THE SACRED TEXT AS A SOURCE OF THE PRECEDENT PHENOMENA (BASED ON THE POETRY BY ZINAIDA N. GIPPIUS)
The most important source of precedent phenomena for Russian literature was the Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments. The symbolism and religion-oriented character of Z. Gippius' poetry make it possible to clearly represent precedent phenomena. In different periods of her creative work, Z. Gippius turned to various texts of the Old and New Testament. The precedent situations in Z. Gippius' prewar poems were mostly taken from the Gospels, one - from the Revelation of St. John the Evangelist. During the war period, new situations and texts are found in the Gospels and the former texts are conceptualized in a new way. Z. Gippius refers to the Revelation of St. John the Divine three times, her poems contain the echo of the Old Testament too. In emigration, she remembers the Gospels, the Old Testament and the Acts of the Apostles. During that period, Z. Gippius turns back to the prewar topics: personal, confessional or related to the creative work of D. Merezhkovsky, as well as to military, publicist and anti-Bolshevic topics. The choice of precedent phenomena is dictated by the time of creating the poem, the historical, cultural and socio-political situation and the readership for which they are intended. The “background” tradition should also be taken into account, i.e. the facts that the poet herself was brought up in Orthodoxy and that the Russian culture of the 19th - early 20th cc. was based the Christian tradition, which the Russian emigration tried hard to preserve.