Novye Issledovaniâ Tuvy (Mar 2019)
Visuality and Textuality in Hagiographic Posters of Old Believers of the Chasovennye (“chapel-going”) Denomination
Abstract
Modern-day Old Believers of the ‘chapel-going” denomination (chasovennye) strive to preserve their doctrines and culture, and yet they are willing to adapt them in order to meet the needs of their communities in our constantly developing and changing world. Old Believers seek to compensate for the increasing and often destructive influence of the outer world on their traditions by simultaneously cultivating existing genres and creating new genres of their confessional art. The realistic representation of spiritual leaders in portraits, which are often accompanied by spiritual verses can be attributed to such an innovation. This composition can be attributed as visual-texts hagiography. The field collections made by the authors in 2016–2018 in Russia (on the territory of Eastern Siberia — Tuva, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Irkutsk oblast) and in the USA (Oregon, Minnesota), where the Chasovennye communities are found, were used as sources for this study – including images, written and oral sources. We have examined a number of portraits of monks and hegumenons of taiga sketes, especially those of Frs. Grigorii, Gurii, Timofei, Lavrentii and Mikhail. Of particular interest is the portrait of Fr. Mikhael and the accompanying informative memorial verse, dedicated to this famous religious figure of this denomination (full text provided in the article). The additional meaning given to the image by the memorial text turns it into an informative and highly dramatic hagiographic unity of the visual and the textual. This combined type of hagiography, common among contemporary Old Believers of the Chasovennye denomination, has become an integral part of reconstruction, saving and
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