The article explores oral hagiographic narratives about St. Seraphim of Sarov (1754 - 1833), hieromonk of the Sarov Hermitage. They were recorded in the south of the Nizhny Novgorod region during the folklore expeditions of the UNN. N.I. Lobachevsky 1998-2015. The cult of this saint originally took shape among the female monastic communities of the village. Diveevo, whose trustee was the elder Seraphim, as well as from the peasants of the surrounding villages. In the middle and in the second half of the XIX century the lives of the elder are written, scenes from his life are depicted in popular popular prints and church iconography, at the beginning of the 20th century, after the canonization of Seraphim in 1903, the image of the saint entered Russian literature and religious philosophy. Popular veneration of the saint is concentrated in the south of the Nizhny Novgorod region, expressed in an abundance of stories about his life, his miracles and his natural shrines (springs and stones). The center of veneration of the saint is the Diveevsky district (in the Seraphim-Diveevsky monastery there are his relics and the man-made Kanavka). The plots of biographical oral stories about Seraphim have a book basis, it manifested itself indirectly - through visual images of the saint in a lubok and an icon. In Seraphim's "oral folk life" there are no stories about the saint's childhood and death, his life in the monastery; "oral life" consists of stories about the life of an old man in the forest (a saint feeds a bear, a saint is beaten by peasants, a saint stands on a stone, a saint ennobles a spring). Some images of lives grow in local folklore into independent cycles of legends (these are cycles of stories about the origin and miraculous possibilities of the Kanavka, stones and springs of the saint). Oral narratives have lost their hagiographic didacticism and style, contain portrait and everyday details, psychological characteristics of the characters and create the image of a simple, modest and kind old man in a white robe.
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