On the day of pascha. The evangelical subtext in Pushkin's "stanzas" ("Wandering the noisy streets...")

This article explores one of Pushkin’s greatest poems - «Stanzas» («Wandering the Noisy Streets…»). The author argues that beneath the lines «грядущей смерти годовщину» («the anniversary of my death») usually interpreted in connection with the poet’s desire to guess an accurate date of his own death, lies a hidden evangelical, Paschal subtext. The article shows that the unusual use of the word «годовщина» (anniversary) containing the elements of meaning related to «the past» and «calendar regularity» as well as to «the future» and to «what is coming», definitely alludes to the semantics of the Paschal cycle about the death and Resurrection of Jesus. Although Pascha (also called Easter) is a regular, most important event annually celebrated in the Christian calendar, it is necessary to «guess», «predict» or, more exactly, «calculate» the day of Pascha for coming years, according to a special formula. Consequently, the day of Pascha determines the date of the coming death anniversary of Jesus. The semantic structure of the elegy contains a meta-literary parallel between, on the one hand, the coming death anniversary of Jesus and «the anniversary of the poet’s death» and, on the other hand - between Resurrection of Jesus and the «revival», «return to life» of Pushkin’s narrator-hero. The author comes to the conclusion that the symbolic triad «birth / death / revival» (of the lyric hero) forming the narrative base of the elegy and corresponding to «birth, death and Resurrection» (of Jesus), illuminates a hidden evangelical subtext of the poem.