The night violet in Blok's poetry: realia and symbolic connotations

The article raises the issue of the genesis and semantics of the symbol of the Night Violet in 1906 Alexander Blok’s poem of the same name. The plot of the poem combines all the most important themes and motifs of Blok’s lyrics of the so-called period of “antithesis” (1904-1907: the city, modernity, Norse-Wagnerian mythology, “swamp” imagery, “element”, loss of the initial Paradise and transformation of the female image, hope for renewal and rebirth. The analysis of related images in the world literature is carried out: folklore legends, folktales and songs that identify a girl with a flower, often with an enchanted one; the image of the “blue flower” in Novalis’ novel “Heinrich von Ofterdingen”, the mention of the scent of the night violet in “Travel Pictures” by Heinrich Heine, the female protagonist of the “Northern Symphony (aka The First Heroic)” by Andrey Bely is a Princess, as in Blok’s poem, surrounded by violets. The analysis of the semantics of the image of the Night Violet puts forward the question of which flower in Blok’s representation had such a name. In solving this question, the main source was the book of two famous German botanists B. Auerswald and E.A. Rossmessler “Botanical Conversations” (the German title for it “Auerswald B., Rossmässler E.A. Botanische Unterhaltugen zum Verständniss der heimatlichen Flora”), which was translated and supplemented by Professor A.N. Beketov, Blok’s grandfather. In the “Sixteenth Conversation”, written by A.N. Beketov, the Platanter plant receives the Russian synonyms “Night Violet” or “two-leafed Lubka”. The idea that plants are animate living creatures is repeated in the works of Andrey Beketov. According to Blok’s recollections, he learned the names of the plants while walking with his grandfather in the vicinity of Shakhmatovo. Thus, for the poet, the Night Violet turns out to be the secret namesake of the main prototype of the female protagonist of his lyrics, the poet’s wife Lyubov Blok, which reveals the hidden biographical subtext of the poem. Key word