THE TEMPORAL STRUCTURE OF "THE JOURNEY OF GLEB" TETRALOGY BY BORIS ZAITSEV: A BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVE
In the tetralogy of Boris Zaitsev “The Journey of Gleb” there are at least three temporal layers: linear historical time, time of “first events” and time after the Apocalypse (“new century”). Linear history is a constant return to the eternal prototypes from the sacred history. These eternal events may appear in a different morphological form, but always in the same relict semantic quality. In Zaitsev’s tetralogy, such a matrix event is the biblical story of the Flood and the life of St. Job the Long-suffering. These “invariant” events are interfaced with the history of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Zaitsev, two revolutions (February, October) are the embodiment of the Russian “flood” while Job the Long-suffering is personified in Emperor Nicholas II, who was born on the day of this saint. Zaitsev uses a number of symbols (thunderstorm, ark, rainbow, etc.) in order to connect ancient events with modernity. The third temporal layer in tetralogy is the Church Slavonic “пакибытие” - afterlife - that is, the “new age” that will come after the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The heroes of tetralogy sometimes “come out of time”, that is, they end up in eternity beyond time. In addition, the author of the article explores the features of the artistic method of Boris Zaitsev. A. M. Lyubomudrov once called Zaitsev the representative of “spiritual realism”. The author of the article suggests that Zaitsev’s mentality was close to the old Russian mentality. This type of consciousness inspired the features of the literary text and the image of the universe in tetralogy, in particular, the temporal characteristics of the universe.