Rainbow as a covenant in I.A. Bunin's spiritual lyrics: semiotics of the sacred. Article 1. Introduction to the problem. Sacred in the works of I.A. Bunin

Abstract

In order to solve the seemingly simple philological question “What meanings are associated with the image of the rainbow in Bunin's lyrics?” we had to solve a number of difficult tasks when it turned out that the rainbow is not exactly a natural phenomenon or image, but primarily a spiritual reality that exists in Bunin's poems on the supreme rights of a religious phenomenon. Hence, there was a need to solve specific problems in the first article. 1. Special realities, belonging to the spiritual world, form the sacred space, determine its value hierarchy. The sacred presupposes the actual "presence of God." 2. The hierotopic in the text appears as an embodiment in "signs", in "images" of a special way of viewing the world in Its light. The structure of such a hierophany – the "invasion of the sacred" (M. Eliade) – was expressed very simply and accurately by Bunin: "There is no one in the sublunary, Only I and God." 3. The presence in the text of such a "super sign" as God, which exceeds any existence in the system of meanings established in the national culture, turns the text into a spiritual one. The establishment of the supramundane power embodied in God, who determines the world orientation and perception of a person, becomes a decisive factor in the "transubstantiation" of Bunin's lyrics into a spiritual one. 4. In order to be semantically significant for the reader, artistic sacredness needs to be recognized: either through direct response and perception or through a research clarification of hidden anagogic meanings. 5. Artistic localization of the sacred is more easily achieved in texts not just of an "intense" form, which is the lyrics, but also of a subjectively centered one.