THE BOOK OF POEMS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ... - TopReferat

Скажу, что рая не приемлю.
Возьму опять суму мою
И снова попрошусь на землю.
So be it! When the time comes
And all roads end,
I will ask Peter about play,
Stopping on the threshold.
And if there is no play in heaven,
I'll say that I won't accept heaven.
I'll take my bag once more
And again set off for earth.
This refusal to accept a heaven without play is characteristic of Gippius's dynamic faith.
She seeks a "trembling eternity," not a static realm of unchanging wisdom. As in
"Когда?," she wishes to find in heaven earthly joys—a poet's play with words, a kitten's
game with a ball (Котенок возится с клубком...Играет с рифмами поэт). She strives
to combine the earthly with the divine, to unify the spiritual and the everyday.
Gippius's expectations for death become more complicated in the subsequent
poems. She longs not only for death, a passage from the earthly world to the spiritual
realm of heaven, but also for resurrection—a return to an original, sinless state. This
notion of resurrection as return is evident earlier in Сияния. In a discussion of the nature
of memory in the book's fourth poem, "Над забвеньем," the poet defines resurrection as
the "backward flight of moments" (воскресенье,/Мгновений обратный лет)—the literal
reestablishment of an earlier existence. 170
In "Сложности," the poet wishes to return to
simplicity, an original pure state reminiscent of the "enfance spirituelle" Gippius admired
170 In the final lines of "Идущий мимо," cited above, a God-like Gippius wishes to offer other souls the
choice of immortality or a return to nonexistence. It is possible that this return, seemingly a negative
opposite to immortality, is in fact an alternative reward for those who, tired of earthly existence, wish to
return to an original simplicity.
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