RECONSTRUCTION OF THE ETHICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEA OF LOVE IN THE OLD RUSSIAN LANGUAGE (BASED ON THE MATERIAL OF THE CHRONICLE TEXT)

The article deals with the reconstruction of one of the most significant ethical dominants of medieval consciousness based on materials from surviving written sources, based on historical and literary data. The formation of love idea in the Russian Middle Ages worldview was important for the translation of the moral principles of the newly perceived Christianity. Therefore, the most significant in the content side of this concept is love for God and adherence to the principles he preaches. Since the ideological principles of Orthodoxy were in conflict with the social and political factors of extralinguistic reality, their propaganda was very important in the ideological sphere. High ethical principles, among which love occupies one of the leading places, were an important means of combating the rudeness and cruelty of the feudal state. The use of chronicle text as a material for research allows us to present the picture of the world of medieval man with the greatest completeness. The text of “The Tale of Bygone Years” contains works of different thematic and genre-stylistic orientation, in which the word love realizes different components of meaning: from love for God, as the most significant embodiment of this feeling in the ethical and philosophical picture of the world of the Middle Ages, to paternal, brotherly, friendly. In contexts of a historical, documentary, biographical nature, the semantic content of the concept of “love” in the Old Russian language turns out to be much closer to the concept of “friendship”. In the texts of treaties, the concept of “love” conveys the idea of peace and harmony between peoples. The medieval text does not reflect the perception of love as a feeling of attachment, sympathy for another person due to the lack of individualization of characters.