Miracle in old Russian theotokos tales through the prism of their spiritual content

The article examines the Theotokos tales, a real phenomenon of ancient Russian literature. The narrative of each of them is mainly built around some icon of the Most Holy Theotokos venerated in one region or another. At the same time, the plot itself, and therefore the compositional structure, artistic ideas, and techniques used by the author are pretty much diverse. A number of researchers make attempts to identify specific plot-narrative motifs that the Old Russian scribe used most often when writing the text dedicated to some miraculous icon of the Mother of God. But due to the variety of subject matter, vocabulary, artistic techniques, etc., as a rule any systematization of such works is conditional. Some motifs are represented in a wide body of monuments, while others are found less often. Introduction of seemingly traditional ideas and narrative cliches into the text also differs: often their implementation is quite mean, lacking any details or rhetorical floridity. Despite all that, scientists distinguish this group of ancient Russian works as a separate genre, and a miracle is often named as their main element, around which the whole story is built. It is the meaning of the miracle that is discussed in this article.