Textual and Linguistic Means of Constructing the Venerable Image in Men of Faith Hagiographies

Abstract

The paper provides some results of linguistic analysis of Men of Faith hagiography in synodal and modern periods of Russian hagiography, the Life of Saint Seraphim of Sarov and Optina elder Leonidas (schemamonk Leo), in particular. The authors focus attention on textual and language means that are used to present the image of the man of faith, educe some peculiarities of hagiographic scheme that is to describe the life of saint eldership. It has been stated that the canonical structure of the saint hagiography demonstrates some variations of its implementation in the texts that are referred to separated time periods thus contributing to a full coverage of the saint's image due to a partitive-scheme realization (with some toposes lacking), a transformed scheme (when toposes demonstrate various gradation in detalization), or may be expended (by including new toposes). In the men of faith descriptions the following word groups show regularities in co-occurrence: words that describe the intrinsic (unseen) world (emotive lexical units) or present relations with extrinsic (observed) world (perceptive lexis). The reliance of emotives to the object status is estimated as a tool that serves for presenting high emotional intensiveness and its reasons, coordination between quantitative markers of emotional states and their measurement is uncovered. The perception processes are defined as valuable for making the venerable image because the perceptive words definitely point to specificity of the object assumption, and altogether they show connection between the process of information perception and cognition.