The book is devoted to the study of holiness in Russian spiritual culture. This volume covers three centuries - the XII-XIV, from the last decades before the Mongol-Tatar invasion to the victory on the Kulikovo field, from the extreme fragmentation of Russia into appanages to the century of the gathering of the lands of North-Eastern Russia around Moscow. In this historical period, many things develop in a completely different way than in the first century of Christianity in Russia. But even within this period there is no unity, as can be seen from a broad historical and panoramic survey of the epoch. Holiness at this time is embodied mainly in two types – saints, right-believing princes and saints. The most diagnostically important figures considered in this volume are the two paradoxical (though in different ways) saints:

It marked the highest point of holiness reached in Russia.

Christianity, Russia, Russia, Orthodoxy, holiness, saints, culture ru Vladimir Schneider http://www.ccel.org/contrib/ru/xml/index.html FineReader 11, OOoFBTools-2.3 (ExportToFB21), XML Spy 26.08.2012 Vladimir Shneider OOoFBTools-2012-8-23-18-18-32-472 2.0

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Vladimir Nikolaevich Toporov. HOLINESS AND SAINTS IN RUSSIAN SPIRITUAL CULTURE. Three Centuries of Christianity in Russia (XII–XXV Centuries) Publishing House School "Languages of Russian Culture". M. 1994 5–7859–0062–9 Proofreading: Igor Grushin

V. N. TOPOROV

Holiness and Saints in Russian Spiritual Culture

Volume II

Three Centuries of Christianity in Russia (XII–XIV Centuries)

I

FROM EARLY RUSSIAN-WESTERN ENCOUNTERS

A few preliminary explanations. For all the exclusivity and symbolic significance of the earliest encounters of the two ethnolinguistic and cultural elements, we will not be talking about them here, although in a broad cultural-historical perspective they form the phenomenon of the beginning and constitute the necessary background, without which subsequent encounters can hardly be adequately and organically perceived. In general, the definition of "the most" in these cases reveals features not only of a certain conventionality, but also of doubtfulness, if only because in the depths of time, in dark epochs, not yet snatched by the light of history, there is obviously more of the unknown than of what most often accidentally became known. But there is another, partly even more cardinal, reason that makes the definition of "earliest" in such situations extremely inaccurate. Such is the situation of the meeting of two ethno-cultural elements, which in the course of their development change, transforming in essence of a different rank and status, often preserving their successive genetic links in these trials, and these changes often occur at different rates.