Abstract
This article focuses on the "spring tale" The Snow Maiden (1873) in which, as A. Zhuravliova noticed, Ostrovsky produced a lyrical representation of national life, using rich and varied folk-symbolic resources for this purpose. The article proposes an interpretation of the semantics of the famous enigmatic scene in act 4 (sc. 2). In this scene two leitmotifs are intertwined : the poetry of nature and the lyricism of love. In this scene, they reveal the internal dramaturgy. The scene of the last meeting of the mother (Spring) and her daughter (Snegurochka) concludes with the ritual of the initiation of the latter into the world of amorous passions, which consists in particular of braiding a crown that symbolizes virginity and love. Ostrovsky made the Snow Girl's crown almost entirely from wild flowers related to national topoi such as fields, meadows, woods. The article aims at decoding the meanings of each of the flowers evoked from literary and lexicographical sources in coherence with the period of the play's creation.
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