Biblical Story’s Lexical Representation In Russian Poetry Of The 19th-20th Centuries

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the functioning of the biblical units in the poetic text. Exploring the Bible language influence on fiction discourse, the authors introduce the concept of “poetic bibleism”, defining thus an exact or transformed quotation from the Bible, used in a poetic text for ideological and thematic correlation with Scripture. The content of some Russian poetry texts is related to the retelling and commenting on the biblical narrative, and there is an important role of poetic biblical units. The essence of such a text is not just a retelling of the biblical story, but its author's experience, development, and even reinterpretation. In such a situation, bibleism is introduced as a sign and token. The basis of the biblical text interpretation tradition was mostly set up by Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet in his poem “Abaddon”. The poetic text of the twentieth century, as well as the poems of A. A. Fet, is focused on the interpretation and transformation of the biblical narrative. From this point of view especially significant is the poem by Maximilian Alexandrovich Voloshin “Vision of Ezekiel”, which not only reproduces the biblical conflict in poetic form, but also reinterprets the meanings marked by bibleism, as well as the "Biblical Verses” by Anna Akhmatova and “Candlemas” by Joseph Brodsky, which is characterized, on the one hand, by an accurate following of the gospel plot as a whole, and on the other – a significant increase in the narrative volume due to the detailed description of what is happening.