The Royal Power in the hymnographic texts of the Russian Church during the Synodal Period

Abstract

An important source on the history of the Russian Orthodox Church of the 18th-19th centuries is not only memoirs, legal documents, art and architectural monuments, but also liturgical services and, mainly, hymnographic texts. It was in the latter that the specificity of church-state relations that developed in the era of Peter the Great was definitely reflected. The language, the system of artistic images and literary techniques used by Russian church hymnographers of the Synodal era — all of this significantly fills in the historical description of the real conditions in which the Russian Orthodox Church carried out its ministry. Particularly noteworthy among the hymnographic works of the 18th–19th centuries are those devoted to the prayerful remembrance of important events of both domestic life (coronations of monarchs) and international relations (military victories of the Russian Empire). The present article deals mainly with the verbal characterization of the royal power given in the sequences of various prayers composed in the Russian Empire for liturgical use in connection with important political events of the 18th–19th centuries. The purpose of this study is to confirm the connection between the facts of the Russian Church's loss of its independence and the secularization of Russian imperial power, which naturally led to the absence of canonized saints in its midst. The main research method is the philological analysis of some liturgical monuments of the Synodal time, supplemented by a comparative analysis.