Professor Sergey Sergeevich Averintsev
[Poets]
Content
Two thousand years with Virgil
The luxury of pattern and the depth of the heart: the
poetry of Grigor Narekatsi
Reflections on Zhukovsky's translations
Consistency of symbols in the poetry of Vyacheslav Ivanov
The fate and message of Osip Mandelstam
The poetry of Clemens Brentano
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, or The Surprise of Sanity
Between "clarification" and "covering":
the
situation of the image in the poetry of
Ephraim the Syrian 8
Alas, our contemporary does
not seem to remember very clearly the very existence of classical Syriac
literature, which survived its golden age in the 4th-5th centuries. “The
Syrians – did they write in Arabic?” - sometimes you have to hear from people
who are not at all ignorant. Neither textbooks nor reference books are in a
hurry to help grief 9
.
And this is a pity, because
literature in Syriac, the offspring of the Aramaic language tree, created over
a strictly measured historical period, when the onslaught of Hellenism lost
strength, and the onslaught of Islam had not yet gained strength, is not just
the subject of one of the disciplines of Semitology, not a local
phenomenon that can only be praised for its originality, but a historical and
literary fact of a worldwide scale. The lines connecting in time biblical
antiquity with the Christian, and even Muslim, Middle Ages, and in space - Iran
and everything that lies to the east of Iran, with Byzantium and Western
Europe, pass through the Syrian-speaking zone, intersect in it, form their own
lines in it. vital knots. In the first millennium of our chronology, the Syrian
influence was felt from Ireland 10
to China 11.
This is not the place to talk about this in any detail. Let us just recall two
circumstances: firstly, it was the Syrians who were the first to create durable
forms of the Christian hymn for Byzantium, and therefore for all countries that
Byzantium influenced 12
; secondly, it was from the Syrians that the Moslem East received the tradition
of Aristotelianism, which in a roundabout way, through the Arabs, returned to
the West and fertilized high scholasticism
13
. The importance of both cannot be overestimated. And one more brief reminder,
concerning not world, but domestic culture. What do ancient Russian literature,
together with Russian folklore, owe to Syrian authors (and especially to
Ephraim the Sirin
) 14,
in a few words you can’t say; but even in our literature of the last century,
which seemed to have departed so far from these sources, it is impossible not
to recall Pushkin, who transcribed into verse the prayer of the same Ephrem
the Syrian 15
, and Dostoevsky, a reader of another Syrian author, Isaac of
Nineveh 16
.
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