Poetics of Medieval Vita in Biographical Prose of the First Half of the 18th Century

About the author:

Olga A. Krasheninnikova, PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1518-7923

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Abstract:

The article is devoted to the relationship between the genres of vita and autobiography in the 17th–18th centuries, when the genre of traditional vita increasingly faded into the past, giving way to literary biography. Despite this, the poetics of vita still had a serious influence on the structure of the new, secular literature, the “literature of fact”. The article analyzes the literary autobiography of M.P. Avramov, which was included in his “Petition” (1749), addressed to the Empress Elizabeth, in which the medieval poetics of the miraculous still occupied an important place in the spiritual biography of the hero. The numerous miracles described by Avramov in his “Confessions” give grounds to assert that this prominent figure of the Russian Enlightenment of Peter’s time combined the idea of devoted civil service to Peter I and the new Russian state with a commitment to traditional religious-conservative thinking, which was reflected in the genre and poetics of his autobiography.