"THE WORDIS MAN, MANIS SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY, SPIRITUAL COMMUNITYIS SOPHIA". GNOSTIC MYTHANDTHE CONSTRUCTIONOFTHE AUTHORIN L. P. KARSAVIN'SSOPHIATHE EARTHLYANDTHE HEAVENLY

Sophia the Earthly and the Heavenly was written by L. P. Karsavin during his transition from mediaeval studies to religious philosophy. The text was fi rst published in the third issue of the almanac C & tcy;pe & lcy;e & tscy; ('Sagittarius', 1922). It represents a literary hoax: an "unknown" Gnostic treatise with a parodic commentary "from the publisher". The basis of the work is an artistic translation of the chapters of the treatise Pistis Sophiawith poetic inserts by Karsavin. The article analyses the structure of the author's self in the context of the Gnostic myth. It traces thematic connections with texts of other authors of the almanac, as well as with other "gnostic" texts by Karsavin and reveals the sources of mystifi cation and principles of parody. It also establishes connections with Alexei Remizov's stylisations (Russia in Letters), S. P. Bobrov's hoax (a continuation of A. S. Pushkin's poem Judith), etc. Further, it shows the connection of Karsavin's poetics with the abstruse language of the Futurists (Velimir Khlebnikov), the poetry of Symbolism (Vladimir Soloviev), and Acmeism ("gnostic" poetry of Mikhail Kuzmin). The Gnostic line in the works of other authors (Belenson, Kuzmin, Hollerbach, Ro-zanov) of the almanac helps to decipher the idea of Sophia... as the wandering of a soul in terms of eros mysticism. The latter theme is the leading one in Noctes Petropolitanae(1922), where in the image of Adam Kadmon Karsavin proposes the idea of the all-uni-fi ed man as a symphony. The Sophia myth is continued in O & ncy;a & chcy;a & lcy;a & khcy; ('On Beginnings', 1925). As a result, the structure of the text of Sophia... reveals an ensemble of authors, immanent and external to Karsavin's authorial self. All of them are connected in the multitudinous subject-author. Another meta-theme of the almanac is the Word: its cre-ative power (Fyodor Sologub) and its mute impotence (Artur Lurie). In Sophia..., in the idea of the Word as the Fullness of being and non-being, a synthesis is realised. For the authorial utterance Karsavin turns to the not-word, constructing from it his own-other multi-subjective self. The text of Sophia... is thus a laboratory of the author's multi-subject self, where the model of the symphonic personality is experimentally assembled and tested as the leading concept of Karsavin's subsequent doctrine of personality, in his ontology (On the Beginnings) and philosophy of history.