Article

Name: The saints and the righteous people in the Russian religious verses: Christian text in the context of folklore

Authors: A. M. Petrov

Institute of Language, Literature and History of Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Petrozavodsk, Russian Federation

In the section Study of folklore

Abstract: The development of characters of Christian culture in a folk tradition is studied on the material of Russian spiritual poetry. The purpose of the paper is to consider the ways of the transformation of Christian ideas, categories, characters in Russian folklore, to reveal the specificity of adaptation of the Christian culture to the folklore tradition and to investigate the assimilation of Christian concepts and symbols by the traditional folk culture. The subject of the study is the mechanism for adapting the literary text to the folklore picture of the world, to the characters, models and stereotypes of traditional folk culture. The objects are the folklore characters of saints and righteous people. The material of the study is presented by the folklore epic spiritual verses: «Alexei, the Man of God», «About Kirik and Ulite», «Theodore Tiron», «George the Brave», «Demetrius of Thessalonica», «Boris and Gleb», «Joseph the Beautiful», «Galaktion And Epistemia», «The Prince Joasaph and the Desert», «Two brothers Lazarus», etc. The results obtained made it possible to conclude that folklorization process is carried out with the help of the plot models, characters, stylistic formulas which are familiar to the bearers of a folk tradition. Saint can appear in the form of epic snake fighter and gets the appropriate attributes. A motif of growth of a hero «by leaps and bounds» is also actively involved in a genre of spiritual verse. It goes back to the depths of the mythological tradition. In the genre of spiritual verse this archaic motif is used to express Christian values. A Christian chronotope is also comprehended in the categories habitual to the folk consciousness: in many cases, it is subjected to the tripling pattern. If in the book «The Tale of Boris and Gleb», a period of the incorruptibility of relics of the saints is not specified, in the spiritual verse, it gets specific numeric outline: three years. Transformation of book motifs can be done with the forces of a book culture itself, without the involvement of means of folklore. For example, twenty pieces of silver, which Joseph’s brothers get from the deal with merchants (according to the Old Testament story), in the folk spiritual poems are transformed into thirty under the influence of conceptual numerical New Testament formula thirty pieces of silver which is much more widely known in a world culture and has become a symbol of betrayal. However, here we cannot exclude the influence of the tripling pattern of folklore: the pre-Christian folk tradition contains a great number of formulas with a numeral thirty (as well as other derivatives of the numeral three), which define the stylistic appearance of different genres of folklore. The adaptation, creative reworking of the plot of the book is not confined only to its simplification. In some cases, as a result of the folklorization of the original story, the plot acquires new motives, and Christian ideas, borrowed from the Christian texts, get a new impetus for development. This is, for example, a spiritual verse «Two brothers Lazarus», which contains a significant development of the Christian idea of retribution for the righteous man who devoted his life to «the work in the name of God».

Keywords: spiritual verses, folk Orthodoxy, holiness, study of religion, folklore, cultural adaptation

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