Transformation of the symbolic image in the artistic space of the text (for example sermons of Ioanniky Galyatovsky on the feastday of the holy apostles Peter and Paul)

The process of secularization and the development of the Baroque style introduced a number of changes into the system of symbols of Old Church Slavonic. The reasons for these changes and their nature still need to be explored. The Sermons on the Feastday of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, included in the Key to Understanding, a collection of sermons by Ioanniky Galyatovsky (Kiev, 1659-1660), are analyzed from this perspective. One of the editions of the collection is kept in the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts of the State Public Scientific and Technical Library (Novosibirsk). Despite the fact that Ioanniky Galyatovsky was one of the brightest and most talented southern Russian preachers of the seventeenth century, his literary heritage has yet remained understudied. Sermons were chosen as the focus of the study, because secularization primarily touched upon the oral genres of Old Church Slavonic, the most important of which were sermons directly addressed to the listener. Remaining religious in content and functioning, the sermon received new forms of expression and new imagery, borrowed from the Baroque, which reflected the author's position in respect to the described events or phenomena. Moreover, the language of preaching became closely linked with the popular spoken language. The study views the problem of the «status» of the symbol as the main means of expressing a Baroque text, and the loss of the «ideal» component of the symbol. For the Baroque author the expressive value of symbol, its «semantic expansibility», and its capacity to evoke associations became more important than tradition. The study also discusses the process of symbol disintegration into individual semantic series, and symbol renovation through metaphorical comparison and contrast, as well as formation of a symbolic and metaphorical picture of the Baroque world. Allegorical amplification as a new creative way of working with the text defines the new relationship of the author and the text as an object of discursive analysis. Following this method, the writers and preachers of the Baroque would break the Scripture into a series of allegory-fragments, and engage in their interpretation. The question is which methods and narrative sources were used by the Baroque writers who tried to fire the imagination of the listener, and why traditional symbols were «drowning» in the semantic improvisations of the author. The process of secularization caused an increased interest in everything new and unusual, attention to secondary, unsubstantial details, features, and values, and the desire to explain the symbolic meaning on the basis of the actual properties of the object. We may conclude that all such metamorphoses lead to a symbol’s loss of sublimity, ideality, and the traditional brevity of imagery. The emergence of so-called «original symbols» indicates that any word which occurred in the Scripture at least once and which had a figurative component in its semantics might become a symbol.