Spiritual realism as a unity of the secular and the sacral in the poetry of hieromonk Roman (Matiushin-Pravdin)

The paper`s subject is the poetry of hieromonk Roman (Matiushin-Pravdin). The authors examine one of the properties characterizing the poet’s religious-aesthetical system, namely creative method of spiritual realism. The term spiritual realism means putting Christian ideals and sacral reality into artistic form. There are two main modalities in the literary discourse of spiritual realism: 1) secular (visible world); 2) sacral (hidden spiritual reality). Both in the first and the second case, the poet indicates a God’s omnipresence. God’s presence in everything that surrounds us is personally felt by the poet, and this experience is the basis of his creativity as well as the main source of poetic inspiration. The study shows that “secular” and “sacral” are semantic variables of lexemes, which fix, firstly, the multidirectional aspects of the Russian linguistic personality (religious-mystical and everyday, “secular”), and secondly, based on these aspects, the meanings of lexemes, connected with their non-clerical, “secular” — and clerical-religious spheres. To perceive, to get the idea and interpret the lyric poems of hieromonk Roman one should focus on the meanings and senses of polysemantic words and phrases. They can be used in their secular meanings of the literary Russian language on the one hand and in their Church Slavonic ones that imply the realia of an Orthodox Christian world view.