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Abstract:

For the first time, the article considers the myth of the Invisible City as the basis of Mikhail Prishvin’s autobiographical myth, which organizes the event space of his diaries. One of the aspects of the autobiography in the diary is confessional gospel stories, which became the basis of the autobiographical myth about the transformation of the artist-wanderer’s soul. Prishvin’s autobiographical myth contains a “mystical plot scheme,” which stems from Solovyov’s myth about the return of the fallen world to the Pleroma, “the world in God.” The inclusion of mystery motifs in the comprehension of one’s own destiny translates the events of a real biography into the sacred space of a confessional plot of conversion (“victory over egoism”), from the “I” of the former to the new “I” in God. At the same time, “purification of the soul from egoism” is understood by Prishvin not as “the destruction of the ego itself, the personality itself” but as “raising this ego to the highest level of being.” In Prishvin’s diaries, this is the path of the individual through the “veil” of the ego from the disparate world to the All-Unity (the revelation of the individual, “conscious of himself in everyone and everything”). The motif of the liberation of the individual from the “ego house” is formed in allusions to the penitential gospel stories about the prodigal son and the prudent robber, including Dante’s topology, where the movement of the soul to paradise is depicted as climbing the mountain of Purgatory (the motive of climbing the holy mountain in Prishvin’s diaries). The sacred sequence of events captures the mystery of the transformation of the autobiographical character: this is the path through the death of the ego (“Kashchey’s Chain” of evil), opening a new vision and “kindred attention” to people and nature.

Keywords: diaries, Prishvin, autobiographical myth, plot of “The Path to the Invisible City,” curtain, Solovev myth, gospel story.