ON THE VISUAL ORIGINS OF ONE FOLKLORE MOTIF. THE TOMB IN THE CHURCH

• Main Author: Liudmila V. Fadeyeva
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences 2017-06-01
• Series: Studia Litterarum
• Subjects: imagery of the Passions of Christ in Christian art and folklore; liturgical symbols; icons; spiritual verse
• Online Access: http://studlit.ru/images/2017-2-2/Fadeeva.pdf

The article examines the influence of Christian iconography on poetic images of Rus- The article examines the influence of Christian iconography on poetic images of Rus sian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian spiritual verses. It claims that the icons that symbolize the Passion of Jesus Christ, both in the Western and Eastern European traditions, are possible sources of images and plots for a spiritual verse “Walking of the Virgin” (“Three Tombs”). The essay specifically focuses on the image of the Holy Sepulcher in Russian spiritual verse and its iconographic sources. It discusses a number of cases from the history of its iconography, from the images of the Holy Sepulcher in the Medieval Catho lic churches to the ones in the Orthodox cathedrals and churches of the second half of thth 17 — the beginning of the 18 century. In spiritual verse, the notion of the “tomb in the church” as part of liturgical practice was related not only to death symbolism. In the verse “Walking of the Virgin,” the image of three tombs, and primarily the tomb of the Virgin, bears on the Western-European poetic tradition and includes images that func tion to deny the idea of the finitude of human existence and reaffirm the idea of eternal life. Flowers and birds over the tomb of the Virgin are emblematic: it is a verbal icon of a kind that corresponds with the final episode of the poem, its climax. This emblem refers to conventional images of the Christian iconography that convey Christian dogmas via a combination of contradictory elements that we see, for example, in the traditional image of the Flourishing Cross.