BIBLICAL PARALLELISM IN “THE MYSTERIOUS DROP” BY F. N. GLINKA (LIGHT AS WORD AND IMAGE)

The article deals with the uses 19th century Russian poetry made of parallelism as a biblical stylistic device, with a special focus on The Mysterious Drop, a religious poem by F. N. Glinka. We have traced a firm connection between biblical stylistics and that of Glinka's poem. Fearing to distort the basics of Christian teachung, the poet both included the words of Christ or biblical prophets almost verbatim into his poem and borrowed stylistic figures and devices from the Old and New Testaments. Hence, one of the most frequent words and images in The Mysterious Drop is that of light. We use it as a test case to study the semantics of various kinds of parallelism (direct, synonymical, antithetic, synthetic, progressive and chiasmatic). Our final conclusion is that the stylistical figures and devices are used by Glinka in his poem to help readers better understand the biblical message.