Имитация архаики: история культа царевны Софьи и риторические стратегии посланий к ней
Archaic imitation: history of the cult of Tsarevna Sophia and rhetorical strategies of messages to her

Summary/Abstract: The article is devoted to texts which appeared in connection with the cult of Tsarevna Sophia Alekseyevna (1657-1704). It has been established that the veneration of Sophia, associated with the Moscow Novodevichy Convent, did not start until the 21st century. An analysis of the prehistory of this cult shows that before the revolution, in Soviet times, the the Novodevichy Convent preserved the memory of Sophia and displayed objects associated with her, yet this memory of Sophia was of a local history nature. Elements of religious worship were not present there. At the beginning of the 21st century, a certain cult arose around one of the Convent’s towers: people who came there wrote messages addressed to Sofia on the wall. It was a secular cult that was not supported by the Church, so there are no well-composed prayers to Sophia, on which the authors of the inscriptions could have relied on. A study of the corpus of inscriptions copied in 2010-2014 shows that these texts were written in Russian, but their authors used stylistic markers, which, in their opinion, endowed these appeals with the status of a prayer. The language and stylistic features of the inscriptions are openly eclectic in nature: here one can notice both prayer formulas and attempts to imitate conjurations, as well as appeals to the modern epistolary style. Moreover, the authors of the texts were convinced that they were writing correct prayers addressed to the saint.

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