Secondary members of the sentence - working with text

Card #1

Fill in the missing letters, add the missing punctuation marks. Underline all verbs in the indefinite form as members of the sentence.
Disassemble the selected proposals by members.

Since childhood, Robert Louis Stevenson was tormented by illnesses, he hardly went to school and did not play with peers. However, lying in bed surrounded by toys, he never experienced boredom because he knew how to fantasize. His beloved nanny read aloud to him and told fairy tales. It is to her that he dedicates the first book of poems addressed to children in the history of literature. It was written in a new way. The author did not teach readers to behave well and obey their mother, but depicted the world of the child as red and mysterious.
But Stevenson began with prose. At the age of fifteen, he wrote and published an essay on the war of shotla_ts_v against the British. He was ready to devote his life to literature, but he had to yield to his father and study at the University of Edinburgh in the department of law. After graduating from Stevenson University with a new passion, I give myself to my favorite business.
The disease drives him to warmer climes. He travels with a friend in the south of France, where he writes a series of essays. The reader immediately sensed in the author an intelligent and observant person who could even talk about empty spaces in an entertaining and humorous way.
Stevenson retained the ability to be happy under any circumstances for the rest of his life. It was especially useful in the fight against his worst enemy - tuberculosis. In search of a suitable climate for health, he had to travel a lot. The writer was treated in a winter sanatorium in the state of New York, sailed on a yacht in the Pacific Ocean, but did not stop working. When the doctors forbade him to move, he dictated works to his wife.
Stevenson spent his last years on the island of Samoa in pacific ocean. He made friends with the Samoans, learned their language, sent articles about their life to London newspapers to draw attention to the problems of a small people. When Samoa was brewing Civil War he rode from one camp to another trying to fold the sides to the world.
After the death of the writer, six_ten Samoans carried the coffin with his body to the top of the mountain. On the gravestone was engraved Stevenson's poem Requiem, which begins with the words

Under the starry sky, in the wind
Place last chosen.
I lived happily, I will die easily
And ready to go to the grave.

(O. Sventsitskaya)

In the text, two words are written with a hyphen. Find them and explain their spelling.
Write an answer to one of the questions: “What do you find unusual about Stevenson's life? What personality traits of the English writer are mentioned in the text?

Card #2

underline participial phrases and mark the defined words.
What is the name of the member of the first sentence, separated by commas?

The legend tells how the young Gregory of Narekatsi, the future great Armenian poet and theologian, fulfilling his vow for seven years, pastured a village flock not far from the m_n_n_styr and never hit one animal. When, after the expiration of the time, he, as a sign of the fulfillment of the vow, stuck the unused twig into the ground, a green bush grew from the twig.
Enemies decided to accuse Grigor of heresy. They even wanted to summon him to ecclesiastical and secular courts, but another miracle prevented this, according to tradition. The last guards after Narekatsi came to him on a fast day. He invited them to dine with him and they were given hot pigeons. The guards were very surprised at the violation of the church charter and reproached Grigor. He was embarrassed and said that he simply forgot what day it was and clapped his hands. Pigeons suddenly came to life and flew away. When the news of the miracle spread around the district, the trial of Narekatsi, of course, became impossible.

(A.Tsukanov)

What's happened vow, heresy, secular, lean?
Circle (box) the introductory words. Complete parsing selected offers.
Name all the parts of speech in the first sentence.
Place the stress on the underlined word.

Card #3

Fill in the missing letters, add the missing punctuation marks. Correct spelling errors.
Underline all verbs in the indefinite form as members of the sentence.
Highlight the app.

The Russian Empress constantly corresponded with the great French philosopher Denis Diderot and considered his opinion. In the early 70s of the XVIII century. he received from his powerful respondent an invitation to go to Russia and gladly accepted it. For Diderot, this journey was very important. After all, here was an opportunity to influence the “philosopher on the throne” and thereby contribute to the well-being of her followers. Alas, Catherine could not share the radical views of Diderot, and to all his calls to not slowly carry out reforms in the country and free the peasants, she answered rather carefully, drawing his attention to the unpreparedness and lack of enlightenment of the Russian people. However, these discrepancies did not prevent the philosopher and the queen from talking for hours. Ekaterina, with a certain curiosity, told the courtiers that Diderot, carried away by his thoughts, forgot about the ticket, grabbed her hands and squeezed them so hard that bruises remained. The philosopher reproached Catherine for not fulfilling many of the communications given by her at the beginning of her reign, resolutely condemned her for an unnecessarily bloody foreign policy - in a word, openly and not hypocritically expressed his opinion about the reign of the empresses.
Diderot paid for his desire to bring good to Russia, if not with his life, then at least with his health. On the way back, his carriage broke the ice on the river, and the philosopher never recovered from the illness that began on his return to France.

(T.Eidelman)

Name all morphemes in which letters were omitted.
Perform syntactic analysis of the highlighted sentences and retell them.
What's happened _ ticket, k_respondent, radical?
As Catherine is named in the text (continue from memory, then check with the text): Russian Empress, .... Can these names be swapped?

TEXTS FOR SYNTAX LESSONS
AND PUNCTUATIONS IN THE EIGHTH GRADE

N.SHAPIRO

The existing Russian language textbooks for the 8th grade have different advantages and disadvantages. But one feature has in common both what has been published for the third decade and what has been created recently: the exercises in these manuals are very boring in content. These are most often either scattered sentences from the classics, mainly about nature, or proverbs of unknown peoples (“The hardworking one reaps the fruits of his labor, and the lazy one reaps the fruits of his laziness”, “Ignorance is worse than a dark night”), or sentences invented for educational purposes by the authors of the manual ( “Builders are building a new theater in the square”, “Because of rainy weather, the pace of the harvest has slowed down”), or instructions once spoken or written famous people and apparently called upon to play an educational role: “You need to travel a lot”, “A person must remember from childhood, from school what land he was born on”, “A person who loves and knows how to read is a happy person”, “I consider nature protection holy deed”, “After all, it’s only the consumer who gets bread easily”, “I love my profession”, “The main motive of my life is to do something useful for people...”, “Politeness, as a rule, gives rise to reciprocal politeness”. The mind is asleep, the student gets used to dealing with words, sentences, texts that do not hurt him and mean nothing to him - an inexcusable and inexplicable pedagogical waste!

However, there is an explanation: it is believed that nothing should distract the student from the educational spelling, punctuation or grammar task - even the content. This is certainly true for early stages mastering the topic. But later you need a text - popular science or fiction. And not only because it may contain interesting and useful information or an unexpected linguistic find. A well-chosen text helps to solve many problems: 1) develop skills on a specific topic; 2) systematically repeat the studied spelling and punctuation rules - after all, a rare text does without isolated members, complex sentences, participles and adjectives with difficult suffixes, particles and prefixes Not with different parts of speech, etc.; 3) constantly enrich the vocabulary of schoolchildren and teach them to use dictionaries; 4) make your observations and explore how the text works; 5) control reading comprehension... The list goes on.

Of course, using the proposed texts in a lesson or as homework, you will have to abandon the traditional first part of the task: “Write ...”. First, a more or less finished informative text is usually too long to copy. Secondly, this much unloved type of student activity requires significant physical effort, in which mental effort fades into the background or is completely canceled. And at the end of the cheating, the student often gets the feeling that the main thing has already been done, and the rest of the tasks are optional little things. A photocopier or a printer makes it possible for many teachers - unfortunately, not all of them! – to make the process of teaching the Russian language more lively and effective. Each student receives a one-time sheet and inserts letters directly on it, underlines, marks, corrects mistakes.

Is there a danger that children will forget how to write? It is unlikely, because neither the traditional exercises of the textbook, nor the dictations with essays and presentations are canceled. And besides, tasks for texts also require work in a notebook: you need to write out sentences for analysis, write down the meanings of words, draw up a thesis plan, answer a question in writing, edit part of the text.

Some teachers are very disapproving of the "Correct Spelling Mistakes" task. In the methodology, the opinion is rooted that it is impossible to destroy the correct visual image of the word. The level of spelling literacy of students that does not satisfy us, with the widespread observance of this methodological rule, should make us think about how fair it is. Why do children who have seen a correctly spelled word many times write it themselves incorrectly? Maybe we should turn on other mechanisms besides analysis and visual memory? And if children still make mistakes, is it not obvious that they need to be taught to check what is written and to find and correct these mistakes? Perhaps the alarmed methodologists will be reassured by the fact that the proposed texts contain the same type of mistakes - for continuous, separate and hyphenated spelling of words. A separate spelling is given - it can also be correct, so that the visual image suffers minimally. Another thing is that exercises with errors require special attention, discussion, commentary, elaboration, and at least mandatory verification.

The proposed texts are distributed according to the main topics studied in the Russian language lessons in the 8th grade. Most of them are taken from the volumes “Art”, “Linguistics. Russian Language, World Literature, Encyclopedia for Children, Avanta+ Publishing House. The author of the only unsigned text, which, by the way, received the lowest rating from a seventh-grader expert, is the author of this material.

main members of the proposal. Types of predicate

Find predicates different types, write out one example of each type (together with the subject, if the example is taken from a two-part sentence).

To my greatest surprise, I turned out to be musical - at least Marya Gavrilovna claimed so. The learning went on with unexpected speed. We didn’t have an instrument yet, but Varya Solovyova, who took the procession over me, did not allow me to “turn to the stable”, as many years later Korney Chukovsky determined this inclination of mine. She caught me in the street once she took me off the fence over which I climbed running away from her and with a stubborn motionless face led me to the piano.
Grandfather's apartment was liquidated after the death of my grandmother. And they sent us a piano, the same piano that I played with matchboxes when I was six years old. Now I start playing exercises and scales at home. Dad is pleased that I have found some talents.

(E. Schwartz)

Find a sentence with homogeneous predicates and draw a connection diagram for homogeneous members. Enclose the introductory phrase in a box.
Write out the corrected words, mark the parts of speech.

Correct spelling errors.
Underline the main terms in the highlighted sentences and indicate what parts of speech they are expressed. Specify the type of predicate.

One morning when Pierre Gassendi, the famous philosopher, rhetorician and astronomer, who was not afraid to argue even with the great Descartes himself, was reading
at the next lecture downstairs in the hallway there was suddenly a noise that forced the interruption of the lesson. Gassendi and his disciples went out to find out what was the matter. They saw a young nobleman beating a servant with something. The whole appearance of the stranger was remarkable, but the first thing that caught my eye was his huge nose. What do you allow yourself, the philosopher asked sternly and heard in response I want to listen to the lectures of the great Gassendi and this whip has splayed out in my path. But, I swear by my nose, I will listen to this smartest person even if I want to pierce this fool or someone else with a sword! Gassendi's voice warmed noticeably Well maybe I can help you. What is your name, young man? Savignen de Cyrano de Bergerac poet proudly answered the guest.

(A.Tsukanov)

Circle (frame) the introductory word.
Is there a narrative, description, reasoning here? How are the sentences in the text related?

Fill in the missing letters, add the missing punctuation marks.
underline grammar basics, indicate the type of each predicate.

One young Athenian went to court. He claimed that his decrepit father had gone out of his mind and therefore could not dispose of the family's property. The old man did not make excuses - he only read the just finished tragedy to the judges. After that, the dispute was immediately resolved in his favor, and his son was recognized as a dishonest liar. The tragedy was called "Oedipus in Colon" and the old man's name was Sophocles.

(O. Levinskaya)

Select only those roots in which the missing vowel is checked by stress.

Arrange the missing punctuation marks, insert the missing letters.
Underline the predicates, indicate their type.

Bear_nok was rather tall with intelligent eyes with a black muzzle and he lived in a booth in the lyceum yard. It belonged to General Zakharzhevsky, the manager of the Tsarskoye Selo palace and the palace garden. Every morning, the lyceum students saw how, when preparing to go around, the general patted the bear on the head, and he tried to break free from the chain and follow him.
And then one day, before the eyes of the lyceum students, an event occurred that brought the bear into the political history of the lyceum.
General Zakharzhevsky once passing by the booth, to his horror, found that the booth was empty: the bear still broke off the chain. They began to search - unsuccessfully: there was no bear in the yard or in the garden. The general lost his head: two steps away was the palace garden...

(Yu. Tynyanov)

Write out: 1) a predicate expressed by a phraseological combination; 2) predicate with a linking verb be in the right form.
Mark with a “+” sign the predicates expressed by the verb be in the right form.
Mark with a “++” sign the predicates in one-part sentences (in which there is no subject). Underline the subjects expressed by pronouns. Specify the category of pronouns.
Name all morphemes in which letters were omitted.

Arrange the missing punctuation marks, insert the missing letters.
Indicate the grammatical foundations, indicate the type of predicates.
Underline the adverbial phrases.

At the halt, we slept wrapped in blankets. I still could not wrap myself up, and the Solovyov girls carefully helped me. I chatted and made everyone laugh. My face was hot, I was intoxicated and didn’t let anyone sleep, and no one wanted to sleep. From the outside, we probably would have seemed crazy, which is why I am so condescending to the companies of our peers (peers - according to our age at that time) who walk so noisily hand in hand along the Komarovsky streets or laughing, taking benches opposite each other in the train. laugh_t no matter what happens.

(E. Schwartz)

Come up with and write down a sentence with a highlighted turnover.
Write down words with unpronounceable consonants.

Insert the missing letters.
Underline the main terms in all sentences and indicate what parts of speech they are expressed. Specify the type of predicate. (Note that in this text, all punctuation marks, except for three commas, separate simple sentences in complex.)

According to the myth, the Theban king Lai and his wife Jocasta received a terrible prophecy: their son would kill his father and marry his mother. The king and queen decided to prevent trouble: a child with pierced the servant had to take the needle with his feet to Mount Cithaeron and leave it there. But the slave could not carry out the cruel order; he met a shepherd from Corinth and gave baby to him. So the boy ended up in Corinth, in the house of the childless king Polybus and his wife Merope. He became their son, and the name was given to Oedipus, which means "with swollen feet." Once, at a feast, one of the guests told Oedipus that he was adopted. Oedipus went to Delphi to the oracle for the truth and there he learned that he was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. He hastened to get away from Corinth, so as not to destroy Polybus and Merope, whose son he considered himself.

(O. Levinskaya)

Put the stress on the underlined words.

Secondary members of the sentence

Fill in the missing letters, add the missing punctuation marks. Underline all verbs in the indefinite form as members of the sentence.
Disassemble the selected proposals by members.

Since childhood, Robert Louis Stevenson was tormented by illnesses, he hardly went to school and did not play with peers. However, lying in bed surrounded by toys, he never experienced boredom because he knew how to fantasize. His beloved nanny read aloud to him and told fairy tales. It is to her that he dedicates the first book of poems addressed to children in the history of literature. It was written in a new way. The author did not teach readers to behave well and obey their mother, but depicted the world of the child as red and mysterious.
But Stevenson began with prose. At the age of fifteen, he wrote and published an essay on the war of shotla_ts_v against the British. He was ready to devote his life to literature, but he had to yield to his father and study at the University of Edinburgh in the department of law. After graduating from Stevenson University with a new passion, I give myself to my favorite business.
The disease drives him to warmer climes. He travels with a friend in the south of France, where he writes a series of essays. The reader immediately sensed in the author an intelligent and observant person who could even talk about empty spaces in an entertaining and humorous way.
Stevenson retained the ability to be happy under any circumstances for the rest of his life. It was especially useful in the fight against his worst enemy - tuberculosis. In search of a suitable climate for health, he had to travel a lot. The writer was treated in a winter sanatorium in the state of New York, sailed on a yacht in the Pacific Ocean, but did not stop working. When the doctors forbade him to move, he dictated works to his wife.
Stevenson spent his last years on the island of Samoa in the Pacific Ocean. . He made friends with the Samoans, learned their language, sent articles about their life to London newspapers to draw attention to the problems of a small people. When civil war was brewing in Samoa, he rode from one camp to another trying to win over the sides for peace.
After the death of the writer, six_ten Samoans carried the coffin with his body to the top of the mountain. On the gravestone was engraved Stevenson's poem Requiem, which begins with the words

Under the starry sky, in the wind
Place last chosen.
I lived happily, I will die easily
And ready to go to the grave.

(O. Sventsitskaya)

In the text, two words are written with a hyphen. Find them and explain their spelling.
Write an answer to one of the questions: “What do you find unusual about Stevenson's life? What personality traits of the English writer are mentioned in the text?

Fill in the missing letters, add the missing punctuation marks. Correct spelling errors.
Underline the participial phrases and mark the defined words.
What is the name of the member of the first sentence, separated by commas?

The legend tells how the young Gregory of Narekatsi, the future great Armenian poet and theologian, fulfilling his vow for seven years, pastured a village flock not far from the m_n_n_styr and never hit one animal. When, after the expiration of the time, he, as a sign of the fulfillment of the vow, stuck the unused twig into the ground, a green bush grew from the twig.
Enemies decided to accuse Grigor of heresy. They even wanted to summon him to ecclesiastical and secular courts, but another miracle prevented this, according to tradition. The last guards after Narekatsi came to him on a fast day. He invited them to dine with him and they were given hot pigeons. The guards were very surprised at the violation of the church charter and reproached Grigor. He was embarrassed and said that he simply forgot what day it was and clapped his hands. Pigeons suddenly came to life and flew away. When the news of the miracle spread around the district, the trial of Narekatsi, of course, became impossible.

(A.Tsukanov)

What's happened vow, heresy, secular, lean?
Circle (box) the introductory words. Perform syntactic analysis of the selected sentences.
Name all the parts of speech in the first sentence.
Place the stress on the underlined word.

Fill in the missing letters, add the missing punctuation marks. Correct spelling errors.
Underline all verbs in the indefinite form as members of the sentence.
Highlight the app.

The Russian Empress constantly corresponded with the great French philosopher Denis Diderot and considered his opinion. In the early 70s of the XVIII century. he received from his powerful respondent an invitation to go to Russia and gladly accepted it. For Diderot, this journey was very important. After all, here was the opportunity to influence the “philosopher on the throne” and thereby contribute to the well-being of her followers. Alas, Catherine could not share the radical views of Diderot, and to all his calls to not slowly carry out reforms in the country and free the peasants, she answered rather carefully, drawing his attention to the unpreparedness and lack of enlightenment of the Russian people. However, these discrepancies did not prevent the philosopher and the queen from talking for hours. Ekaterina, with a certain curiosity, told the courtiers that Diderot, carried away by his thoughts, forgot about the ticket, grabbed her hands and squeezed them so hard that bruises remained. The philosopher reproached Catherine for not fulfilling many of the communications given by her at the beginning of her reign, resolutely condemned her for an unnecessarily bloody foreign policy - in a word, openly and not hypocritically expressed his opinion about the reign of the empresses.
Diderot paid for his desire to bring good to Russia, if not with his life, then at least with his health. On the way back, his carriage broke the ice on the river, and the philosopher never recovered from the illness that began on his return to France.

(T.Eidelman)

Name all morphemes in which letters were omitted.
Perform syntactic analysis of the highlighted sentences and retell them.
What's happened _ ticket, k_respondent, radical?
As Catherine is named in the text (continue from memory, then check with the text): Russian Empress, .... Can these names be swapped?

Introductory words and sentences

Insert introductory words into the text, where necessary, choosing the appropriate ones from the list: therefore, fortunately, first of all, however, in other words, for example, say, on the contrary, on the contrary.
Insert the missing letters.

The word can expand its meaning. Shelter etymologically means « roof", but in combinations like hospitable shelter or to share bread and shelter this word has a wider meaning - "house". At the heart of this kind of change is often the custom to name a part instead of the whole in speech.
In other cases, the meaning of the word may narrow down. More ancient meaning of the word powder it was dust powder - diminutive of powder. But in modern Russian, not every powder is gunpowder, but only one that is a special explosive. Word powder narrowed its meaning.

(According to Yu. Otkupshchikov)

Highlight the grammatical bases in the sentences of the second paragraph.
Find and underline the verb in the indefinite form, which is used as a secondary member of the sentence.
Find the theses and evidence in the text. Compose and write your text in the same way and with the same introductory words.

Fill in the missing letters, add the missing punctuation marks. Circle (box) the introductory words. Pay special attention to the sentence in which the introductory word follows the union A.

IN Ancient Greece believed that the Trojan War started either because the almighty god Zeus wished to reduce the number of people on earth, or because he decided to give the heroes an opportunity to become famous, and maybe his daughter, the beautiful Elena. That was the reason for the war. Once the goddess Eris threw an apple with the inscription: "To the most beautiful" to the three inhabitants of Olympus - Hera Athena and Aphrodite. Each goddess, of course, hoped that the apple was meant for her. Zeus ordered Paris to judge the dispute.
By birth, Paris was a Trojan prince, but he did not live in a palace, but among shepherds. The fact is that his parents Priam and Hecuba, even before the birth of their son, received a terrible prophecy: because of the boy, Troy would perish. The baby was taken to Mount Ida and thrown there. Paris was found and raised by shepherds. Here, on Ida, Paris judged the three goddesses. He recognized Aphrodite as the winner, but not disinterestedly: she promised the young man the love of the most beautiful woman in the world.
When Paris returned to Troy already as a royal son, he decided to visit Greece. In Sparta, he was received by King Menelaus with his wife Helen. Aphrodite convinced the beautiful Helen to give in to the persuasion of Paris and flee with him to Troy. The deceived Menelaus gathered a large army, appointed his brother Agamemnon as commander-in-chief and moved to Troy.

(O. Levinskaya)

Underline the main terms in all sentences and indicate what parts of speech they are expressed. Specify the type of predicate.
Find and underline the verbs in the indefinite form that are used as secondary members of the sentence.
Circle the coordinating unions, and underline the homogeneous members connected by them.
Place the stress on the underlined word.
If most of the text talks about the casus belli, then what is the word for the content of the first sentence?

Continued in issue 36/2001

Today, for the first time in the Catholic Church, the memory of Gregory of Narekatsi, the Armenian theologian, poet and philosopher, proclaimed Doctor of the Church by Pope Francis, is celebrated. Sergey Averintsev tells about the saint.

Do not be afraid of my golden robes, do not be afraid of the brilliance of my candles.
For they are only a cover over my love, only sparing hands over my secret.
I grew up at the tree of shame, I am intoxicated with the strong wine of tears,
I am life from flour, I am strength from flour, I am glory from flour,
Come to my soul and know that you have come to yourself

Gertrude von Le Fort. From "Hymns to the Church"

The place of the "Book of Sorrowful Hymns" by Gregory of Narek, not only in traditional Armenian culture, but in all traditional Armenian life, cannot be compared with anything. The collection, completed in the very first years of the 11th century, was copied from century to century on a par with the Bible, they tried to have it in almost every home. A whole nation took the poetry of Narekatsi to heart. Her beneficent action appeared in the minds ordinary people spread from the realm of the spiritual to the realm of the material; if the texts were expected to heal the human soul, then in the materiality of the manuscript of the collection they were looking for healing for the sick human body - it could be put under the patient's head.

So it was customary for the peasants of Japan to rub the sick places of the body on the statues of Buddhas made by the brilliant master Enku, which caused the wooden figurines to be irreparably erased, but on the other hand, faith in the miraculous power of pity and mercy, which inspired the artist, was picked up by the people for whom the artist worked with all the concreteness of a visual gesture. Naivety is naivety, but in such cases there is no need to talk about a misunderstanding - the thing was used for its intended purpose, the artist was understood, in general, correctly. So the manuscripts with poems by Narekatsi, no less than the figurines of Enku, have this fate - to appear to the imagination of the people as a source of effective help.

In this regard, it is difficult not to recall the simple-hearted legend about a miracle revealed from Grigor's grave in Narek long after the poet's death. The Kurd who then owned Narek entrusted his hen with chickens to the care of an Armenian peasant woman, but the poor woman overlooked - the hen with all the brood climbed under the millstones from the downpour, the millstones, as if it were a sin, fell, and the birds were crushed to death. The desperately frightened peasant woman took the hen and chickens to the grave of Narekatsi and laid them there, while she herself went about her work - rural work does not wait - silently appealing to him for help. “And when about an hour had passed,” the Menaine text narrates, “she saw a hen waddling along with the chickens alive.”

Miracles at the grave of a saint are a common place in hagiographic literature, but this story has a special flavor, very homely; even such a detail as the waddling gait of a chicken is not forgotten. The situation from which the miraculous deliverer rescues the village woman is really serious, because an enraged Kurd would not spare her; however, the matter of the plot is devoid of pathos, which is usual in such cases, and does not go beyond the limits of everyday life - here we have not a raging sea, not a serious illness, not captivity in a distant country, but only a chicken and a millstone, and even reprisal threatens not from some evil king , but from a tyrant of purely local significance.

Able to understand, regret and help in everyday misfortune, completely “their own” - this was how Narekatsi seemed from century to century; the Armenian people. Genius is also seldom a saint (the most undoubted example is Augustine); but a genius and a saint rolled into one, whose intercession would be told by legends as soft in timbre as the Armenian hagiography associates with the name of Gregory, this seems to be a unique case.

And in folklore there is a story about how Narekatsi - in fact, a learned monk, a vardapet, a scribe and a scribe's son - carried out the humble service of a shepherd for seven years, never getting angry with the cattle, without whipping it or offending it with an evil word. "Blessed is the man who has mercy on cattle." Having passed the test, he stuck a rod, which had never been used to beat any living creature, into the ground in the middle of the village, and the rod turned into a bush, reminding people of the beauty of mercy and the glory of Narekatsi. Folk Italian legends about Francis of Assisi are called "fioretti" - "flowers". Around the name of Vardapet Grigor from Narek, their own fioretti also grew.

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Grigor Narekatsi

Book of Lamentations

(translated by Margarita Darbinyan-Melikyan and Lena Khanlaryan)

5 ...

The luxury of the pattern and the depth of the heart:
poetry by Grigor Narekatsi

From the editor:
This introductory article to the book of the great Armenian monk "singer of repentance" Grigor Narekatsi was written by a non-Orthodox unbelieving scholar S. Averintsev, who calls Orthodox believers "Chalcedonites" and "dyophysites". Nevertheless, we cite this article for the sake of the evidence contained in it that the Monk Gregory of Narekatsi did not follow the heretical destruction of Monophysitism, but remained in the purity of the Orthodox faith.

Do not be afraid of my golden robes, do not be afraid of the brilliance of my candles,
For they are but a veil over my love, only sparing hands over my secret.
I grew up at the tree of shame, I am intoxicated with the strong wine of tears,
I life from flour, I strength from flour, I glory from flour,
Come to my soul and know that you have come to yourself.
G. von le Fort, Passion, 1

The place of the "Book of Sorrowful Hymns" by Gregory of Narek, not only in traditional Armenian culture, but in all traditional Armenian life, cannot be compared with anything. The "Book" was rewritten from century to century, they tried to have it in almost every home. A whole nation took the poetry of Narekatsi to heart. Her beneficent action appeared in the minds of ordinary people as having spread from the spiritual realm to the material realm; if the healing of the human soul was expected from the texts, then in the materiality of the manuscript they were looking for healing for the sick human body it could be put under the patient's head.

Able to understand, sympathize with and help in everyday trouble, completely “ours” Narekatsi seemed to the Armenian people from century to century. Genius is also rarely a saint (the most obvious example is Augustine); but a genius and a saint in one person, about whose intercession people would tell such soft-tone legends as Armenian hagiography associates with the name of Gregory, this, it seems, is a one-of-a-kind case.

And in folklore there is a story about how Narekatsi, in fact, a learned monk, vardapet, scribe and son of a scribe carried out the humble service of a shepherd for seven years, never getting angry at the cattle, not whipping it or offending it with an evil word. "Blessed is the man who has mercy on cattle." Having passed the test, he stuck a rod, which had never been used to beat any living creature, into the ground in the middle of the village, and the rod turned into a bush, reminding people of the beauty of mercy and the glory of Narekatsi. Folk Italian legends about Francis of Assisi are called "flowers". Around the name of vardapet Grigor from Narek, their own "fioretti" also grew.

We see the image of the poet primarily in the mirror of the legend. What does history know about him?

The life of Grigor Narekatsi falls on the second half of the X first years of the XI century. This is the era of the Bagratids the epilogue of the "golden age" of Armenia. After the death in 928 of Ashot II the Iron, who defended the independence of Armenia in the wars with the Arabs, a peaceful time began, which gave a lot to cultural development. A lover of Armenian art will remember that during the life of Narekatsi, the royal luxury of the miniatures of the Echmiadzin Gospel of 989 was born. The architect Trdat, who built the cathedral and the church of Gagikashen in the city of Ani, the capital of the Bagratids, is also a contemporary of the poet. As is usual for the Middle Ages, the deepening of spiritual culture, the self-consciousness of the individual, the increased sensitivity of the soul to itself, are directed into an ascetic course. People are no longer satisfied with the outward side of religion. Some break with the church and go into heresy: the background of the era is the strong anti-church movement of the Tondrakites. Others are looking for more inner and spiritual aspects of the Christian ideal, striving to build a different, righteous life outside the walls of monasteries: on Armenian soil, monasteries are growing in abundance, this is also a feature of the times. Both Sanahin and Haghpat, and among the lesser known Narek, where the poet spent his life, arose precisely in the 10th century. The air of the era is saturated with theological disputes: the Monophysites, zealots of the local Armenian tradition, lead a sharp polemic against the dyophysites, who share the doctrine of Byzantine Orthodoxy, both anathematize the folk heresy of the Tondrakites, and doctrinal disagreements, as always, are intertwined with political and social conflicts.

The poet's biography developed in such a way that he had to know much more about these disputes than he would like. His father was the learned theologian Khosrov Andzevatsi, who was engaged in the interpretation of liturgical symbols; subsequently, having been widowed or separated from his wife, Khosrow became a bishop, but in his old age he was accused of heresy and excommunicated from the church. The teacher of Gregory and the abbot of the Narek monastery Anania Narekatsi, the illustrious vardapet, the author of ascetic teachings, the very themes of which - a tearful gift, the renunciation of thoughts from everything earthly - belonged to the same circle, are also characteristic of the new spirituality of the era. Perhaps he, too, was suspected of infidelity; there is a deaf message that he did not want to curse the Tondrakites (against whom, however, he wrote a polemical treatise), but did it before his death, obeying the direct command of the Catholicos. Finally, suspicions did not spare Narekatsi himself. Hagiographic tradition tells that he was already called to the church court and only a miracle protected him: he called those sent for him to the table and, contrary to all his ascetic habits, served fried pigeons, and when the guests reminded that it was a fast day, he resurrected before their eyes pigeons and sent back to the flock.

What is behind such a story? The repeatedly expressed opinion that the poet was a secret tondrakit is hardly substantiated enough. Sources give no less, and perhaps more reason to consider the most prominent Byzantine theologian of the XIV century. Gregory Palamas was a secret Bogomil, but not a single Byzantinist would do this. Firstly, the swear words cited by tradition, which were spoken by the accusers against Narekatsi, suggest suspicion not of tondrakism, but of dyophysitism, or at least of tolerance towards dyophysites. For example, he was called "a Roman and an apostate," that is, a co-religionist of the Byzantine church. The author of the life emphasizes the conciliatory position of Gregory in the confessional strife. “... There was a strife between the bishops and the vardapets on various issues in the affairs of the Chalcedonites (that is, the dyophysites). And blessed Gregory, realizing correctly that this was a useless and pernicious church turmoil, in which the soundness of doctrine was damaged by disagreement, he exhorted everyone to be meek in soul and peace-loving, to abide in love and unanimity. Secondly, it is known that Narekatsi, following the example of his teacher Ananias, wrote a polemical essay against the Tondrakites. To imagine that both of them did this in an effort to deflect a dangerous accusation from themselves is to suspect them of double-mindedness, of abandoning their true views, that is, of such a course of action that cruel circumstances can make understandable, but nothing can make commendable. From everything we know about Narekatsi, it doesn't look like him. His poetry cannot be based on the spiritual duality of an apostate who saves his life. It is better to postpone the Tondrakite hypothesis until there are very strong arguments in its favor.

And yet, information about slanders against the church reputation of Vardapet Grigor is important. First, we learn that Narekatsi, being a monk and a faithful member of the church, was not a spiritual conformist. The enthusiasm of the ascetic, who inspired him (and, apparently, his teacher Ananias), aimed at reviving the Christian ideal, in the real situation of his time, opposed the inertia of unspiritual ritual belief and mechanical worship of authority. As the Menaion note says, “the orders of the holy church, distorted and forgotten due to lazy and flesh-loving spiritual shepherds, he wished to establish and restore”; immediately after this, the understandable discontent of the “lazy and carnivorous” is noted, which almost led to the massacre of the poet. If Narekatsi was not a tondrakit, but was, on the contrary, an opponent of the tondrakit doctrine, he must have well understood the feelings of people who sought the truth in heresy. The attitude of Narekatsi to tondrakites is typologically comparable with the attitude. Francis to the Waldensians, Gregory Palamas to the Bogomils, or Nil of Sora to the hairdressers.

Secondly, we learn that Narekatsi, being a zealous ascetic and mystic, was not a fanatic and did not share the passions of his contemporaries for reprisals against dissidents, but called for reconciliation, knowing full well that he put himself at risk. It seems that peacefulness was also inherited by him from his learned mentor; Perhaps Ananias' unwillingness to curse the Tondrakites testifies to a principled position on the issue of attitude towards heretics, similar to the position of Russian non-possessors in their dispute with the Josephites.

We know that in the Middle Ages, not everyone who was not attracted to the occupation of a heretic hunter was necessarily a heretic himself, or even sympathized with heretical doctrine; there were, at least in a minority, people who sincerely accepted the dogmas of the church as the truth, but did not accept violence as a method of fighting for this truth and advised leaving controversial issues until the judgment of God. Even Isaac of Nineveh, a Syrian hermit of the 7th century, taught to have a “merciful heart”, which “cannot bear or see any harm or small sorrow endured by the creature”, and therefore prays with tears, among other things, “for the enemies of truth ", i.e. about infidels and heretics; such a disposition of the heart, which, according to Isaac, brings closer to God, clearly prevents those who think differently from being cursed with a slight feeling. And later, some teachers of the church believed that cursing the erring was not entirely a Christian occupation (“... it is not worthy of hating or condemning anyone, below the unfaithful, below the heretic”); others emphasized that this matter, in any case, is not a monastic one (“... if it is proper to judge and condemn heretics and apostates, but as a king, and a prince, and a saint, and zemstvo judges, and not a monk, who renounces the world and all even in the world, and it is fitting for them to pay attention to themselves, and do not condemn anyone ... ". Such people were, of course, in Armenia. Why should not both monks from Narek be among them? It is similar to the fact that we We know about the favorite themes of Ananias, who wrote so much about the gift of tears. This is even more similar to what we know about the soul of Gregory from his poems. Needless to say, elementary historicism forbids us to interpret such a position in the spirit of the new European ideals of tolerance or freethinking. Rather speech goes as in the case of Francis of Assisi, or Nil of Sorsk, or the work of Andrei Rublev about the noblest version of medieval spirituality.

We have already mentioned the addiction of the lives of Narekatsi to the episode of the call to the church court and the miraculous resurrection of doves; otherwise, the biographical tradition is not rich in details. Apparently, the life of Vardapet Grigor passed rather quietly amid the usual monastic studies and literary works. In 977 he wrote an interpretation of the biblical Song of Songs, as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa did before him, and Bernard of Clairvaux and his followers after him; the theme is very characteristic of medieval mystics, who shifted their emphasis from the religion of fear to the religion of love. According to legend, this pile was made in response to the request of Gurgen, the sovereign of Vaspurakan. Narekatsi also wrote words of praise for the Cross, the Virgin Mary, saints, as well as hymnographic compositions in various genres. All these are venerable examples of medieval Armenian literature. But the "Book of Sorrowful Hymns", completed around 1002, the poet wrote for all people and for all times. It was she who lived for centuries in the memory of the people and will live in the world memory of culture.

Narekatsi's masterpiece is the most perfect expression in words of the spirit that inspired the ancient Armenian architects, stone cutters, and miniaturists. Behind him is a special, unlike anything else world. The maturity of the artistic will that determined the appearance of the "Book of Sorrowful Hymns" had been prepared for a long time. Three and a half centuries before the poetic laments of Narekatsi, Zvartnots was conceived and built, striking our imagination even in ruins. Nowhere else can one find such a weighty, heavy, almost frightening excess of forms and images as the one that marks the capitals of Zvartnots; but when Narekatsi begins to unfold his metaphors, which have no end in sight and which take their breath away, the power is no less and there is much in common in the logic of the idea.

The poetry of Narekatsi certifies both the originality of the ancient Armenian culture and the uniqueness of the poetic genius of Grigor himself. But historicism demands of us that we try to see both in the universal, "universal" perspective of that whole which is called the literature of the Christian Middle Ages.

Songs of Narekatsi are “mournful” songs, literally “weeping songs”. What is the poet grieving about, what is the poet crying about? About his imperfection, about his spiritual weakness, weakness, impotence in the vanity of the world, about the lost birthright of man. Reproach to himself is constantly ready to be transformed into lamentation about sinful humanity in general, with which Narekatsi feels himself closely bound by the mutual guarantee of guilt and conscience. He asks God for forgiveness not for himself alone, but together with himself for all people:

Counting yourself among those deserving punishment,
Together with all I pray for mercy:
Together with the humiliated and with the timid...
Together with the fallen and with the despicable,
Together with those who were exiled and with those who returned to You,
Together with the doubters and with the faithful,
Together with the fallen and with the resurrected...
(ch. 32, § 1)

Confessional self-accusations and lamentations about one's sins are a very productive genre of medieval literature; creativity in this vein came from an attitude that was very far from romantic or post-romantic ideas about self-expressing individuality. When an author tells us: “I” suffer and mourn, “I” am guilty and reproach myself, his “I” must appear in such a way that any reader or listener of the same faith as the author can repeat each complaint already on his own behalf, identifying his “I” with author's "I" entirely and without reservation. Let's repeat once again completely and without reservations; for the way of perception, which since the time of romanticism, the so-called confessional lyrics are usually designed for, includes a certain measure of self-identification according to the formula “here I am like that”, however, in combination with the pathos of the distance, “and I” already means “not him”, "such" already means "not the same". The personality of the poet from Byron and Lermontov to Tsvetaeva and Lorca is thought of as exceptional; contemplating it in the imagination, the reader correlates his personality with her on the same basis of exclusivity ("... like him, a wanderer persecuted by the world"), but a personal relationship cannot be an attitude of identity ("no, I'm not Byron, I'm different. .."). When Pushkin talks about the very feelings that were the subject of Narekatsi's poetry:

And, with disgust reading my life,
I tremble and curse
And I bitterly complain, and bitterly shed tears,
But I do not wash off the sad lines,

the experience described appears as the experience of a poet, or, what is the same, “ lyrical hero»6; the reader's experiences may be consonant with him, but the web distance still remains. Precisely because a poet is expected to speak about himself, and only indirectly, through his own individuality, about everyone and for everyone, biographical details are allowed, even welcomed.

Merging the feelings of the poet and the reader for prayers and laments of repentance is not a paradoxical and unexpected result of the confrontation between two individuals, their dialectical contrast, but a self-evident task. Here no one will be surprised at how the poet managed to say this about everyone and for everyone; nothing else was assumed a priori. And here is another important difference: identifying his "I" with the "I" of the poet, the modern reader, as it were, splits internally into an absolute "I", suitable for such an identification, and an empirical "I", obviously different from the lyrical hero (and the latter does not coincide also with the empirical "I" of the poet, so that the bifurcation penetrates into the appearance of the latter); such a game installation is incompatible with the spirit of medieval asceticism. Here bifurcations and acting disguises are not allowed.

This means that all signs of an individual biography must either be eliminated or generalized to such an all-human paradigm in which every detail is completely processed into a symbol. Otherwise, the procedure for assimilation of the text by the community, for whose everyday life it was created, could not have taken place. This procedure assumed that all members of the community could, "with one mouth and one heart," as one liturgical formula says, pronounce the text as their authentic collective statement, i.e., that each member of the community applies each word to himself, and, moreover, without any metaphors and bifurcations, perhaps more literally; the more literal the better. When, for example, a Byzantine was present at the Lenten service during the recitative reading of the "Great Canon" of Andrew of Crete, he could have some ideas about the biography of this hymnographer - more or less real, drawn from hagiographic literature, or fantastic, drawn from folklore tradition, where the saint is presented as a new Oedipus, but with each exclamation of this penitential hymn, he was asked to think not about Andrew's sins, but about his own. Therefore, Andrei did not speak about any special features of individual sinfulness, but about the sinfulness, so to speak, of “man in general”; and so did Narekatsi.

Pushkin could give in his poems the Petersburg night as a setting for the repentant insomnia of his lyrical hero, but for Narekatsi it was impossible to make any characteristic landscape feel behind his poems, different from any other real landscape, for example, the landscape of the Narek monastery on the shore of Lake Van, where passed his life. The metaphor of the "sea of ​​life" from Greek rhetoric (where it really was due to the experience of the people of sailors) fell into the "common places" of the international Christian literary tradition and already in patristic times became an indispensable component of the latter "; by the way, it is also popular in Russian folklore, although a resident of Central Russia did not often observe ramparts on the sea or even on a sufficiently large lake.As for Narekatsi, it is not even important that his "sea" metaphor is conditional through and through and does not reveal a single specific feature, but that, according to her Concreteness is fundamentally counter-indicative to her internal task.Suppose we could identify his penitential outpourings as uttered precisely on the shores of Lake Van, which would mean that a fellow believer, who by chance finds himself far from Lake Van, is already excommunicated from identity with the penitent lyrical hero.

Let us allow ourselves a historically justified analogy. The modern interpreter of the Byzantine-Russian icon explains why linear perspective and three-dimensional corporality would destroy the meaning of the icon: the depicted object would thus receive an unambiguous fixation in the physical space in front of the viewer, and its three-dimensionality would, as it were, push the viewer out according to those laws, according to which two physical bodies do not can simultaneously occupy the same place, but meanwhile, for the icon’s super-task, it is necessary that this object appear not only in front of the viewer, but simultaneously inside and around him, as embracing and embracing, and therefore allowing you to enter inside yourself, letting in yourself8 . The same requirements are made for penitential genres to the author's "I": it must let in itself, which means that it should not be too voluminous.

Thus, the genre as a whole is prescribed a supra-personal character. "Superpersonal" for poets with a weak personality means "impersonal". And we know that in the sacred literature of the Middle Ages there are many such "nobody's" texts that live not by individual inspiration, but by the suggestions of the genre canon itself, by the energy of the genre norm as such. This. by no means always identical with aesthetic weakness; sometimes we have just perfection in front of us, but perfection is impersonal. Narekatsi is not like that at all. His individuality is strong enough to preserve himself, renouncing himself and giving himself to the end, in order to appear resurrected and transfigured, descending into the tomb of supra-personal spiritual discipline. As it is said, “he who hates his soul will keep it”, and this promise justifies itself in the historical and literary phenomenon of Gregory of Narek: the poet-monk is very cool with the individual “soul” of his work, denies it any biographical identity, completely erases everything portrait, constrains her spontaneous self-expression, but the very life of this soul is indeed preserved. Each reader can be convinced of its safety. If reading Narekatsi encourages each of us to once again think about how complex the dialectics of the personal principle is, it will be not bad.

And this is what is important: from a simple given, imposed by the religious worldview and religious everyday life of the era, that is, from outside of literature as such, from an obligation that you just have to put up with, Grigor turns the supra-personal direction of his poetry into a special poetic theme. If he sacrifices, "crucifies" his individuality, this act has for him the pathos of a monumental gesture. He breaks the mediastinum between "I" and "not-I" as if with a wide wave of his hand, so that the prayer for himself and the prayer for everyone could not be distinguished. In our century, poets have so often sought ways "from the horizon of one to the horizon of all." The horizon of Narekatsi's poetry is at every moment the horizon of all of course, seen as a person of that time could see; and this is specially expressed, expressed in the word. “With all together I pray for mercy; together with the humiliated and timid, together with the fallen and despicable...” Above, we cut off the quotation so that it would not be too long. But Narekatsi was not afraid to violate the measure in this long list of categories of people with whom he unites himself in the very final, very last instance of his being - before the throne of God. The list goes on and on:

Together with the reckless and the sober ones,
Together with the dissolute and the temperate,
Together with those who departed and with those who approached,
Together with the rejected and with the beloved,
Together with the timid and with the daring,
Together with the ashamed and with the jubilant
(Ch. 32, § 1).

It is as if we see two crowded crowds, two hosts, two choirs some stand straight and cheerful, having risen after all the falls, and rejoice in firm faith and confident knowledge of their chosenness, others waver, stagger, fall and do not know how to rise, struck by doubt , feel rejected, abandoned, almost predestined to perdition. If the poet thought only of his own salvation, he could concentrate on the supplication; may God grant him to be with the first, and not with the second. If the poet were anxious to show his humility, he could clearly identify himself with the latter: I am a sinner, and therefore separated from the righteous. At the very beginning of his list, he seems to be embarking on this path, uniting himself with the “humiliated and timid”, “fallen and contemptible”. But the next moment the barriers are removed. Yes, the poet is sinful, and therefore is it only because or according to the law of pity? first of all puts himself in the ranks of the most lost and hopeless; however, he does not separate himself from the righteous, if only because he does not separate himself from anyone. It would seem that the two hosts are so different from each other they are collected according to opposite signs, there is nothing in common between them; but the elect and the cheerful intercede continually for the reprobate and the paralyzed, and they ask for help, and there is communion between the two hosts. For the tradition to which Narekatsi belonged, this is an integral part of the accepted doctrine; but for the poetry of Narekatsi, this is a theme articulated with unusual poignancy. Particularly interesting is the role assigned to the figure of the poet himself; since she is "together" with both at the same time, the reunion of both occurs! in it and through it; it is revealed "as a sign" of reunification. The gods must be at one with each other, because the poet is already at one with everyone.

Narekatsi does not get tired of repeating that he speaks for everyone, for everyone but “everything” is too abstract for him, he needs to concretize, sort through possible options human existence. The poetics of the list, the "catalog" is very traditional; Grigor perceives it simultaneously in fidelity to tradition, in obedience to the tradition common to the entire Middle Ages, and in the primordial immediacy that characterizes it. Here is to whom he offers his book as an exhortation and a "mirror":

And by the fact that at the first time of life they entered,
And those who are in the second, which is called manhood,
And the weak elders, whose days are coming to an end,
Sinners and righteous
To the proud self-satisfied and those who reproach themselves for sins,
Good and evil
Fearful and brave
Slaves and slaves
Noble and noble,
middle and nobles,
Peasants and gentlemen,
For men and women
Lords and subjects,
Uplifted and downtrodden
Great and small
Nobles and commoners,
On horseback and on foot
Citizens and villagers
Haughty kings, who are held by the bridle of the terrible,
Hermits, conversing with the celestials,
To the well-meaning deacons,
pious priests,
Bishops vigilant and caring,
Vicars [of God] on the patriarchal throne,
Who distribute the gifts of grace and ordain
(Ch. 3, § 2).

The wide breath of such passages, which unwind like a thread, unfold like a racing fabric, flow like a river, is characteristic of a certain type of verbal creativity, which is a constant of all medieval literature as a whole from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia and from Augustine to Villon. With regard specifically to Villon, it is difficult not to recall the list from his “Great Testament”, which is very close to the quoted lines of Grigor Narekatsi also by topic. Here is the list in literal translation: “I know that poor and rich, wise and mad, priests and laity, noble and vile, generous and stingy, small and great, beautiful and ugly, and ladies with high collars, of any class, combed like a lady or like a bourgeois, will take death without exception." Villon cannot say "everyone in general is human" he must find out the scope of this concept through a long chain of antitheses.

But now we are no longer interested in the motive for calculating humanity by “binary oppositions”, which has numerous precedents already in the Old Testament, “one fate for the righteous and the wicked, the good and the evil, the pure and the unclean, the one who sacrifices and who does not and fearing an oath” (Ecclesiastes 9:2), but intonation as such: the irresistible pressure of the verbal flow, when each word immediately varies in a number of synonyms, each metaphor in a sequence of additional metaphors. Here is an example taken at random from the Meditations of Augustine: “What evil have you done, sweet lad, that you are judged by such a judgment? What evil have you done, beloved youth, that you have been treated so harshly? What is your crime, what is your sin, what is your fault, how did you deserve death, how did you bring execution on yourself? (8, 1). In ancient Russian literature, such intonation is especially characteristic of Epiphanius the Wise and the authors of his circle: , and dragging, packs of the verb: what else will I call thee, the leader of the lost, the finder of the lost, the mentor of the deceived, the leader with the blinded mind, the defiled purifier, the exactor wasted, the guard of the military, the comforter of the sad, the feeder of the hungry, the giver of those requiring, the senseless punisher, the helper of the offended, the prayer book warmth, an intercessor is faithful, a filthy savior, a demon of a curser, an idol of a consumer, an idol of a trampler, a servant to God, a caretaker’s wisdom, a lover’s philosophy, a doer’s chastity, a creator’s truth, a storyteller’s books, a writer’s letter of writing,” Epiphanius addresses his hero.

It is precisely when applied to Russian material that such poetics of pathetic “stringing”, i.e., the emotionally suggestive use of synonyms, is very clearly described by D. S. Likhachev: “Here, synonyms are usually placed side by side, they are not merged and not separated. The author, as it were, hesitates to choose one, the final word for the definition of this or that phenomenon, and puts next to two or more synonyms that are equivalent to each other. As a result, the reader's attention is attracted not by shades and differences in meanings, but by the most common thing that exists between them ... ". The role of "synonymous" comparisons is similar to that of lexical synonyms; their combination "does not allow the reader's attention to linger on their tangible side, erases all specific differences, retaining only the most general and abstract, and leaving the reader with a sense of the significance of what is being discussed." The ancient Russian authors themselves called the goal of their aspirations "verbal satiety."

There is little to add to this characteristic, except for one very important point. We are talking about a stylistic tradition in which principles that seem incompatible to us are indistinguishably close, noisy ornate and quiet meditation, playing with words and understanding the meaning behind the words. In this sense, the historical and cultural incident of Augustine is characteristic, who, on the threshold of the Middle Ages, could move from the role of a rhetorician to the role of a meditator, changing so little in the purely stylistic devices of his prose. For medieval meditative literature, the technique of rhetorical “amplification”, the art of making speech lengthy and thus increasing its inspiring power, gave a lot. A rhetorician who masters this technique will pick up more and more new words for the same subject, striving to increase the brilliance of the verbal feast prepared by him, the verbal fireworks; but for a person performing an act of meditation, the same procedure is needed in order to go deeper and deeper into the subject, ultimately reaching a level at which words no longer exist. Thus, the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, an unknown Greek-speaking author of the 5th century, generously pouring out streams of synonyms and parallel metaphors in three of his treatises, declares at the end of his corpus, in the last, “apophatic” treatise: “Here we no longer acquire brevity but complete speechlessness. He needed a lot of words to go beyond the word. "His example clarifies a lot in the practice of Narekatsi.

Let's pay attention to semantic structure appeal to God in paragraph 2 of that very thirty-second chapter, which opens with the above grandiose list of sinners and righteous people with whom Grigor from Narek unites himself. First there are very rich paraphrases of the abstract philosophical concept of the highest good, the summum bonum, skillfully interspersed with biblical metaphors of "heritage" and "lots", but on the whole adhere to the lines of ancient idealism, and on a purely literary level, striking in their inexhaustibility by what Florensky called in relation to analogous to the phenomena of Byzantine poetry with "boiling wit":

The essence is incomprehensible, the truth is inscrutable.
Power almighty, mercy omnipotent,
Perfection boundless, heritage inexpressible,
Worthy lot, plentiful gift,
Unclouded wisdom, cherished charity,
Giving desired, joy sought,
Peace of mind, undeniable gain,
Being is inalienable, acquisition is indestructible,
Height is incomparable...

This part of the series is the most "mental"; and in it God is not “you”, but “it”, not a person, but an essence, considered in itself, ontologically (“being”, “truth”, “strength”, “wisdom”, “height”), but in relation to a person only as the goal of his aspirations and acquisition (“joy”, “peace”, “acquisition”, “lot”). One involuntarily recalls the motionless prime mover of Aristotle, forcing everything that exists to love itself and in a love impulse to reach out to him, thus setting in motion the colossus of the world (Metaphysics, XII, 7), but he himself loves only his self-sufficient, resting perfection, nowhere and to no one tearing.

But now the middle part of the series begins, where God is no longer an essence, but an agent, a “living God”, manifesting himself in acts of love, mercy, pity:

The most skillful healer, an unshakable stronghold,
Returner of the lost, finder of the lost,
The hope of those who hope, the enlightenment of the darkened,
Purifier of the sinners, You are the refuge of the fugitives,
Comforter of the rebellious, You are the salvation of the perishing,
You are the breaker of bonds, the liberator of those who have been betrayed,
You are the protector of those who stumble, You are the compassionate of those who are offended,
The patience of the doubters...

And this is not the last word. God as man's protector is still a force external to man; and its action is described more for reason than for feeling. In the last part of the series, the megaphors take on a more cordial and more mysterious character. This is no longer about a self-sufficient essence and not about the ultimate goal of a person lying above him and in front of him, and also not about a powerful patron of a person whose help can be counted on, but about the innermost center of the human soul itself and human life, about a force acting "from within" a person and closer to him than himself. It is hardly prudent to speak of pantheism in this connection: a term that is absolutely clear when applied to the philosophy of Spinoza, but causes slight doubts even when it comes to the sermons of Meister Eckharg, is in this case very controversial. When the Gospel of Luke says, "The kingdom of God is within us" (17:21), this is, of course, not pantheism. When Augustine speaks of God as the core of his own "I": "I would not be, I absolutely could not be, if you did not abide in me" (Confessions, 1 3), this is also not pantheism. And yet, the emphasis on the inner presence of God in a person, in human body movements, in human speech, undoubtedly introduces a new semantic moment, and, moreover, a very significant one. It is easy to see that the theme of intimacy between God and man, the mystery that brings God and man closer, especially excites Narekatsi and makes him more eloquent than both previous topics:

An image of light, a vision of joy, a shower of grace,
The breath of life, the strength of the form, the cover over the head,
Mover of the mouth, mover of speech, guide of the body,
Lifter of the hand, stretcher of the pastern, bridler of the heart,
Native name, related voice,
Sincere unity, father's care,
Confessed name, revered face, incomprehensible image,
Power idolized, memory praised,
The entrance of rejoicing, the right path, the enemy of glory,
The path of truth, the ladder of heaven...

In the gospel saying, Christ is called "the way" and "the truth"; if it were only “truth”, this would once again emphasize the inaccessibility of God for the human soul, which is outside the truth, but the “path” to truth, which gives itself to human feet, is a completely different matter. If the divine principle is not only in transcendent immobility, in sacred statics, but in the dynamics of human effort, then a person has something to hope for. The accessibility of the path is expressed in the word more strongly than the impregnable height of the goal; paternal, “native” and “kindred” to a person is stronger than royal. Without modernizing the ancient Armenian poet, without insisting either on his freethinking, or on his pantheism, or on his rebellion, we have every right to assess his position as deeply humane. Humanity has the last word in the passage we have analyzed; but she always has the last word with Narekatsi.

Having reached this result, the pressure of oratory subsides in a significant way. "Innumerable rows, innumerable stanzas" is only a means to reach the last penetration and become silent. The luxury of comparisons serves to reveal the silent depth of the heart at the limit of the possibilities of poetry, and the heart of the suffering, wounded, defenseless. The decoration of the metaphors must be very heavy and dense to hide such insecurity.

And now a few words about the nature of this edition. Until now, Narekatsi was known to the Russian reader in the translations of N. I. Grebnev. These excellent Russian verses would be better called by the old word "arrangements"; so during it Lomonosov, Derzhavin and Yazykov transcribed psalms, so Pushkin himself wrote “From Anacreon” or “Imitation of the Koran” and reforged the Alcaean stanza of Horace into iambic tetrameters: “Which of the Gods returned me? ..” Find a place among the heirs of such tradition is not only not shameful it is no small honor. The strength of Naum Grebnev is in his convinced and heartfelt fidelity to the daily routine of Russian verse from Pushkin to Pasternak. But the reader has the right to ask again: “But what about Narekatsi?”

This question needs an answer. This is partly done in interlinear translations, which were published in fragments together with N. Grebnev's translations. Now it is necessary to bring the reader as close as possible to the original so close that he had to go beyond all the usual associations suggested by Russian poetic culture, so that the translator’s mediation work becomes as humble as possible, and his presence almost imperceptible, so that through the thin cover of Russian words could, as if by hand, touch the Armenian text.

This is the purpose of the translation of Margarita Darbinyan-Melikyan and Lena Khanlaryan. Already from the quotes given in our article, it is clear to the reader that this is not a trivial interlinear.

S. S. Averintsev

5 ...

Over time, the fame of the Narek monk spread everywhere, and it is believed that legends were made about him even during his lifetime, which have come down to us partly by word of mouth, partly through written sources.
It is noteworthy that in the numerous traditions and legends that have been formed over the centuries, the people have simplified and thereby brought Narekatsi closer to themselves, investing their dreams and aspirations, their ideal in his personality, life behavior, deeds. folk man, the only meaning of life and activity of which is to care for those bypassed by fate, for the suffering and destitute. If we add to this the reverence with which they treated the word or prayer of Gregory, who was canonized as a saint, or miraculous properties his grave, then we will get a more or less complete image of the poet in the popular imagination. In legends and traditions, the famous monk acts in the noble role of the protector of the unfortunate, their guardian and comforter. Who only does not come to the aid of his saving right hand: the widow and orphans of the deceased shepherd, the parents and grieving bride of the untimely deceased youth, the hungry shepherds, the helpless cripple ... A vivid example of the warmth and in what bright colors the people described philanthropy, mercy and the kindness of the monk Grigor Narekatsi, the following legend can serve: “St. Grigor came to the village of Kharzit. And he sees the villagers fighting among themselves. He asked about the reason for the fight, he was answered: "The shepherd of our village has died, we are cursing, because we no longer have a shepherd." The saint asks: “Does he have someone at home who could tend the sheep?” They say: "No, there is only a wife and seven orphans." The saint says: “Do you want me? I will feed the sheep, and you will give the reward to the orphans.” They gladly agreed. The saint drove the sheep to the pasture above the village, the sheep climbed up the mountain to graze every day, and he himself prayed under the apple tree. All wolves and other animals ran away at the sight of these sheep. And when the time came to milk them, the sheep themselves came under the tree to St. Gregory. And one day: the peasants saw how the light descended on the saint. Grigor grazed the sheep until autumn, and in the fall, having received four jugs of grain, he gave it to orphans, who ate these four jugs of bread for seven years.
There are many legends and traditions in which the believing people reverently talk about the miraculous power of the word and prayer of the holy monk of Narek. Here, for example: “Grigor Narekatsi, after visiting the monastery of St. Karapet, comes to the city of Mush and meets a funeral procession on the street - an old man, an old woman and a young woman, heartbroken, go ahead, and a great many people follow them. Narekatsi asks - who, they say, are buried, who is dead? He is told that the dead man got married only seven days ago, the young woman in black is his wife. Grigor joins the procession, comes along with everyone to the cemetery and there, approaching the coffin, overshadows the deceased with growth and pronounces the name of God. The dead man immediately comes to life. Seeing this miracle, everyone rushes to Grigor's feet and praises God. Another legend of a similar content: “Grigor Narekatsi, secretly from his uncle, left his house at night, went to the village of Artonk, in the province of Mush” and hired himself as a shepherd. For two years in a row, he gave everything he earned to the poor. Once the devil, wanting to annoy Grigora, killed the owner's ox. The owner, having learned about this, was very angry, but Narekatsi promised to bring an ox, alive and unharmed, in the evening - and if he does not bring it, then let the owner not pay him a salary for a whole year. Returning to the field, Grigor began to pray to God and asked him to revive the dead ox, and the Lord heeded the words of Narekali. In the evening the owner went out to meet the herd and saw his ox alive.
According to popular belief, the power of Narekatsi's word and prayer not only does not disappear, but does not weaken even after his death, it goes to the grave of the saint, continuing to save suffering souls.
“By order of the local Kurdish bek, an Armenian peasant woman from the village of Narek planted a hen on her eggs. Soon the mother hen brought out the chickens and began to wander with her brood through the village. Suddenly it started to rain. The mother hen, in order to save her chickens, hid with them behind a millstone, nailed to the wall, but the stone fell and crushed her along with the chickens. In fear of the wrath of the Kurdish Bek, the peasant woman turned to God and Grigor Narekatsi with a prayer. She put the crushed mother hen with the brood in a sieve and took them to the grave of Narekatsi, and she herself returned home. A little time passed, and the hen and chickens came to life. The peasant woman rejoiced and, raising her hands to heaven, glorified God and Saint Gregory, who resurrected her chickens.
In their legends, the people represent Narekatsi as a poor peasant, a shepherd, or the son of a poor man (“Narekatsi was the son of poor parents; for seven years he went to shepherds ...”), in a word, a man from the thick of the people.
It is also interesting that Narekatsi, who appears in folk legends, is alien to religious intolerance, and for him the measure of a person’s virtue is not his belonging to one or another faith, but, above all, the social usefulness of his work. This idea was refracted in a peculiar way in the following legend: “Crossing the Tigris along the wonderful bridge of Bavtu, Grigor Narekatsi learned that the builder of the bridge was a pagan and therefore ended up in hell after death. Narekatsi came to the grave of the master, made the sign of the cross over it and began to pray that he would be admitted to paradise. By the command of the Lord, the master resurrected and Narekatsi began to convince him to repent and ask God for forgiveness of sins. The master obeyed, was baptized by the hand of Narekatsi and, again turning to dust, settled in paradise. Such brilliant poet, the famous monk Grigor Narekatsi, a great humanist and thinker in the minds of the people. Narekatsi is truly eternally alive not only in his works, but also in the imagination of the people, and in numerous beautiful legends, in their own way making up for the lack of biographical facts and completing his image. We add that one of the legends about Narekatsi was processed by famous poet Middle Ages Hovhannes Tlkurantsi.
Despite the pious lifestyle, honor and high authority, Narekatsi, apparently, was persecuted, had enemies who tried in every possible way to harm him. Shamelessly slandered, he was summoned to the spiritual court, which is described in Aisma Vurka: “Since he (Grigor) tried with great zeal to correct the disordered church order, several envious people slandered him before the bishops and princes and this vardapet of truth was called a heretic and little faith. And those, having gathered, decided to arrange a trial for Narekatsi and sent their people after him. ”Further, a wonderful legend about fried pigeons is given: “Narekatsi received the messengers courteously and, before setting off on his journey, invited them to the table, placing two fried pigeons in front of them. . And it was Friday, the day of fasting, and the envoys reminded Narekatsi of this. He asked for forgiveness - he forgot, they say, about fasting, he said to the guests: “Tell these birds to come to life and fly.” The guests, of course, could not do this. Then Narekatsi himself commanded the birds to come to life and fly, and the doves came to life and flew away. The aliens, seeing with their own eyes the holiness of Narekatsi, were horrified, and the conspiracy fell apart.
This, of course, is a very common legend for the Middle Ages, the likes of which are often found in manuscripts. However, there is no doubt that they were not created from scratch, they were often based on real events and facts. The above legend is interesting because we learn from it: Grigor Narekatsi was persecuted and summoned to court, he was threatened with exile. Unfortunately, the sources do not report anything definite, they do not explain what kind of "disorganized church order" Narekatsi "tried to correct with great zeal", because of which he was persecuted and was called "a heretic and a lack of faith." It is also not clear who these “envious people” who pursued him. In a word, there is much hidden under the veil of uncertainty.
In this regard, we note that Narekatsi hints at the troubles caused to him by enemies in separate parts of the Book of Lamentations, at the same time asking God not to be angry with them. Here is one example: The frontier of gentleness, remember with goodness those of the human race, Who are my enemies, those about whom the words of repentance are in the book of mournful hymns.
Improve them, forgive them their sins, have mercy on them. For my sake, Lord, do not be angry with them, As with saints, slandering me because of your great love, [treat them] as detractors of evil, which justly Accuse me, forgive their crimes!