Reception of the Prayer “Our Father ...” in the Creative Heritage of V. A. Zhukovsky

Abstract

In the Russian culture of the XIX century, the prayer “Our Father...” was the most important text not only of religious, but also of the artistic discourse. One of the first authors who turned to poetic dialogue with the Lord’s Prayer was V. A. Zhukovsky. Zhukovsky made a poetic arrangement of the Lord’s prayer in 1817, including it in his translation of I. P. Goebel’s “Morning Star”. Attempts at theological interpretation of the prayer were made by the poet several times: at the beginning of his creative path, on the pages of letters-diaries of 1814, then — at the end of his creative activity, in articles of the 1840s. Studying the reception of the canonical text of the prayer “Our Father...” in Zhukovsky’s work makes it possible to clarify not only the ideas about the genre-thematic range of his lyrics, but also about his religious picture of the world, in the center of which there is the relationship between God and man, seen as the relationship of a father with children