Eschatological Images in the Living Speech of the Con­temporary Old Believers of Perm Prikamye

Abstract

This article considers the reflection of certain peculiarities of Old Believer religious consciousness in the language of the contemporary Prikamye Old Believers. The description of vocabulary, phraseology, paremiology, and utterances found the living speech of contemporary believers is aimed at the restoration of the cultural context of tradition and revealing the peculiarities of expression of the eschatological theme, the main one for Old Believer ideology. Observations of the living speech of the Old Believer dialect bearers help reveal a set of linguistic forms expressing the meaning of human existence, including vocabulary and proverbs reflecting the ideas of Old Believers concerning death and new birth of the world, the ways of death visualisation, posthumous existence, and fate of the souls of the dead. In the course of interpretation of such means, supplemented by the descriptions of the Old Believer ritual practices, the author reveals the attitude tradition bearers have towards death as well as the peculiarities of their life ideals and moral values. To reveal cultural and ideological meanings, the author analyses the figurativeness of words and expressions existing in the Old Believer vocabulary, comparing religious and cultural connotations of language forms under study. While describing the means representing the ideas of the end of the world and the person’s death, the author emphasises their relation to religious texts and verbal pre-Christian tradition symbolism. The author concludes that the Old Believer linguistic worldview reflects a peculiar syncretic worldview which is associated with the fading away of the tradition and the decline of religious literacy. The linguistic representation of the Old Believer worldview peculiarities denotes that not only book learning, but also naive religious archaic ideas have an effect on their consciousness.