Speech genre “interpretation” in the era of the Russian church schism of the 17th century: Hermeneutic and linguo-personological aspects (based on the “Book of Interpretations and Moralities” by Avvakum)

Abstract

The research presents the description of the speech genre “interpretation” on the basis of the understudied essay of Archpriest Avvakum “Book of Interpretations and Moralities”. The relevance of the topic is determined, firstly, by the small number of publications with the analysis of the source involved, and secondly, by polar and contradictory statements about the composition of the “Book of Interpretations and Moralities”. The article uses the following methods and techniques: description, context analysis, reconstruction, comparison and interpretation. For the first time, with the involvement of third-party handwritten (XIII–XVI centuries) and early printed sources (XVIIth century), both precedent features of the form of the interpretations of Avvakum and his innovation in this speech genre have been identified. The reproduction of the “verse-interpretation” structure, known from the samples of the Slavic translation of the work of Andrei of Caesarea and the explanatory psalters, should be attributed to the precedent features of the form of the interpretations. We refer to the content side of the interpretations as innovation in the speech genre. In particular, it is substantiated that the exegesis of Psalm 102 is accompanied by rethinking of Orthodox hymnography, including the Eucharistic canon, as a result of which the Old Testament source is filled with the content of the worship of the New Testament church and, therefore, turns out to be more significant and valuable than the sum of the texts used as material for interpretation.

Keywords

• genre
• text
• interpretation
• linguistic personality
• philological hermeneutics