The theme of Palestine in P.A. Vyazemsky's poetry: the features of world perception and genre tradition

The article deals with P. Vyazemsky’s lyricism, devoted to the theme of Palestine. The five poems that form “the Palestinian cycle” (“Jerusalem”, “Palestine”, “One Treasure”, “To Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov”, “Calais”, “In the memory of Abraham S. Norov”) have the biographical origins and, simultaneously, are associated with the Christian-Orthodox attitude of the poet in the second half of his life and creative path. That is why the “Palestinian” theme was also reflected in P. Vyazemsky’s other works, for instance, in his literary criticism, diaries, journalism. The article shows that for Vyazemsky the image of Palestine became a source of religious and philosophical reflections on the spiritual meaning of human and historical existence, the nature of creativity and the purpose of the artist. The “Palestinian cycle” refers to the spiritual poetry: the artistic world and the hierarchy of values are created with a reference to the “authoritative word” of the Holy Scripture, and the Sacred (Biblical) chronotope organizes the plot-compositional and value-semantic integrity of the artistic world of literary works. The poems bear the imprint of various genre elements of both secular and ecclesiastical literature (autobiography, confession, prayer, hagiography, ode, elegy, epistle). Their poetics is distinguished by the intertwining of the landscape, portrait, ethnographic details, biblical quotations and reminiscences, symbols. Understanding Vyazemsky’s lyrics in the proposed aspect contributes to the formation of a new value and aesthetic paradigm of Russian literature related to the theme “Russian literature and Christianity”.