N.A. Klyuev and F.-R. Lamenne: The image of the future through the prism of social Christianity

The article introduces, on evidentiary grounds, a previously unknown source of N.A. Klyuev's religious and philosophical ideas – the work of the ideologist of social Christianity F.R. Lamenne “The Words of a Believer” (“Paroles d'un croyant”). It is revealed that in his 1919 article “Red Alarm” Klyuyev included almost unchanged chapters 35 and 36 of this text translated by brothers Vladimir and Leonid Androusonov (1906 edition). It is assumed that Klyuev's acquaintance with the ideas of social Christianity first occurred in a revolutionary environment in the early 1900s, which determined the formation of a stable complex of philosophems in the poet's artistic consciousness, which is also fundamentally important not only for his works of the 1900s. (article “In Black Days”), but also for his work of 1917–1919: this is, first of all, an understanding of fundamental social transformations as “participation in God's plan” and the idea of the future as a “kingdom of justice and the kingdom of love” in which slavery and hunger will be eradicated, the lost universal brotherhood of people (“the brothers of Christ”) – restored, and the “God-man people” will rise again. The dramatic collision of Klyuev's life-creating myth is revealed: on the one hand, it is rooted in the idea of the need for the spiritual transformation of mankind, dating back to V.S. Solov'ev, and on the other – in the ideology of social Christianity with its understanding of the revolutionary struggle as a religious sacrifice, implying equal readiness for both heroic death for “brothers” and bloodshed as a means to achieve the “future kingdom”.