The Rhetoric of Rituals: How Russian Symbolist Writer Recreates the Ritual with the Help of Words

The present research is devoted to the study of the rhetoric of ritual on the basis of the Russian symbolists’ lucubrations. As part of the work, the generalized image of the symbolist writer is represented by such prominent authors as Andrei Bely, Valery Bryusov and Fyodor Sologub. In order to answer the question of the research topic, we apply to the analysis of examples of the verbal transmission of the ritual by the authors of the novels “The Created Legend”, “The Petty Devil”, “The Silver Dove” and “The Fiery Angel”. The main subjects of our interest are the mechanisms of verbalization of ritual actions in the selected artworks. Due to the fact that the elaboration of the system of ritual rhetoric construction in the mentioned works has not been carried out before, we are not pretending to create one on the basis of the analyzed material. We have attempted to identify some of the essential aspects inherent in the rhetoric of ritual, and thereby to outline the basis for the subsequent monolith of the theory’s forming foundation. To confirm (or to refute) the hypothesis formed by the author of this research, we will conduct a philological analysis of the literary techniques and expressive means, that help constructing ritual actions and ritual speech, represented in the form of spells, conspiracies or prayers, in the artworks of the era of Russian symbolism. The research is relevant primarily due to the lack of the scholarly works on the theoretical aspects of the rituals transference by the representatives of Russian prose of symbolists. Moreover the studying of the artistic texts’ rhetoric is one the challenges of the modern linguoretics and philology. The result of this work is the refinement and complementation of the scientific knowledge on the problem of verbal re-creation of rituals in literature.