Time and eternity in the literary image of the church procession: Pushkin’s Boris Godunov and Shmeleff’s The Year of the Lord

Abstract

This article considers the depiction of the church procession to examine the literary inter­pretation of time and eternity in Alexander Pushkin’s historical drama Boris Godunov and Ivan Shmeleff’s novel The Year of the Lord. The two texts share fundamental similarities in literary images. The church procession is portrayed as a manifestation of eternity in the tan­gible reality of this world. Despite their common temporal nature, images in Boris Godunov and The Year of the Lord differ in terms of both motivation (state-driven in Pushkin’s dra­ma and public-driven in Shmeleff’s novel) and the degree of detail. The description is con­densed and script-driven in Boris Godunov, whereas the church procession in The Year of the Lord unfolds before the reader to reveal personal, family-related, and public aspects of the phenomenon.

Keywords

• time
• eternity
• alexander pushkin
• boris godunov
• ivan shmeleff
• the year of the lord
• icon-bearing procession