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Космология и Возрождение на рубеже ХХ в.: “Миры” Александра Блока
The article represents a fragment of collaborative study on the reception of heliocentrism at the turn of the twentieth century. Popular interest in astronomy and its history was an essential part of the intellectual culture of that time. From this perspective, the authors consider Alexander Blok’s poem «Worlds fly, years fly. Empty…» (1912). Blok implicitly contrasts the fixed and closed cosmos of antiquity and the Middle Ages with a multitude of worlds that fly through the endless, dark, and empty space with monstrous speed. The rotating Earth is likened to a whirring top, which reminds one, a contrario, of the former harmony of the spheres. The commentary offered in the article provides a partial reconstruction of the still largely unexplored lines of the intellectual history of the late nineteenth — early twentieth centuries related to the widespread views on the Renaissance and modern cosmology.