“Perfect love casts out fear”. How did Old Russian princes-martyrs fear?

Abstract

The concept of fear is one of the foundations upon which the image of a martyr is based in hagiography. The paper analyzes ways of representing the feelings of a saint who is about to suffer torment. The historical sources of the research are the Byzantine acts of the martyrs which translations were known in Ancient Russia, and original Old Russian lives. In the first part of the paper, stories about Greek righteous men are discussed from the point of view of the concept of fear. The author identifies two types of the representation of a martyr’s emotional state and defines the principles which guided the creation of the stories about the fearlessness or the bravery of the characters. In the second part of the paper, Old Russian literature is analyzed. It is based on the same principles as the Byzantine acts of the martyrs. However, in two of the lives of princes-martyrs (“The tale of Boris and Gleb” and “The life of Mikhail Yaroslavich of Tver”), the aforementioned principles are realized in a special way. The study of the representation of the characters’ feelings rests on the analysis of biblical quotes that are used to describe the fear of Boris and Mikhail. The findings help to clarify our understanding of the ways in which the image of a saint was created in translated Byzantine lives, and how the hagiographic canon was adapted in Ancient Russia.