On the poetics of the title of I. S. Shmelev's story “The hidden face”

The article is dedicated to the poetics of Shmelev's story's title “The Hidden Face”. The ideological and thematic aspects of the title, that develop story's fiction structure of the writing are exposed to analysis. The story got its final title in the last, second, manuscript edition (its previous title was “Furlough”). The writer accentuates the character's inner, radical crisis of consciousness, rather than external events. This intention manifests itself in the ideological structure of artistic images: the characters' philosophy is based on the principle “thesis - antithesis - synthesis”. However, there is another viewpoint, that prevails over others and comes out of this system of immanent relations and theoretical judgments of the characters - the Orthodox one. In the text there are several semantic levels of an image system of the story that are kept current in the concepts of “holy face”, “face” and “mask”. The “hidden face” is nothing more than God's image, contained in every human being, in other words, his true, original nature. Thus, in the title of the story the author's idea of Shmelev is revealed.