The issue of genre interaction: northern Russian hagiographic monuments about miraculously revealed icons and saints

The article deals with the issue of genre interaction using the northern Russian legends about miraculously revealed icons and hagiographic monuments about the revealed saints (“the lives of righteous people”) dating from the XVI-XIX centuries. The conclusion is made about the diffusion of these genre forms, as evidenced by a wide range of similar motifs in these works. The key motifs include the phenomenon of a miraculous revelation of a sacred object - an icon or relics - associated with symbols of water and earth, which have both biblical and mythological folklore semantics, miraculous signs accompanying the revelation of such objects, the motif of church-building, and visions in which the miraculously revealed sacred object itself contributes to the formation and development of its veneration. The genre interaction of the studied works is based on the typological similarity of the perception of icons and relics as miraculously revealed sacred objects in the Russian religious consciousness. Nevertheless, in the church tradition, the veneration of newly-revealed sacred objects had significant differences, which is reflected in the individual motifs of the works. In the legends about the revealed icons, the iconographic type of the found icon is usually recognized, and the miracles from the icon are not questioned. In the lives of righteous people, on the contrary, the attribution of the revealed relics to a certain person is either impossible (“nameless saints”), which contradicts Christian memorial practice and hagiographic norm, or does not fit into the framework of the church canon. The veneration of the revealed relics in many cases took place within the framework of folk religiosity and traditional folk culture.