SPIRITUAL RECOLLECTION LETTER AS A GENRE PHENOMENON OF THE RELIGIOUS AND ECCLESIASTICAL STYLE

Abstract

Based on the epistolary heritage of Metropolitan Benjamin (Fedchenkov), this article examines the functioning of spiritual recollection letters in the religious and ecclesiastical style and determines their linguistic status. Analysing the epistles combined in the work Letters on Monasticism, the author studies the particularities of the ideological content, thematic sphere, authorship and addressees of such texts, as well as reveals their intentional and linguistic-stylistic features. It is noted that the most characteristic features of the genre are: realization of spiritual and religious intentions, assertion of Christian ideas, and emphasis on Orthodox themes. The author shows that many religiously marked language units are used in this type of text, including theonyms, agioanthroponyms, iconyms, ecclesionyms, names of Christian sacraments, Orthodox holidays, items of liturgical vestments, as well as theological studies and disciplines. In addition, the paper demonstrates that the religious and ecclesiastical nature of spiritual recollection letters is manifested in the use of language units designating Christian texts and belonging to the corpus of Orthodox vocabulary with spiritual and moral meaning and religious formulae. In considering the linguistic incarnation of the genre, the author focuses on the figurative and tropeic organization of the spiritual recollection letter and demonstrates that particularities of the functioning of epithets, metaphors, allusions, comparisons, enumerations, repetitions, rhetorical questions, questionanswer constructs and rhetorical exclamations are connected with their religious and ecclesiastical signification (that is, these means of expression are either religionyms or include religionyms). The problem of Christian intertextuality is also touched upon: intertextemes, which are present in the studied letters, refer to the Old and New Testaments, patristic texts and prayers. It is concluded that the spiritual recollection letter is a hybrid epistolary genre of the religious and ecclesiastical style, a text created by an ecclesiastic writer and targeted at a concrete (individual) Christian addressee. Moreover, it contains elements of dialogization and has a retrospective narrative organization.