«TEARS FELL ON A HANDSOME FACE…»: THE MOTIF OF WEEPING IN RUSSIAN FOLKLORE SPIRITUAL VERSES

The article examines the motif of weeping in spiritual verses of Russian folklore. The theme of tears appears in three main forms: tears of love for God, tears of repentance, and tears as a natural expression of strong human emotions, such as grief, sorrow, despair, pain, fear, joy, and hope. In the last case, tears have an additional symbolic connotation that associates them with a life-giving substance. In some cases, the polysemantic nature of the folkloric image is obvious. The author points out the role of Christian culture in the image of tears in the folk tradition. In addition to the literary sources, the article reveals the folklore origins of the motif of weeping and traces the historical, ethnographic and semantic connections of some types of spiritual verses that contain folk funeral lamentations. The author proposes the hypothesis that the lyrical and lyro-epic penitential spiritual verses constitute a special type of genre of spiritual verses — the plach (religious lament).