Concepts of Orthodox Worship and Its Language in the Light of Errors in Manuscript Religious Texts of the Kostroma Volga Region

Abstract

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the religious discourse of folk domestic worship, conducted without the participation of a priest in the situation of Soviet persecution of the Church in the villages of the Kostroma Volga region. It examines the issue of the perception of the Church Slavonic liturgical text and liturgical communication by the villagers — bearers of the folklore tradition. The object of the analysis is the texts of Orthodox Worship (all-night vigil, liturgy, funeral / memorial service) from handwritten collections compiled by residents of the villages of the Manturovsky and Makaryevsky districts and used during popular feast-day prayer meetings and folk memorial services on days of remembrance. Linguistic analysis of the scribes’ errors allows us to draw conclusions about their strategies for interpreting ambiguities and, based on this, about how traditional speakers understood liturgical communication and religious language. The manuscripts contain additional dialogisation, compared with the canonical church texts, and indicate a simplified understanding of the divine service as a direct dialogue between the congregation and God and the saints. The corrections, conscious or not, made by the scribes reflect contextualisation, the desire to correlate the canonical text with the specific situation of common prayer. In an effort to clarify the text, scribes could change words and forms within a narrow context, often based on stereotypical notions about vocabulary and grammatical features of religious language. As a result, we can speak of keywords and forms that are apparently perceived by the tradition-bearers as markers of Orthodox discourse, serving as a substitute in an obscure context, or being preserved during editing. At the same time, the scribes typically regard the church text as semantically and syntactically opaque and not entirely clear. The work is based on field materials collected during HSE folklore expeditions to the Kostroma Region in 2021–2024.