The article examines the poetical features of "The Story about the First Residence of the Monks…", created by the founder of the Sarov Monastery monk-priest Isaac at the beginning of the 18th century. "The Story…" by Isaac belongs to the genre tradition of the story about the foundation of a monastery: like in other works of this genre, the monument combines elements of life (didacticism, patericon related composition, hagiographic stylistics) and chronicles (documentary and chronological orientation of the narrative, the use of genres of an annual recording and a chronicle story). A distinguishing feature of "The Story…" is its autobiographical nature: a significant part of the narrative is conducted in the first person, the author is both the narrator and the protagonist of the story. Unlike the life of Avvakum, Isaac’s autobiography is much more limited by the hagiographic canon: the author deliberately reduces his presence in "The Story…", using various means for this purpose (transferring his biography to another character, rhetorical processing of speech, simplified representation of the inner world of characters - as a place of competition between good and evil, "reassembling" personal life events with the help of literary topoi). At the same time, these means do not completely suppress autobiography: some fragments of the narrative have a marked author’s subjectivity. These fragments include a geographically accurate description of the monastery founding site, a psychologically detailed confession of Monk Hilarion, a miraculous episode saturated with everyday details, stories of "unrighteous monks" in which - through scrupulous fixation of the actions of the actors - the characters of the author and heroes with whom he comes into conflict are simultaneously revealed; finally, the story about church construction, in which a panoramic picture of the life of a provincial monastery at the beginning of Peter the Great’s reign is drawn. Thus, "The Story about the First Residence of the Monks…" carries the most important feature of the Russian literature of the 17th century - the inconsistency of poetics, balancing on the edge of various genres and methods of narration.
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