Theologische Zeitschrift 79/1 (2023)
Natalia Bakshi, "«Sowjetparadies» vs. «Verlorenes Paradies». Zur Aktualisierung der biblischen Urgeschichte in der sowjetischen und russischen Literatur der 1920er Jahre," 104-122
After the upheavals of the Russian Revolution, the biblical discourses of the New Man and Paradise were updated by both the Soviets and the exiles. While Soviet propaganda made a conscious and also deliberate polemical exaggeration of Christian usage, writers like Jevgenij Zamjatin and Michail Bulgakov tried to address the proximity of a Soviet «paradise» to hell and to expose the socialist utopia of the «new man» as a dystopia. In the exile poetry of Ivan Bunin or Vladimir Nabokov, for example, the use of Christian symbols, on the other hand, is a metaphorical one that helps to articulate longings or feelings of loss and grief. The presented discourses of reception are to be understood as a kind of real-dialectical dispute about the adequate actualisation of traditional Christian metaphors of disruption.
