About the Journal

Dear readers!
Before your eyes is the journal "Word and Image", prepared by teachers of the Philology Department of the MDA and undergraduate students of the Department in the field of "Russian Spiritual Literature". Questions of the Study of Christian Literary Heritage". It is with joy and awe that we present it to you.

According to a long-standing tradition, we would like to begin by explaining the title of our journal.

Its first part implies that all those involved in the activities of the Department of Philology, specializing in linguistics, literary studies and theology, rely in their specific research on the experience of relating to the text in terms of basic and auxiliary philological disciplines. The research objectives may vary from case to case. However, they should be determined precisely by the results of the philological interpretation of the text as a phenomenon of verbal creativity. In this respect, we are interested in everything: the history and attribution (if the author is unknown) of the text, linguistic and stylistic features, literary devices, plot-compositional, ideological-thematic, artistic specificity, different - explicit and implicit - levels of meaning and associations; author's ideological, axiological, aesthetic position, connection of the monument with the cultural and historical context and literary tradition, the new and the old in its form and content, its place, role and significance in the literary process, the problems of its perception, interpretation, actualization and scientific publication.

The second part of the journal's title defines the range of our subject interests, but in a very general outline. Indeed, the concept of "Christian literary heritage" implies a very wide field of sources for review and reflection. Our priorities, however, are the study of the written and printed heritage of Slavia Ortodoxa and the Russian Orthodox Church in the form of translated and original works from antiquity to the present day, Russian secular and religious literature of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, Church Slavonic, Old Russian, and contemporary Russian. Specifically, we are interested in the spirit of Christianity, or rather, the spirit of Orthodox worldview and attitudes, which surrounds, permeates, and nourishes verbal creation and literary speech of the past and present, and precisely how, in what form, with what essence and power it is reflected and reflected in them. It goes without saying that we are also open to scholarly materials on similar issues, connected with the study of Christian literature in foreign, non-Slavic-Russian, cultural traditions, but conditioned by Orthodoxy as a system of values.

"Both joy and consolation are in the sciences," Pliny the Younger, an enemy of Christianity, once said. "There is nothing more valuable than knowledge, for knowledge is the light of an intelligent soul," the Venerable John Damascene clarified centuries later. The final conclusion belongs to St. Philaret (Drozdov): "All our knowledge is useless, when in it we do not know Jesus Christ".
В. M. Kirillin