INTERPRETATION OF THE GOSPEL PLOT IN THE SHORT STORY OF HONORE DE BALZAC “JESUS CHRIST IN FLANDERS”

Abstract

The article is devoted to the artistic adaptation of the Gospel story of Christ’s walking on water in O. de Balzac’s short story “Jesus Christ in Flanders”. The purpose of the article is to determine strategies for mastering the New Testament text in O. de Balzac’s short story “Jesus Christ in Flanders”. Methods of investigation are carried out by studying the work of art using the historical-cultural method and intertextual analysis. The historical and cultural method establishes the connection of the short story with the social and moral problems of the French bourgeois society of the first half of the 19th century. Intertextual analysis is focused on identifying the dialogue between gospel and artistic texts. The results. The analysis of O. de Balzac’s short story “Jesus Christ in Flanders” proves that the decoding system of the artistic text represents the content and structure of the evangelical parable of Christ’s walking on the waters. The recipient text is connected with the New Testament pretext at the levels of naming and the explanation of the image of Christ, including plot parallels, and actualization of evangelical values. Emphasis is placed on the transformation of intertextual inclusions in the artistic text in order to reproduce the social background of modern reality. The ethical and social ideal of O. de Balzac is substantiated from the point of view of Christian axiology. The process of a short story genre transformation into a literary (stylized) apocrypha is traced. Conclusions. In the process of research, the parameters of the representation of the New Testament history in the artistic text were established. The central character in the short story, like in the Gospel parable, is Jesus Christ and his teaching about salvation by faith. At the same time, in the short story the precedent text is modified, which is reflected in the peculiarities of the character system and in additional plot episodes. The new artistic version is projected onto the modern reality and interpreted by the writer through Christian axiology as the main spiritual and moral mark for overcoming social contradictions of bourgeois France in the first half of the 19th century. In this sense, Balzac’s views get close to the ideas of the representatives of Christian socialism, which used to be quite attractive to the French writers in the thirties. The Gospel story in Balzac’s interpretation contributed to the activation of genre reorientation and modification of the short story “Jesus Christ in Flanders” into a literary (stylized) apocrypha.