«И звѣзды тебѣ служатъ»: солнце, луна и звезды как внешние очертания смысловых констант в творчестве протопопа Аввакума (на материале текстов разных жанров)

Abstract

The article deals with the identification of semantic constants in the corpus of the texts of Protopope Avvakum, which manifested themselves as a characteristic feature of his worldview with the help of certain resources of the language system. In this regard, the main attention is paid to the substantives “the sun”, “the moon” and “stars” as the external outlines of associative links that arise in a number of works. At the same time, the article considers only those cases where the indicated lexical units are part of a syntactically built sequence. Thus, the methodology of the present article includes contextual analysis, reconstruction, comparison techniques and elements of philological hermeneutics. For the first time on extensive material (Life, written by himself, Books of interpretations and moral teachings, Books of conversations, theological writings and epistolary heritage) it is proved that the mentioning of these celestial bodies actualizes two key meanings, which we conditionally designated as “eschatological” and “axiological”. The first of them is due to the awareness of Nikon’s reforms as the beginning of the last days and the proximity of the Last Judgment, characteristic of the period of the early Old Believers, and the second – to the need for Protopope Avvakum to respond to the actions of his supporters and followers. It was revealed that the contexts of the analyzed lexical units expressing the names of celestial bodies organize the body of works into two blocks. The eschatological meaning is found in a number of texts, including the main editions of Life ..., Book of Interpretations ... and On the Creation of the World ..., and the axiological meaning - in the Book of Conversations and the epistolary heritage. The article ends with a general conclusion about the importance of searching for similar constants for the rest of the Pustozersk Prisoners.