The study raises the question of the historical dynamics of the theme of Job in the Russian poetry of the second half of the 20th – early 21st century. As a link between the Old and New Testaments, the Book of Job poses the most important problem of theodicy for mankind – the justification of the divine world order. A special emphasis is placed on Alexander Soprovsky’s philosophical essay “On the Book of Job”, a pro grammatic aesthetic text of the 1970s.