This article discusses contemporary practices of spiritual poetry performance by children from Russian Old Ritualists-Lipovan families living in Moldova and Romania. The author analyzes the nature and origin of the texts of spiritual verses, and describes the peculiarities of the corresponding musical material, taking into account the manner of performance and the situation of playback. The above practices were observed during the joint expedition of the Interdepartmental Archaeography Laboratory of the Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Folklore Department of the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences to the Republic of Moldova in January 2020 as well as through a study of the Old Ritualists' own video records placed in the public domain on the Internet. The author's description of the forms of tradition's practice is the first to be introduced into scholarly discourse. Spiritual poems, currently performed by Lipovan Old Ritualists' children are also analyzed in terms of literary criticism. Thus, various aspects of the poetics of these spiritual poems (metrics, strophics, rhyming, and composition) are explicated, and their rhythmic structure is discussed in relation to the main systems of versification used in Russian poetry. This article shows what new meanings traditional poetic symbols, such as the rose symbol, acquire within the space of the genre of religious poetry. The article also demonstrates changes in the texts of poems by the poets of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, which begin to function as spiritual poems. The works of both secular poets (Alexey Koltsov) and poets, whose works are closely connected with religious activities (Boris Nikonov, Nikolai Guryanov), are considered.
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