Sophia or Apophatic reality in Alexander Blok’s poem «A girl was singing in a church choir»

Abstract

The paper presents a coherent analysis of the famous poem by Alexander Blok «A Girl Was Singing in a Church Choir...» in an extensive historical and cultural context. Much attention is paid to the poetics of color, the colorative «white», which is characterized by semantic tension and brings the reader into the ontological space of the text. In the poem, the image of the girl is associated with white color and light, which shows that the heroine belongs to the higher, heavenly world and is opposed to «everyone» from the temple, which is in darkness. The play of light and shadow acquires a sacred nature and makes it possible to raise the question of the apophatic tradition, the appearance of «evening light» and «unfading light». The image of the heroine is also viewed from the perspective of the teaching on Sophia by Vladimir Solovyov, whose legacy was addressed by the poet. Blok draws parallels with the Russian folklore tradition, analyzing the last stanza, the image of a crying child. The appeal to folklore is fruitful, since Blok was well acquainted with oral folk art, as evidenced by the fact that he was the author of the article «Poetry of Conspiracies and Spells», written in the same period as the object of the current study, the poem «A Girl Was Singing in a Church Choir...». However, the authors of this paper interpret folklore not narrowly, but include in its field rituals, ceremonies, and pre-genre formations. The work is based on a holistic analysis of the artistic text using structural-typological, comparative, and systematic-comprehensive (culturological) research methods. These methods allow highlighting the ontological dimension in the poem, revising the views on the images of the girl and the child that have established in literary studies, avoiding unambiguousness in interpretation.