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Abstract: The article in the cultural, philosophical and religious-ontological context presents the Christological theme in the poetry of V. T. Shalamov, which, developing throughout the poet’s career, underwent a peculiar evolution – from the atheistic-secularized understanding of Jesus Nazarene as a historical person, who revealed to the world the absolute value of the moral and ethical teachings of the New Testament, before penetrating the spiritual and metaphysical depth of the Gospels, evangelizing the victory of life over death, being over nothingness, freedom over necessity. The purpose of this work is to study the transformation of the gospel motifs and images, that make up the biblical realm of the world culture, in the lyrics of Shalamov in close connection with the ethical and aesthetic searches of the poet, which turned out to coincide with the aspiration of the Russian thinkers to the moral Absolute at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries. The search for axiological constants of human existence, enriched by the tragic experience of the gulag Golgotha, brought Shalamov from the closed sociocultural space of Soviet reality to a spiritually boundless universe. The allusions and reminiscences related to the Holy Scriptures form in Shalamov’s poetic heritage quite obvious biblical metatext, which has a motivational-shaped integrity, internal lyrical plot, and mytho-suggestive coloring of specific biographical facts and artifacts that constitute the author’s worldview. Shalamov’s apophatics of search for God under the conditions of Soviet reality determined the ways of artistic embodiment of the image of the Son of Man in all its existential complexity and multidimensionality. The object of this study covers the motivational layer of Shalamov’s poetry, containing explicit and implicit references to the biblical text rethought by the author. The biblical motifs of the poetry by Shalamov are identified through historical-genetic, hermeneutic, structural-semantic and systemic-typological methods of studying a literary text. The image of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, comprehended in the context of non-denominational Christianity, is central in Shalamov’s poetry. The article presents an analysis of the poem “Treatise on Faith” that embodies the Christological vector of Russian poetry of the 20th century, which received creative development in Shalamov’s works.

About the author(s) :

Igor S. Uryupin
Moscow State P edagogical University (Moscow, Russia).
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9080-9505

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 17.12.2022; date of publication: 29.12.2022

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