Abstrakt: | The book is devoted to the analysis and characteristics of the interpreting part of prophetic
signs/images featuring in texts and folk predictions. The analysed material comes from
the Old Ruthenian literature (The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, The Russian Primary Chronicle)
as well as from some Russian folk predictions and prophecies. Selecting the said aspect for
the analysis assumes the elicitation of a conceptual system behind the intuitively interpreted
knowledge of the world. On the one hand, the units of this system are what the representatives
of a given mental tradition should be both aware and unware of. On the other hand,
however, those units need to be expressed and then described by the categories and groups
of the paradigmatic system. The examination of the system in question will facilitate noticing
and approaching from the typological point of view the Weltanschauung-related questions
and, at the same time, determining in terms of axiology an ethno-semantics oriented towards
the above aspects.
The paradigmatic system in question makes it possible to receive a consistent determination
of what is visually perceived or received through other senses and what those stimuli
mean to the representatives of a given mental and national-cultural community. The linguistic
or verbal side to the transmission of meanings and sense may be presented in various ways.
There are some interdependencies between the verbal or language facet, understood as the
form by linguistics, and the image of prophecy conveyed by it, and those interdependencies
relate to a series of visions. The basis of those multilevel images, which is not always explicitly
expressed, is a set of imaginings originating in the mythological awareness of the past.
This awareness links the meaning of human existence, his/her being in the world and essence.
All these aspects inevitably contain an axiological element to them, predicated upon and
oriented toward a Weltanschauung dominant molding the images of the world that have been
formed over centuries and millennia. The said images are – which is crucial – of ordering
and regulatory character. On the one hand, the world organised and structured in a particular
way – which may be manifested by both its alive and dead facets, received or at least felt –
may impact a human being, his/her life conditions, successes and failures, his/her fate in
general, including a person’s relation to life and death. On the other hand, an individual human
being/person may influence the world in both conscious and unconscious ways. However,
the unconscious usually turns against an individual.
If an individual was in the possession of broad enough yet exclusive knowledge, which
would serve to validate and drive his/her actions, the negative ramifications of his/her behaviours
and action could be avoided. All this is described in the prophetic forecasts which
have been present in the human awareness from the time immemorial. These rules determine
human behaviour, actions and deeds. Thus the strict life-code for a given community has
been shaped. The prophecies, forecasts and beliefs contain at least two aspects whose description and
elucidation seems to be of essence. First of them is thefunctional one and it indicates how to
live, if not properly, thansafely with regard to a person’s close ones and the entire community
he/she belongs to. The second one is internal, systematic and virtual, both in terms of its
proper paradigmatics and syntagmatics.
The book deals with the mentioned two aspects and because of its aim and goal it is
a sketch of planned description of prophecies, beliefs and harbingers in the world of the human.
This world has been existing since ancient times and human being is a vital thereof. |