Bible quotes and images in the poetry of Maria Shkapskaya

This article is the first to examine in detail the complete corpus of Biblical quotations in the poetry of Maria Shkapskaya, including unpublished handwritten texts. The article uses the material in books Mater dolorosa (1921), Chas vecherniy (1913–1917) (The Evening Hour (1913–1917), 1922), Baraban Strogogo Gospodina (The Drum of the Strict Master, 1922), Krov’-ruda (Bloodore, 1922), Zemnye remyosla (The Earthly Crafts, 1925) and the poem Yav’ (Reality, 1923), as well as texts from the notebooks of 1903–1907, 1913–1920 and Vcherashnee, a project of a book of poems (Yesterday, 1916) with a preface by Z. Gippius. The intention is to explain the role and significance of the biblical corpus of texts for the author’s poetry. The task is to consider in chronological order all the poems by Maria Shkapskaya that are somehow related to the texts of the Holy Scripture, while clarifying the author’s basic principles of working with these texts. The thematic inversions characteristic of Shkapskaya’s poetry are revealed. The general thesis states that the nature of Shkapskaya’s appeal to the texts of Holy Scripture has changed over the years, and her attitude to them has consistently shifted from neutral-calm to a tense one that requires dialogue. Growing increasingly more conflicted and questioning over time, Shkapskaya’s quoting of biblical texts assumes the nature of a personal experience, which clearly indicates the author’s reflections in this direction and a deeply religious understanding of the surrounding reality and poetic creativity as such.