German ecclesiastical-protreptic literature as the coordinate of late V.A. Zhukovsky: the unknown poet's signatures in the book The Biblical Christmas Gift for Adults and Children

The article focuses on a topical issue of the mainstream influence of German ecclesiastical-protreptic literature (Erbauungsliteratur) on V.A. Zhukovsky's art of 1840-1850s on purpose. The prosaic poet's extracts, discovered in the columns of the popular in German world issues of the 1840s Biblical sayings The Biblical Christmas Gift for Adults and Children (''Biblische Weihnachtsgabe fuer Alt und Jung''), are introduced to the scientific use for the first time. The signatures and marginalia are attributed, dated and commented basing upon the authentic culture-historical context and appear in Zhukovsky's religious quests. Zhukovsky's signatures on the note pages 1 and 13-16 are of academic interest not only as the facts of reception of German anthology of Biblical quotes, but also as complete extracts of his Christian philosophy. The ontological categories of wisdom and faith, freedom and infallibility become the subject matter. Within eleven theses Zhukovsky briefly develops his Christian philosophy, attempting to gradate the essentially dynamic ideas. In the short text he succeeded to put a fragment of the Holy History from the failure and expulsion to the current status of the human, raise and solve the hardest question about faith and God-obedience. We can not talk about the direct intertextual and interdiscursive connection between the extracts, unmarked by the author, and its fragment, but the reader's reflections uncover the correlation with the studied book in general. The results of Zhukovsky's marginalia notes research on the pages of two editions of The Biblical Christmas Gift open the laboratory of the development of the new word, the sacral word able to express the unspeakable, just to show the mystic, to create and depict the onto-logical essences. While discovering the new type of the word the German ecclesiastical-protreptic literature, the book culture of German pietism and holiness, unframed by any confessions, became the coordinate for Zhukovsky. Its trace in the romanticist's artistic system of the 1840-1850s can not be determined as influence, translation, borrowing or as an intercultural transfer, always connected with the loss of the authentic and the find of the new senses. As before, this interaction type of ''mine'' and ''strange'' in the 1840-1850s had a constructive meaning for the new artistic revolution step of Zhukovsky, the notionalist and the draftsman, the prosaic, the poet and the translator.

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