The Concept of Beauty in O. Nikolaeva's Story "Kuks from the Kind of Seraphim": Christian Interpretation
Abstract
Nikolaeva's prose is devoid of mysticism. It is filled with light and hope even when reality appears in a tragic form. The story "Kuks from the kind of seraphim" is permeated with a sense of the value of being. Basically, this feeling is deeply Christian. A. Men wrote that in Christianity “man is an incarnated being, in the flesh, that God introduced the Spirit into matter, that the play of the flesh, the play of nature, the multicolor of the material world became the bosom in which the spirit sparkles” [5, C 302]. The author makes an attempt to reveal what the true salvation of a person is - in external, aesthetically beautiful, or in spiritual, internal beauty. Thus, the concept of “beauty”, being the central object of the author’s attention, is subjected to two-sided consideration in the story: as embodied in concretely expressed realities and as spiritual, that is, “the quality of that sphere of the personality that is associated with the transcendent principle, as something that is related to the spirit of God” [4, p.107].
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