The image of the Beautiful Lady in Sasha Chorny’s poem "The Child"

The article presents an analysis of Sasha Chorny’s poem "The Child," written in Rome and later published in the Parisian Russian Gazette in 1925. At the center of the poem is the depiction of a single day spent by the lyrical protagonist playing with a little Italian girl. The purpose of this study is to identify the distinctive features of the child’s image as portrayed in "The Child." The scientific novelty lies in the fact that, for the first time, the images of the lyrical hero and the little heroine in Sasha Chorny’s poem are correlated with the literary traditions of the medieval chivalric romance. The results demonstrate that the poem contains allusions not only to medieval chivalric culture but also to the Silver Age with its cult of the Beautiful Lady. Against the Silver Age ideal of “femininity,” which personifies Beauty in this world and bestows harmony without delving into mysticism and theology, Sasha Chorny opposes and affirms the ideal of “childlikeness.” It is precisely this ideal that inspires poetic creativity, protects from a hostile world, and grants a high purpose and meaning to life.