Motywy maryjne w twórczości Wiaczesława Iwanowa

Abstract

A characteristic feature of the Russian culture at the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century was the search for a universal formula able to explain both the structure of space and the place of human being in the world. Thinking in categories of space and eternity was characteristic of the epoch. Ivanov's broad treatment of the motif of the Virgin Mary is part of ideological quest of his contemporaries like Vladimir Soloviov's deliberation or Alexander Blok's Poems of a Beautiful Lady. However, for the author of the Guiding Stars the admiration for the Virgin Mary was not a passing pose of an artist yielding to fashionable trends. Creating his vision of culture, Ivanov became convinced that all cultures in the world contain a grain of truth and that it was Christianity that expressed it best. Moving through epochs and regions, he was looking for a confirmation of this presumption, trying to express Christian truths with the help of other cultures code. In 1902 Ivanov came to a conclusion that the truth about the Virgin Mary can be expressed only in the language of poetry since this truth is inaccessible for prose. Applying this principle, he created poetical and theological discourse, in which the Virgin Mary was presented as the key to the mystery of existence. Looking at the development of culture in the light of Her life, the poet noticed features of a God-oriented world, both in Christian times and before the birth of Jesus. Consistency with which the poet and thinker referred to all contexts he was familiar with, while making the vision of the Mother of Christ more concrete, multiple aspects of his depictions and care taken of their ideological coherence gives his efforts a dimension of peculiar poetical Mariology.