The concept of cyclicality and unity in Ivan Zhdanov’s poem “Winter”

UDC 81`42+82.161.1-1
DOI 10.20339/PhS.1-26.057

Kosovskaya Olesya Nikolayevna,

Teacher of Russian Language and Literature at Classic Boarding House

Lomonosov Moscow State University;

Applicant for academic degree

Russian State University for the Humanities

e-mail: o.kosovskaya@mail.ru

In Ivan Zhdanov’s poem Zima (The Place of the Earth, 1991), the very epigraph — a children’s counting rhyme (a substitution game, per G.S. Vinogradov) — signals a playful foundation. The composition is structured around a metabola that unfolds the author’s vision of the human soul’s posthumous fate and the transcendence of time. Play becomes an integral element of this metabola. The author’s conception of the immortal soul and the universal striving for wholeness is grounded, on one hand, in a Christian-Platonic framework: the wintry space represents a mythological reality where “there is one soul for all”. On the other hand, it aligns with Buddhist teachings on the transmigration of souls: the poem portrays the horrifying moment of transition from a transcendent realm into a new incarnation and the impossibility of breaking the cycle of birth and rebirth. The structure of the author’s myth resonates with Vladimir S. Solovyov’s concept of all-unity, which posits that “for God, eternal and indivisible, all exists together and at once, all within one”.

Keywords: playful element, metabola, authorial myth, all-unity, Vladimir S. Solovyov, Ivan Zhdanov

References

1.       Zhdanov, I.F. Vozdukh i veter: sochineniia i fotografii. Moscow: Nauka, 2006. 175 s.

2.       Bergson, A. Dlitel’nost’ i odnovremennost’ (po povodu teorii Einshteina) / per. s fr. A.A. Frankovskogo. St. Petersburg: Academia, 1923. 154 s.

3.       Solov’ev Vl.S. Sochineniia: v 2 t. T. 2. Moscow: Mysl’, 1988. 822 s.