PRAYER AND THE "SPIRITUAL CONSTITUENT" IN THE IMAGE OF A BELOVED IN ALEXANDER PUSHKIN'S LYRIC POETRY

Prayer in Alexander Pushkin's lyric poetry appears in its natural ecclesiological context. In his prayerful poems devoted to a woman the motif of turning Love into Divinity in the light of Christian understanding of Beauty plays the most important role. Pushkin's personal prayers are very close to the patristic idea. In his poem Akathist to Ekaterina Nikolaevna Karamzina Pushkin embodied the prayer-praising; in his poem I loved you — and love it may yet be Deep in my soul... he embodied the prayer-blessing; in his sonnet Madonna the reader can find benediction and in the poem To the Beauty (1832) one can feel the state of religious reverence. The heroine of these poems is considered to be a divine creature, a sacral image. In Pushkin's lyric poetry these profound evangelical ideas are renewed. The hymnologic genre and Christian divine service in his poems become obvious. The artistic embodiment of a prayer becomes possible with the help of an iconic word and image. A prayerful word in Pushkin's poems contributes to idealization of the form that evolves from emotional and sensual state to spiritual and ascetical world-view, from the artistic and figurative word to the iconic clarity