POETICS OF THE LIFE OF ST. EPHRAIM OF TORZHOK

Abstract

According to legend, the Venerable Ephraim of Torzhok was an 11th century ascetic, and the “ancient scripture” about him has been lost. The history of the saint was written anew: a Brief edition of his Life was created in the last quarter of the 16th century, an Extensive one — in the second quarter of the 17th century. The subject of research of this article is the poetics of the Life of St. Ephraim of Torzhok (mainly based on the material of the rhetorically adorned Extensive edition). The text’s highly complex structure is examined and attributed to the strong dependence of the Extensive edition on the Brief edition and to the special tasks that the compiler set for himself. The question of the place of the Life in the history of the hagiographic genre, and the ways in which traditional formulas and motifs, and biblical quotations work in the text is investigated along with the fragments of the composition marked by rhetorical means. The Life was probably created not so much with a focus on the hagiographic canon, but in the genre-appropriate language: the compiler of the Extensive edition approached the traditional elements of the hagiographic genre quite freely. One of the main events of the Life, both in the Brief and Extensive versions, was specifically the creation of the text about the saint. The fragmentary nature of the Life, which combines heterogeneous elements characteristic of folk and book lives, allows us to observe the process of formation of a new type of hagiographic text that took place in the 17th century.