The Narrative of the Otherworld of Old Russian Literature: Centre and Periphery

This paper examines the portrayal of other worlds in Old Russian literature, delineating the fundamental categories of such depictions, including the concept of the blessed land, the earthly paradise and the earthly hell, the heavenly paradise and the underworld hell. The objective of this article is to identify and analyse the various images of other worlds that emerge from a comparative analysis of a range of medieval Russian texts, which encompass different origins, genres, and historical periods. The author identifies the principal constitutive elements of the images of otherworldliness in specific texts and subsequently establishes the connection between these elements and the text’s content, as well as the associated type of otherworld. The list of integral constituent elements is composed based on both the methodology of hierotopy and other scholarly works attempting to identify distinctive traits characteristic of different types of the literary otherworld, most notably studies by M. Himmelfarb, M. Rozhdestvenskaya, and A. Orlov. The principal sources consulted in the preparation of this paper are Old Russian apocalypses and accounts of journeys to earthly paradise. Old Russian literature is regarded as a product of the paradigmatic medieval mindset, which is characterised by a hierarchical nature and an integrated worldview. It is proposed that the texts presenting the most detailed accounts of other worlds, referred to as the ‘core texts’, may have served as the basis for the images of other worlds found in the much more numerous ‘peripheral texts’. These latter texts may take place in or make reference to other worlds, but do not describe them in detail. The principal discovery resulting from the analysis of the core texts is the consistent correlation between a set of essential elements that comprise a given image on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a corresponding type of otherworld that is depicted in a text along with its content. The images of other worlds that are presented in all the core texts are demonstrated to be highly stable, which suggests that these images remained stable within the broader context of Old Russian literature as well.