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Abstract:

The a rticle reconstructs t he p rincipal m otifs of Mikhail Prishvin’s Kitezh text and reveals the connection between Prishvin’s search for God and the German existential philosophical tradition. Prishvin’s Kitezh myth (“Russian Parsifal”) determines his forest soteriology, where he reinterprets the existential tradition of the forest wanderings of Novalis and M. Heidegger in the mysterial plot of “resurrection from among,” the salvation of the “spring of light,” the revelation of the “pantry of the sun.” Prishvin’s Kitezh text is based on the intuition of the life creation (the peace creation amid war), overcoming social and political catastrophes, which brings the writer closer to the philosophy of the Kitezh people of the 1920–1940s (M. Bakhtin, A. Meyer, A. Ukhtomsky, A. Gorsky, V. Muravyov), with the German intuition of authentic life, salvation from the world of “deserted numbers” in M. Heidegger and E. Junger, the identification of being as a non-metric space of the “forest” in V. Bibikhin. Mechanical, object-based thinking (“the wall of the material” in Jünger, the “veil of being” in Prishvin) contrasts with thinking “in the image of a forest path” (A. Mikhailovsky), the discovery “in the forest” of a true community — vivid I–Thou relationship. Distancing themselves from Soviet ideology, the residents of Kitezh, who “went into the forest,” discover a veritable “commune” — an “invisible church,” understood as the connection of all living and dead, “The Whole Man” (M. Prishvin), holy flesh, “The Holy Grail of man public” (S. Bulgakov), Adam Kadmon, “Microcosm, realizing itself as Macrocosm” (V. Muravyov), “expanding, mutually saving life,” “superpersonal folk-church fullness of consciousness” (A. Ukhtomsky).