К вопросу о философской интерпретации пушкинского «Пророка»: янсенистская Библия Пор-Рояля и «пророческое преображение» поэта

Abstract

The author assumes that the strategy of the ideologues and translators of the Bible of Port-Royal, based on the powerful linguistic-logical, philosophical-theological and methodological basis of “The Grammar” and “The Logic” of Port-Royal, was in many respects to convey latently to the reader, in what they believed to be a correct and adequate interpretation of the Vulgate, key as­pects of the theological and philosophical ideology of Jansenism (going back to Aurelius Augustine). So, the reader, even completely alien to Jansenism, could at times unconsciously absorb elements of this doctrine without even realising it. By way of a philosophical analysis of the poem “The Prophet”, the author seeks to bring to light not only some aspects of Pushkin’s perception of the Bible of Port-Royal, which he started actively reading in 1825, but also elements of Jansenism ideology (including the “reformation of the inner man”). The poet may also have become acquainted with some of the doctrines of this teaching through the writings of the Jansenist Pascal. The author also sees in Pushkin’s “Prophet” an implicit parallel to Augustine’s doctrine of the world as a “hierar­chy” of God’s creations. The mystical-allegorical description of his “reforma­tion”/“transformation” is consistently correlated by the poet with the Biblical prophetic symbolism of the heavenly fire (in which one can see a parallel to Pas­cal’s “Memorial”). The article also reveals the soteriological aspect of the global humanitarian mission of the poet-“prophet”. Assuming an implicit influence of Jansenism through the Bible of Port-Royal (and an explicit one through the writings of Pascal) might throw new light on the identification of the creative origins and the transformation of the outlook of other Russian writers of the first half to the middle of the 19th century, as well as on the development of Russian intellectual and political thought (e.g., that of Emperor Alexander I) during this period.