Журнал «Филоlogos»

THE SCRIBE OF THE 16th CENTURY «THE BEGINNING OF MESSAGES...» IN HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT

Author: Kuzmina M.D.

The article deals with the study of one of the most significant scribes in the history of Old Russian literature - the scribe of the 16th century. "The beginning of the message, when you want to send to someone, to nobles or to powerful people, - to whom there is no name". It is considered in the historical and cultural context. Its connections with the previous scribe, of the 15th century, "Untitled", as well as with the previous and contemporary literary situation, are revealed. Created in the 16th century, the scribe clearly reflected the characteristic features of the literature of this century: on the one hand, the features of the «second monumentalism» style (D.S. Likhachev), officialism, and on the other, the tendency towards democratization and secularization. It vividly displayed the evolution of the epistolary genre in the indicated period. Previously distinguished by multivalence, closely associated with the genres of teachings, words, sermons, etc., a message to the 15th-16th centuries reveals the desire for isolation in the system of genres. The very fact of the appearance of the scribes - the first of which came out in the 15th century, and all by the end of the 17th century, there were about 170 of them is a clear indication of this process. Each scribe, and in particular, "The Beginning of the Message...", shows the tendency to form and strengthen the constitutive features of the epistolary genre. Among them, first of all, there exists a complimentary appeal to the addressee, self-derogation of the author, the antithesis of "author-sinner" - "addressee-righteous". This is the main and very traditional for the epistolary genre filling of the prescript. Due to the fact that the scribe, in accordance with its name, contains only the «beginning» of the messages, the content of the semantema, the main and most non-canonical part of the letter, is left to the discretion of the users themselves, which is very significant, in anticipation of the approaching era of democratization and secularization. Very curious are the two messages located last. This is the message about Sodom sin and "Another message from the Divine Books". Contrary to the name of the scribe, they are structurally completed. If the previous messages give users the opportunity at their discretion to diversify the epistolary text, then these two teach you to correctly build it all, from the prescript to the clause. Like all the studied samples of the scribe, they are peculiar hybrids of business, educational and friendly writing, which is reflected in all structural and compositional elements. Thus, the message about Sodom sin has a double clause: "secular", characteristic of friendly writing, emerging in Russian literature precisely in the 15th-16th centuries under the influence of ancient epistolography, and "religious", primordial for the Old Russian epistolary. The first is introduced by the word "end", the second - by the word "amen". It is noteworthy that the long-standing Russian tradition of the teaching message and the emerging secular friendly tradition are combined in the scribe based on the tradition of business writing, which is super-relevant for the 16th century.