Hymnographic tradition in Ivan Shmelev's short novel "The inexhaustible cup"

The paper examines the influence of the Orthodox hymnography on Ivan Shmelev's works, using his short novel The Inexhaustible Cup as an example. The author analyzes the hymnographic level of the novel; identifies specific features of adapting liturgical poetry into the literary (fiction) text; defines the functionality of liturgical texts in the ideological and thematic, as well as imaginative and motif structure of a literary work. Comparative analysis shows that novel's poetic attributes are similar to theological terminology metaphors typical for hymnography. Moreover, the plane of content in The Inexhaustible Cup, due to the semantic parallelism with Akathist and, more broadly, hymnographic tradition, forms the Christian dogmatic metatext, which can be called «Being in Christ». This enables the reader to intuitively identify Shmelev's novel as a piece of writing, related to poetic and didactic Christian texts in its spirit and language.