Peleshenko O. Yu. Walking to Paradise as a genre of Ukrainian medieval literature. – Qualifying scientific paper on the rights of the manuscript.
Thesis for PhD in specialty 035 Philology. – National University “Kyiv- Mohyla Academy,” Kyiv, 2023.
The dissertation is devoted to the investigation of genre structures of the corpus of Christian apocrypha of early Byzantine origin full of marvels and fantastic elements and dedicated to the theme of an extremely difficult and voluntary mortal’s journey to the earthly paradise – “The Walk of Agapios to Paradise”, “The Walk of Zosima to Rahman”, and “The Tale of Macarius of Rome.” For the entire period of the medieval era, recognizable topoi as well as morphology were developed; “paradisal” apocrypha started to be translated into Old Church Slavonic in the 12th century and finally were integrated into Ukrainian medieval genre system as a recognizable independent literary genre until the 15th century.
The object of the study is Greek and Ukrainian redactions of “The Walk of Agapios to Paradise”, “The Walk of Zosima to Rahman”, and “The Tale of Macarius of Rome”, medieval apocryphal and hagiographical texts, devoted to the journey of the righteous man to the Garden of Eden. Ancient pretexts of above-mentioned works will be considered in diachronic aspect; and Western Latin sagas with identical genre structure – in synchronic aspect.
The subject of the study is the forms of representation of the motif of the journey to the earthly paradise in Ukrainian literature within the manyhold of the medieval episteme; individual genre formations of analyzed monuments.
Theoretical dimentions of the aim of the study offer to rethink the ambivalent status of medieval genre on the crossroads of classification-based and receptive- communicative approaches through the prism of philosophical epistemology, phenomenology, receptive aesthetics, the theory of intertextuality, and deconstruction. The dimention of literary history provides to make an attempt to investigate genre structures of apocryphal journeys to Paradise in Ukrainian medieval literature and the ways of existence of ancient pretexts of these manuscripts in literary “converted forms” beyond its own episteme.
The methodological basis of the study consists of general scientific empirical- theoretical methods (analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, descriptive), system- functional approach to the literary phenomena research, the combination of elements of structuralist approach (in order to provide morphological analysis of apocryphal journeys to Paradise in ancient Ukrainian literature), comparative, comparative- historical, cultural-historical, and hermeneutic methods for interpreting texts. The theory of intertextuality is used in reference to the modi of mediaval literary process; cognitiology, R. Ingarden’s phenomenological structuralism, and also traditional strategies for literary studies (such as receptive aesthetics, narratology) and philosophical epistemology (V. Bibler, G. Bachelard, W. Welsch, T. Kuhn, M. Mamardashvili) are involved to illuminate phenomenological nature of genre structures of Christian “paradisal” apocrypha.
The scientific novelty of the work is determined by both the methodological approach and optics within which the the object of the study was considered. Author’s own epistemological theory of genres was developed; hence its interpretative value for analysis of genre structures of literary monuments was approbated on the material of genre structures of Byzantic “paradisal” apocrypha and Ukrainian medieval walkings to Paradise. It is proposed to distinguish a genre as a taxonomic abstraction from genre structure as the only way for narration to exist within the intertextual space. Based on the examples of Judeo-Christian apocalypses, it is proven that every literary masterpiece is determined by the sum of its pretexts; thus, it consists not only of explicit genre structure, but accumulates the number of debris of implicit genres, which were derived from alien epistemological situation. Although fragments of other type of rationality and ideologemes through the mediation of variety of implicit genres are always represented in literary art, ways to deal with the Other differ radically in literaty discourses of different cultural epochs.
The practical significance of the thesis. The core findings of this work can be used in further inquiry of theory and history of literature, dedicated to both comparative genology and reception of genre of walking to Paradise in subsequent periods of development of Ukrainian and world literature from the cultural-historical perspective.
Keywords: medieval literature, genre, Kyivan Rus, walking into Paradise, apocrypha, utopia, pilgrimage narration, hagiography, vision, ”The Walk of Agapios to Paradise,” “The Walk of Zosima to Rahman,” “The Tale of Macarius of Rome”, episteme, cultural memory, ideology.
