Genre Originality of «The Tale of the Venerable Abbess Athanasia»

Abstract

The article is devoted to the consideration of the genre originality of the "Tale of the Venerable Abbess Athanasia", which was included in the Synodic Literary Collections. This text is a fragment of a prostrate hagiography. When including "The Story of..." in the synodic prefaces, the compilers were initially interested in the saint's teaching on the necessity of remembering the dead. Later, the circumstances of the saint's posthumous miracle began to play an equally important role in the illustrated synodical literary collections, especially in the Great Synod of Solba from the 18th century, which vividly and figuratively proved the idea of the monument. The synodal article belongs to the symbolic genre of the vision (phenomenon). Its combination with the miracle of the flourishing staff, which plays the role of "physical" proof, corresponds to the general process of genre synthesis characteristic of late medieval literature.