Древнерусская литература: истоки и особенности

Literary works of Old East Slavic authors

Old East Slavic literature, also known as Old Russian literature, is a collection of literary works of Rus' authors, which includes all the works of ancient Rus' theologians, historians, philosophers, translators, etc., and written in Old East Slavic. It is a general term that unites the common literary heritage of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine of the ancient period. In terms of genre construction, it has a number of differences from medieval European literature. The greatest influence on the literature of ancient Rus' was exerted by old Polish and old Serbian literature. Most of the monuments of Old East Slavic literature have been preserved in the form of manuscripts. The most common type of manuscript was literary collections. Notebooks written by a single scribe could then be bound by the scribe or binder himself. Such collections can be of a certain ("Zlatostruy", "Izmaragd", "Solemn", etc.) or indefinite content, reflecting the individual tastes and interests of one or another scribe who selected materials for himself or for his customer. Unlike other traditionalist literatures, the Old East Slavic literature is characterized by syncretism, lack of clearly expressed poetological reflection, conscious rejection of rationalism and specification of theoretical knowledge. It differs from Byzantine literature by its emphasized irregularity, the blurring of genres and boundaries between the prosaic and the poetic, and the lack of a clear conceptual apparatus. Voluminous works could be copied and intertwined into separate books: some letopises, works on world history, paterics, works of a liturgical nature, prologues, etc. Small compositions, for example, "Praying of Daniel the Immured" or the Tale of the Destruction of the Rus' Land did not make up separate books, but were distributed in collections.

The early examples of pre Christian Old East Slavic Rus' literature should primarily include the oral epic: legends, myths and fairy tales. Most of the Old East Slavic oral folklore was recorded only in the 18th and 19th centuries. Among the oral works, stories about the meeting of a person with an otherworldly force were particularly distinguished. Such a story by genre was divided into a bailichka, where a meeting with evil spirits is told on behalf of an "eyewitness", and a byvalschina, an oral story about a case that allegedly took place in reality, without focusing on the personal testimony of the narrator. Bailichka and byvalschina were often told in the villages to friends or children in order to wean them to walk far from home, and, according to Yevgeny Meletinsky, they became the prototype of "scary fairy tales". Later, a special type of druzhina poetry began to take shape – bylina, Rus' epic poems about heroic or mythological events or remarkable episodes of national history. In some ways, bylina are similar to skaldic poetry: both are divided into songs of praise and blasphemy and glorify some historical event. Bylina, as a rule, are written in tonic verse with two or four accents.

Almost all the literature of Rus' – original and translated – was handwritten. Handwritten works were distributed by copying by scribes or ordinary people. In Rus', the apocrypha about the Last Judgment was especially popular. Among such works, a special place was occupied by the life of Basil the Younger, the second part of which (scenes from the vision of Vasily Gregory's pupil about the Last Judgment and a lengthy story about Theodore) spread as independent works. Later, the original Old East Slavic apocrypha began to be created, the most famous of which is "The Walking of the Virgin through the Torments". Its plot is similar to the Greek "Revelation of the Most Holy Theotokos", but it also has many original features: for example, pagans who worship , Veles and Perun are in the first circle of hell, and there are a number of anti Semitic statements in the text itself. According to the philosopher Sergei Bulgakov, the special popularity of apocryphal literature in Rus' is indicated by the fact that of the seven most important monuments of the Jewish apocalyptic (except for the books of the prophet Daniel), three were preserved exclusively in Old Slavonic translations.

Presumably, both epics and folk tales were not recorded by contemporaries for the reason that Rus' inherited from the Byzantine Empire a ban on literary fiction and the presence of a purely artistic function in the works. Back in 1073, the compilers of the Izbornik Svyatoslav warned against worldly writings based on artistic imagination. Fiction developed only in the late period. However, despite some limitations, scientific and artistic works had to answer questions related to natural history (the origin of the world, cosmology) and the development of human society (the settlement of peoples, the origin of power, the state, the meaning and purpose of human history). The first original works in Kievan Rus' were instructive collections, which are the most common type of manuscripts (even after the beginning of printing in Russia in 1569, manuscripts have not lost their popularity). The scribe copied various works according to some attribute or genre in a notebook. Notebooks written by one scribe could then be bound by the scribe himself or the bookbinder into a separate book. The bookbinder could collect notebooks of different times and different scribes and connect them because they were of the same format or were combined by them according to content. Such collections are currently called convolutes. Such collections of teachings as Izmaragd, Golden Chain, Bee, Palea, Solemn, Zlatostruy (origins), Pchela (of Byzantine origin) were originally intended for home and cell reading. Of these, the most interesting is Palea (also Explanatory Palea), which is a collection of several interconnected ancient Rus' works that set out Old Testament history with additions from apocryphal monuments, as well as with theological reasoning. Already in the early period of the development of Rus' literature, one can trace the understanding of Rus' not only as an ethno political and religious community, but also as the Kingdom of Christ. In the Sermon on Law and Grace of the middle of the 11th century (the future Metropolitan Hilarion), the newly baptized Rus' people are called new. The perception of the people who were baptized in the "last times" (before the Last Judgment) as new, endowed with special grace, was characteristic of Rus'. The widespread idea of an imminent dreadful judgment was strongly reflected in the Old East Slavic literature of that period; ascetic creations and instructive literature became an introduction to soteriology (the doctrine of the salvation of the soul).

In the early period after the Christianization of Kievan Rus', there was no special church calendar, and the Old Slavic calendar was not suitable for calculating church holidays. Therefore, many authors had to make their own calculations in their works, which ranked their works among not only Paschal, but also mathematical treatises. For complex calculations, schoty was often used. The earliest mathematical work of Kievan Rus' is considered to be "the doctrine of numbers" by Kirik the Novgorodian, a treatise on the calculus of time, combining an essay on mathematics, chronology and Paschalistics. However, later mathematical treatises did not receive a proper development in Kievan Rus'. Among the works equal to the "doctrine of numbers", scientists include the "Charter of military Affairs" created in the 15th and 16th centuries, which set out the tasks of triangulation on the ground, and the "Book of soshny writing", dedicated to land surveying. Later works include an extensive manuscript entitled "Synodal No. 42", the first textbook in Rus' on theoretical geometry.

The early cosmological works of Kievan Rus' were partially influenced by apocryphal writings, mixed with pre Christian ideas about the structure of the world. Thus, much attention is paid to the creation and structure of the world in two of the most significant early works: the Dove Book and "About the whole creation". Both works have a complex structure and are probably based on Old East Slavic apocryphal legends that existed for the early period after the Christianization of Kievan Rus'. It is also interesting that in the "Depth Book", as in two other ancient Rus' monuments – "The Conversation of the Three Saints" and "The Conversation of Jerusalem" – for some reason, whales are endowed with supernatural power. In the "Conversation of the Three Saints", the Earth floats on top of the great sea on three large whales and 30 small whales; the latter cover 30 sea windows; "The Conversation of Jerusalem" and "Depth Book" connect the movement of the whale with the end of the world. According to the "Depth Book" — "The Whale fish is the mother of all fish. On the Whale fish the earth is founded; when the Whale fish turns, then our white light is finished (the end of all things will come)". The so called "fortune telling books" (also "divinatory books") can probably also be attributed to cosmological works, which are currently not officially assigned to any of the genres of Kievan Rus'. Fortune telling books (Volkhovnik, Gromnik, Kolyadnik, Trepetnik, Enchanter, etc.) were mainly distributed secretly: they were copied, sewn into other books, and passed on by inheritance. Officially, the distribution of such literature was persecuted by the church; lists of forbidden (so called renounced) books of Kievan Rus' were compiled, in which divinatory literature was equated with apocrypha.

Very popular in ancient Rus' were the lives of saints (zhytie), a kind of genre of hagiography that describes the life, deeds and miracles of ancient Rus' saints, martyrs and miracle workers.