Representations about Saint Vladimir, Vladimir the Great in the Moscow Centralized State Epoch

Abstract

The article examines two versions of the well-known 16th century rhetorical biography of the Baptist of Russia — Praise and Precept, the texts of which reflect the general archetype. The researcher pays special attention to the passages containing the evaluative characteristics of the holy prince. Recognizing, following his scholarly predecessors, their plagiarism, the author establishes that, expanding the lexico-stylistically context of praising Vladimir Sviatoslavich by borrowing, the compiler of the archetype of the two works in an ideological sense was not able to enrich it. Perhaps he laid the foundation for the assertion of the tsarist and autocratic dignity of the ancestor of the Christian Russian rulers: a fact consistent with the changed norms of behavior and speech in Moscow society at the end of the 15th — the first half of the 16th century. At the same time, the unknown Russian literary scholar evidently showed himself as a master of literary compilation and combinatorics. The text he created, and at the same time the variants of the latter, Praise and Precept, is primarily of historical and literary significance, since it was used in the compilation of the biography of Vladimir Sviatoslavich, included in the Book of Degrees of the Royal Genealogy.