“Falling in love” as a religion in G.I. Chulkov’s “House on the sand”

Based on the material of the work of the great symbolist writer G.I. Chulkov, one of the aspects of the “new religious consciousness” of the Silver Age is analyzed - “erotic utopia”, or love between a man and a woman as a religious action. The sources of the ideological content of the story “House on the Sand” (1910-1911) are indicated: V.S. Solovyov’s series of articles “The Meaning of Love” (1892-1894), D.S. Merezhkovsky’s “New Babylon” and Z.N. Gippius’ “Falling in Love” (1904), the life-creating practice of love-marriage unions of the Merezhkovskys, Bloks, Ivanovs in 1900-ies. Developing Solovyov’s and Merezhkovsky’s thought about the incompatibility of “true love” with the physiology of childbirth and with the “anomaly” of ascetic spiritualism, Gippius finds a practical way to combine sex with the gospel teaching in a special state of “Christian falling in love”. The most striking embodiment of it is the “kiss” as a form of spiritual and bodily intimacy, which arose thanks to Christ. The new concept of love as a way of practical connection with God, spiritual and bodily transformation and immortality here, on earth, was already embodied in the “texts of life” and in the “texts of art” of the Russian symbolists. So, in the “House on the Sand” Chulkov discredits the traditional child-bearing and economic marriage of Verochka and Lanskoy as not just spiritually pagan, but an infernal phenomenon leading to non-existence. On the contrary, the chaste-kissing infatuation of Vera and Shatrov gives both a sense of genuine life, involved in the divine depth. However, the sexual “fall” permanently closes this opportunity for them.