Theme of sanctitude in Ya.P. Polonsky's autobiographical works

The article focuses on the under-investigated autobiographical works of Ya. Polonsky’s late period of creativity. Sometimes it is done with the help of the collection of his letters. The theme of sanctitude is taken for a detailed analysis, its invariants serve to express the spiritual significance of the central characters’ interior life in his works. The author employs the thematic analysis combined with the selective axiological commentary. Functionally, the invariants of the theme of sanctitude are relevant to V. Toporov’s typology. It is established that in Polonsky’s memoirs “Ancient Times and My Childhood” shows a difficult stage of personal formation associated with the feelings and emotions related to the religious experience of the family. It was found that in her search for holiness, the female protagonist of the poetic story Anna Galdina does not withstand the ascetic lifestyle and succumbs to sin, while the male protagonist of the story “The Dreamer. A Young Man in the 1830s”, Vadim Kirilin, overcomes his spiritual delusions and acquires holiness. The plot of the protagonist develops from a particular historical setting into a mystical one, and then into a sacred space. The analysis showed that the motif of holiness in the depicted world of three autobiographical works by Polonsky serves to unfold the meaning of the author’s spiritual quest as a subject of speech and his contemporaries and a person of the beginning of modernization of the social and religious structure of Russian life.