Sufi tradition, or Sophia in “Persian motives” by S.A. Yesenin: apophatic of a literary work

UDC 81`42

https://doi.org/10.20339/PhS.5-22.019       

Dudareva Marianna A.,

Candidate of Philology, Doctor of Culturology,

Associate Professor of the Russian Language Department

Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia;

Head of the Literary Studies and Intercultural Communication Department Magazine “Nevecherniy Svet” (St. Petersburg)

e-mail: marianna.galieva@yandex.ru

The apophatic of Russian artistic culture is the broadest object of research. Today, an ancient concept “apophatic” radiates into all research humanitarian paradigms. The subject of the article is the ways of manifestation of apophatic reality in the cycle of poems “Persian motives” by S. Yesenin. The research methodology is reduced to the use of the ontohermeneutic analysis of a literary work, which is aimed at highlighting the philosophical issues of a poetic text. Drawing parallels with Russian folklore, a fairy tale, the poetics and aesthetics of which was well known by the poet, who studied folklore from collections of folklorists and collected it, seems productive. The Russian fairy tale is characterized by an apophatic search for “another kingdom”, ideal solar earth, which is personified by the author’s topos of Bosphorus in the Yesenin cycle. The apophatic tradition is characteristic not only of Russian verbal culture; it also manifests itself in Sufism, as an esoteric trend of Islam, in which the phenomenon of an invisible “light man” is highlighted. This observation is significant in the analysis of “Persian motives”, in which the Sufi tradition was latently expressed through the semiotically important gesture of “removing the veil” from the face of the beloved, equated in the axiological sense to “removing the mantle”, familiarizing with sacred knowledge in Sufism. In the Russian version of logocentrism, the teaching of Vladimir Solovyov about Sofia, widely known among the creative intelligentsia of the Silver Age, is associated with such apophatic image of the beloved. Research into world mythology by Robert Graves points to a possible relationship between Sophia and the Black Sufi Maidens. The research results are reduced to the following conclusion: the image of the ideal lover in Yesenin’s “Persian Motives” has Sufi roots and is associated with the highest mode of love, which is achieved through an ontologically significant search for “another kingdom” characteristic of the Russian fairy tale. This cycle presents a synthesis of different cultural and literary traditions, in which an apophatic tradition can be identified at the typological level.

Keywords: S. Yesenin’s poetics, apophatic, Sufism, the cycle “Persian motives”, anthroposophy, Russian traditional culture, fairy tale, Sofia.

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