Abstract: Due to the constant interest in the study of religious images and motifs in literary works, it becomes relevant to study the motifs contained in literary texts on religious subjects. One of the key features of the work of the poetess of the mid – 19th century Yu.V. Zhadovskaya (1824-1883) is an artistic reinterpretation of the Christian traditions of spiritual weeping and "cleansing" prayer. The subject of the study is the motif of prayer tears as an external sign of "cleansing prayer" in the lyrics of Yu.V. Zhadovskaya.
The object of the research is the texts of religious and spiritual subjects of the first lifetime collection of poems "Temptation" (1845), "Calmly over me Again" (1846), "Monologue" (1846), "When reading the History of Peter the Great" (1846), the texts of the second lifetime collection of poems "Wonderful Minute!" (1847), "Night... Chu! into the shady Garden" (1846), "The Awakening of the Heart" (1848), "Who are my relatives" (1850) and unpublished texts "I remember that evening and quiet and beautiful", "Who loved and believed passionately", "The curly birches are noisy, noisy". To conduct the research, the method of historical and philological analysis, the biographical method, the comparative method, as well as the method of complex text analysis were used. A special contribution of the author to the study of the topic is the identification in the lyrics of Yu.V. Zhadovskaya of a group of poems of religious and spiritual themes, the lyrical event of which is focused on the Orthodox prayer tradition.
The main conclusions of this study are the identification of the religious component of the author's worldview. Turning to the Christian tradition of spiritual purification allows, on the one hand, to define the basic framework of readers' expectations, and on the other hand, to violate the peculiar genre canon of "cleansing" prayer, embodying the poetess's special worldview, which consists in a "dual" worldview: the desire to find inner harmony and tranquility is combined with a tragic sense of God-abandonment. The artistic reinterpretation of the tradition of Orthodox prayer is primarily associated with the use of such an element of "cleansing" prayer as crying and tears in the lyrics. A special prayerful state and poetic communion with God in lyrical situations containing the motif of prayer tears are a sign of entering the "field of purity" for spiritual purification and prayer, as well as a sign of inner transformation. The novelty of the research lies in conducting a systematic analysis of the motive of prayer tears in religious and spiritual texts.