«Слово же есть человек, человек — соборность, соборность — София»: Гностический миф и конструирование автора в «Софии земной и горней» Л. П. Карсавина

Abstract

«Sophia the earthly and the heavenly» was written by L.P. Karsavin during his transition from medievism to religious philosophy. The text was first published in the third issue of the almanac Sagittarius (1922). It represents a literary hoax: an «unknown» Gnostic treatise with parodic commentary «from the publisher». The basis of the work is an artistic translation of the chapters of the treatise Pistis Sophia with poetic inserts by Karsavin. The study offers an analysis of the structure of the author's self in the context of the Gnostic myth. The thematic connections of the work with the texts of other authors of the almanac, as well as with other «gnostic» texts by Karsavin are traced. The sources of mystification and principles of parody are revealed. The connections of the work with Alexei Remizov's stylisations («Russia in Letters»), S.P. Bobrov's hoax (a continuation of A.S. Pushkin's poem «Judith»), etc. are established. The connection of Karsavin's poetics with the abstruse language of the Futurists (Velimir Khlebnikov), the poetry of Symbolism (Vladimir Soloviev), and Acmeism («gnostic» poetry of Mikhail Kuzmin) is revealed. The Gnostic line in the works of other authors (Belenson, Kuzmin, Hollerbach, Rozanov) of the almanac helps to decipher the idea of «Sophia...» as the wandering of the soul in the aspect of eros mysticism. The latter theme is the leading one in «Noctes Petropolitanae» (1922), where in the image of Adam Kadmon Karsavin proposes the idea of the all-unified man as a symphony. The Sophia myth is continued in On Beginnings (1925). As a result, the structure of the text of «Sophia...» reveals an ensemble of authors, immanent and external to Karsavin's authorial self. All of them are connected in the multitudinous subject-author. Another meta-theme of the almanac is the Word: its creative power (Fyodor Sologub) and its mute impotence (Artur Lurie). In «Sophia...», in the idea of the Word as the Fullness of being and non-being, a synthesis is realised. For the authorial utterance Karsavin turns to the not-word, constructing from it his own-other multi-subjective self. The text of «Sophia...» is thus a laboratory of the author's multi-subject self, where the model of the symphonic personality is experimentally assembled and tested as the leading concept of Karsavin's subsequent doctrine of personality, in his ontology («On the Beginnings») and philosophy of history.