The Transcendent Power of the Image: Marina Cvetaevaʼs Vision of Russian Icons and the Mother of God in the 1910s-early 1920s

The article explores Tsvetaevaʼs treatment of the image of the Mother of God in the light of the re-discovery of Russian medieval icons in the 1910s-1920s. It highlights Tsvetaevaʼs links with intellectual and aesthetic trends of the modernist period and argues that Tsvetaevaʼs iconophilic outlook was shaped by the debates on the representation of Russian cultural identity and history as manifested in artistic and literary works of the 1910s-1920s. The article demonstrates that Pavel Florenskii and Vladimir Solovʼev influenced Tsvetaevaʼs treatment of sacred visual images and religious themes.