Уникальный концепт славы: девальвация ценности личной славы (молвы) в русском былинном эпосе

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the concept of glory, which should be placed among the main concepts of the world’s folk epics. According to the author’s analysis (undertaken through the axiological, comparative-historical, and historical-genetic methods), glory – as rendered in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, The Mahābhārata, European and Oriental medieval epics, etc. – is most often related to the rumors about a concrete hero and emerges as a substitute of individual immortality or as a pledge of postmortem beatitude. Among nearly all known works of heroic poetry, only the Russian folk epics are fundamentally opposed to this interpretation: Bylinas don’t treat glory as a specific attribute belonging to this or that hero, but as a collective virtue of all Russian knights – the one intended to deter foreign rulers from their invasions of Russia and to protect, in this earthly world, both the divine law and suffering people. Accordingly, the article provides a comparison between different works of heroic folklore and Russian bylinas, which enables both to interpret more fully the axiological structure of the epic tradition as such (the notions of glory, honor, boasting, and rumor – the ones still insufficiently analyzed in scholarly literature and defined more precisely in the present paper), and to determine the principal originality of the Russian folk epics, their unique position among other oral songs of similar nature. In particular, a comparison between the heroic songs of Christian Europe and Russian bylinas allows the author to argue confidently that precisely the latter incarnated (in the most original and profound way, at different levels of their artistic structure, including plot, motives, and imagery) the values and the ideas of Christianity, its spiritual and moral potential.