Народные представления о языке православного богослужения сквозь призму речевых ошибок в рукописных религиозных текстах Костромского Заволжья

Антропологический форум. 2026. № 2. С. 325–358.

Kuvshinskaya Y. M., Вихлянцева С. В.

The article focuses on the features of the religious discourse of folk home worship conducted without a priest during the period of Soviet persecution of the Church in the villages of the Kostroma Trans-Volga region, and the related problem of how villagers—bearers of the folklore tradition—perceived Church Slavonic liturgical texts and liturgical communication. The analysis is based on texts of Orthodox services (Vespers, the Liturgy, the Memorial Service) from handwritten compilations created by residents of the Manturovo and Makaryev districts and used during folk holiday prayer gatherings, as well as folk memorial services on remembrance days.

A linguistic analysis of the copyists' errors allows for conclusions about their strategies for interpreting ambiguities and, based on this, how the bearers of the tradition understood liturgical communication and religious language. The handwritten texts exhibit additional dialogization compared to canonical church texts, indicating a simplified understanding of the service as a direct dialogue between the congregation and God and the saints. Conscious or unconscious corrections made by the copyists reflect contextualization, an effort to relate the canonical text to the specific situation of communal prayer. In striving to clarify the text, copyists could change words and forms within a narrow context, often based on stereotypical notions about the vocabulary and grammatical features of the religious language.

Consequently, we can identify key words and forms that are apparently perceived by the bearers of the tradition as markers of Orthodox discourse, serving as substitutes in unclear contexts or being preserved during editing. Simultaneously, copyists also exhibit an expectation of semantic and syntactic opacity, an incomplete clarity of the church text. The work is based on field materials collected during folklore expeditions of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) to the Kostroma region in 2021-2024.

Keywords: речевые ошибки, religious language, религиозный язык, errors, нестандартная речь, вернакулярная религиозность, православное богослужение, рукописные сборники, Костромское Поволжье, vernacular religiosity, handwritten collections, Kostroma Volga region, non-standard speech, Orthodox worship

Publication based on the results of: Language, literature and culture in historical and social perspective (2025)