronymics and poetonyms fulfil an anticipative or foreshadowing function. Describing simple life of people in “Hadji Murad”, Tolstoy resorts to the generic naming of people by their age, family status and description of clothing. Mentioning the ambitious and faceless high-ranking people the author uses their titles or a military rank that often replace their surnames. Sometimes Tolstoy refers to the multidimensional representation of the characters and combines the indication of their social status, brief biographical information and portrait description. Showing his disfavour to Nikolas I, Tolstoy does not use the title “tsar” while describing him but refers to him by his name Nikolas or his name and patronymic when the latter becomes an object of worship or gives an order to kill people. In “Hadji Murad” Pyotr Mikhailovich Avdeev is a righteous man by Tolstoy. His three-part poetonym bears a powerful moral and religious implication. Tolstoy modifies some of the onyms of certain historical figures mentioned in the story in order to implicitly justify the deeds of these characters. The polemically emphasized discrepancy of the historical person’s onym with that one given to him by the author reflects the extinction of moral and heroic essence in this person. The author does not use the word “enemy”, he deprives the word “antagonist” of its negative connotation and does not mention the nationality of the belligerents; Tolstoy applies the only epic criterion of estimation to all characters and stands for the cessation of the slaughter and for mutual understanding.

The article explores the evolution of one of the central themes of A. Platonov’s work — the recovery of the dead. It has evangelical origins and is inextricably linked with the problems of life, death, immortality, salvation. The complex attribution of actualized artistic nominations and their equivalents to different sources can be traced in its development. In the revolutionary eschatology of the young Platonov (1910–1920), the reinterpretation of the New Testament view of the opposition of life-death, remythologization and utopian transcription of the evangelical images and plots is traced. In the novel “Chevengur”, in the works of the 1930s–1940s the restoration of meanings and symbols of the New Testament takes place. The Christian code plays an important role in the creative work of Platonov. In the development of the theme of the recovery of the deceased, the writer’s evolution appears as the return to the sources of folk spirituality and faith.