The image of the “crucified seraphim” IN M. Voloshin’s The burning bush

The aim of the paper is to analyze the image of the “crucified seraphim” in M. Voloshin’s works that were included in the book Neopalimaya Kupina [The Burning Bush]. This image, although not always clearly, repeatedly appears in works of the book. So it becomes the motive that unites the works of the book in a supertextual unity. Starting from an obvious literary source - Little Flowers of St. Francis that narrates about Christ’s epiphany in the guise of a crucified Seraphim - the author discovered picturesque and iconographic sources of the image during the analysis. This episode of Christ’s epiphany is popular in catholic religious art. Giotto used it in his frescoes devoted to St. Francis’s life, which Voloshin mentions in one of his articles. However, in the author’s opinion, appeal to the Russian iconographic tradition is much more important. The image of “Sophia, the Holy Wisdom” that was depicted in the Novgorod version as a woman with a burning face and seraphic wings and the image of the Angel of the Great Council, in which Christ was depicted with burning seraphic wings, are genetically associated with the iconography of the six-winged Seraphim. The image of the “crucified seraphim” is comprehended in the aspect of Sophia. It symbolizes the conjunction of the material and the Divine, becoming a symbol of the Divine fiery essence that is crucified in a corruptible human body. The interpretation of the image of the “crucified seraphim” in the aspect of Sophia is also connected with an appeal to the image of Seraphim of Sarov. In Voloshin’s poem “St. Seraphim” and in M. Sabashnikova’s book that is devoted to the narrative of St. Seraphim’s life, the image of St. Seraphim is interpreted as an image of a human that reached the Sophian transformation of the flesh, the angelic seraphic state. The evidence of the reliance on iconographic sources in interpreting the image of St. Seraphim of Sarov is a graphic drawing by Sabashnikova that is placed on the cover of the book about St. Seraphim. Voloshin used this book when he wrote the poem “St. Seraphim”, so he knew this drawing. Thus, images of Russian iconography and catholic religious painting are built into the Gnostic myth of Sophia and the captive World Soul. The interpretation of the image of the “crucified seraphim” through the prism of the Gnostic myth of the captive World Soul connects the images of a harlot, a righteous woman and a holy fool, important for The Burning Bush, as well as the antithesis of the untruth, the distorted and the true masks and the light-bearing face, to this myth. Thus, the image of the “crucified seraphim” in Voloshin’s works acquires a wide range of cultural associations and layers. This multilayered image and the wide complex of motives that are connected with it have been analyzed in the paper.

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