Abstract

"The Crown" was written by Vyacheslav Ivanov in 1909. For almost a century it attracted the attention of literary scholars and readers, remaining an enigma, a 'hard nut' for most. The text of "The Crown" is a semiotically generated hermetic system based on mythological images in Indo-European theological context---pagan, Hellenic and Scandinavian, and Judeo-Christian, with some traces going back to Vedic and Zoroastrian sources. ;The present work is devoted to the detailed textual analysis of "The Crown" in the cultural context, to the determination of its leitmotifs, the levels of polysemy, the modus of presentation , its architectonics of ascent and descent, which reveals the way of the 'weaving' of "Crown", its dynamics. The considered text is a hypertext, a set of permutable texts generating a vast system of high order semantic connections. ;The prime goal of this dissertation is to determine a deep structure of the sonnets. The strategy of present analysis is to found, following by signs, the projection of sonnets' images into a mythological system, to establish the logical relationships between them, and to convert this system of relations to the decoding and interpretation of the interacting mythologems in the symbolic field. The evolution of images is a fundamental feature of "The Crown". Semantic directions and parallels are from the very beginning encoded in the text in the relationship of the initial line to the coda, that closes the sonnets' circle. The end of the analysis is to understand the author's technique of weaving the crown of sonnets at all structural levels, to reveal the aesthetics of harmony between the meaning and form. The forming of meaning, as will be shown, is based not so much on the introduction of new images, signs, and properties as on their evolution, their inner affinity and mutation, the peculiar change of their function in the conditional poetic context; it clears up the author's intentions as teleological. ;The theological context underlies by the theologem of God who suffered and died for the people and is resurrected, symbolizing eternal life. Ivanov is trying to create the religious conception of All-Unity, weaving parallel motifs of pagan and Judeo-Christian myths finally developed into Christian ones. ;The philosophical analysis of the sonnets' context is based on antique philosophy , neo-Platonics, philosophy of mysticism of 17th--18th centuries , the German classical philosophy. It is connected with the contemporary Russian and European philosophy. The psychological implication is considered in the context of Jungian school of psychoanalysis, especially Jung's and Neumann's approaches