Sophia, the wisdom of God conceptions of the divine feminine in Russian culture, 1880--1917

This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach to the idea of Sophia, the feminine incarnation of divine Wisdom, as a central aspect of "Silver Age" Russian culture. Existing scholarship affirms the importance of Sophia, but there have been no attempts to offer an analysis of the phenomenon nor to understand why Sophia had such wide appeal. This dissertation fills this gap by examining Sophia and related ideas in Russian literature and a range of other disciplines.The first chapters deal with the history of the idea of Sophia as the personification of a feminine aspect of the divine in the ancient world and Eastern and Western European culture. Highlighting the opportunities and obstacles in applying feminist models to Russian culture, the instability of relationships of power, authority, and gender in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russian culture are also explored.The second part of the dissertation focuses on the role of Sophia in the creative lives and works of various representative and important figures, elaborating a typology of creative postures resulting from encounters with the idea of Sophia designated "sophian despair" and "sophian hope."An examination of the creative lives and works of Vladimir Soloviev, Aleksandr Blok, and Pavel Kuznetsov trace the sources of sophian despair through philosophy, art, and poetic language to a tragic interaction of conceptions of femininity with ideas of the theurgic power of art, nascent modernism, and Symbolist life-creation. On the other hand, a reading of Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolai Roerich describes a position of sophian hope related to similar ideas. The project ends by exploring women's creative positions with respect to Sophia, an area of research until now almost totally neglected.The goal of this dissertation is developing a broader understanding of Symbolist and Silver Age culture and the position of Sophia within it. In doing so, it offers an argument for the centrality of the idea of Sophia Sophia and sophian ideas become not merely a common motif, but a central concept, the proper understanding of which is crucial to the assessment of Russian culture in this period.