2019 Vol. 10 №2

The article describes the main features of the hagiographic genre in the Life of Alexander from Plutarch’s Comparative Biographies. I use the comparative, reverse and structural-semantic methods to analyse the biography of Alexander the Great, the images of the protago­nist and the narrator, the unreality and the deification of the protagonist. There is a certain typological convergence between bios as a genre and Plutarch’s ancient biographies. This convergence is reflected in the structure of Alexander’s biography, which is built according to a certain model, a plot-scheme pattern, and includes Alexander’s birth, childhood, upbring­ing, adolescence, maturity, his victories, lifetime deification and death. The correlation of the two genre forms helps to reveal and explore the biographic image of Plutarch’s main character as well as his human fate, the aim of life and the freedom of choice. These aspects are reflected in the hagiographic genre. I analyse the similarities and differences of the narrative strategies employed since the narrative (non-diegetic narrator) in the hagiography genre is clearly relat­ed to the non-diegetic “multiple” narrator of Plutarch's biography. I argue that the genre of ancient biography with its topos of private life and its entertaining and instructive functions serves as a nutrient substrate for the formation of the genre of bios.

I analyse three hagiographic poems written by Konrad von Würzburg, a German poet of the XIII century. The poems describe the lives of Saint Alexis, a Man of God, Saint Pantaleon and Pope Sylvester. These saints are worshipped both by the Catholic and the Orthodox churches. Special attention is paid to Konrad von Wurzburg’s concept of ‘genre’, its essential features and the reader’s perception of hagiographic texts. I hold that German medieval writ­ers tended to create spiritual literature in a poetic form. I define the terms, which according to Ger­man tradition, characterize hagiography as a genre in the medieval epoch and compared them with the notion used by Konrad von Würzburg. I examine the peculiarities of the text structure, the functions of the prologue and the epilogue and analyse a number of specific features typical of the plot of the above-mentioned hagiographic poems. Conrad von Würs­burg’s outstanding merit lies in the establishment of hagiographic canons in German litera­ture.

The article explores lexemes stemming from Rus. бог- (god), which were used in the texts of the XV—XVII centuries. This stem expressed the concept of God and was used as a means of characterization of objects, phenomena, etc. The material of the analysis was taken from the texts of the XV—XVII centuries, which are a valuable source of information for the study of the system of values of Slavs, based on the axiology of Christian dogmas. The aim of this re­search is to identify the specificity of these lexemes, their interconnection as well as their re­latedness to the concept of God. I defined a number of semantic criteria, according to which the studied lexical group forms various paradigms. I argue that there is quantitative hetero­geneity in the use of lexemes with the stem бог- (God) in the XV—XVII centuries. This het­erogeneity was expressed in the dominance of the lexeme analysed over others. The identified lexemes are grouped according to the following semantic features: designation of people relat­ed to God, characteristics of the activity of a specific historical personality, an abstract con­cept, an object or a phenomenon of that time, or a polysemantic word. This large group of lexemes consists of the words characterizing a person, an object or a phenomenon on the basis of the following attributes — 'worthy of God's praise, '(not) worthy of praise', 'possessing Divine wisdom', 'following the path of God', etc. I argue that lexemes with the stem бог- (God) in the texts of the XV-XVII centuries are parts of a broader paradigm of 'conforming to the standards of Christian dogmas, positively assessed vs not corresponding to the standards, negatively assessed”. This assessment forms the basis of the axiology of the Christian doctrine.