Strategies for Legitimization of the Royal Power in Old Russian Publicism (On the Material of the Letters of Ivan the Terrible)

The article presents an experience of a linguistic consideration of the problem of legitimization in a historical foreshortening. The material of the research was the heritage of one of the brightest characters of the Russian history - the first Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible, in particular, his letters to Andrey Kurbsky, the Swedish king Juhan III, the Polish king Stefan Batory, the English queen Elizabeth, i.e. texts in which questions of legitimacy of power are discussed and strategies for its legitimization are actively used. In Ivan the Terrible’s letters, power is legitimized; namely, its divine nature and the resulting right of the ruler to individual government (autocracy), to his political line, the morally justified right of the tsar to cruelly punish for harm, to strike sinners similarly to the Divine thunderstorm are postulated. Legitimization of any object as macrostrategy is performed through a number of discourse strategies. T. van Leeuwen has allocated four basic ways of legitimizing one’s actions: 1) reference to authority; 2) moral evaluation; 3) rationalization; 4) mythopoetics. Ivan the Terrible uses all of them in his letters, but these strategies possess a specific character caused both by the epoch, and the language personality of the first Russian tsar. The main feature of all the strategies and substrategies of legitimization in Ivan the Terrible’s letters is their religious characteristic: 1) in the strategy of reference to authority, the main authority and the guarantor of the legitimacy of imperial authority is God, as well as Ivan the Terrible’s ancestors, most of them were canonized; appeals to the institution of the Church and God’s law are also regular; 2) in the strategy of moral evaluation, legitimization it is carried out according to the moral values of Christianity, and evaluation is based on oppositions Orthodox-infidel, righteous-sinful; 3) in the mythopoetic strategy, legitimization is realized through references to plots from the Old and the New Testament. The insignificant role of the strategy of rationalization is indicative since for a religion-centered culture it is characteristic to appeal to unconditional faith, not to reason. The listed features of the described strategies and substrategies of legitimization make it possible to speak about the formation of a special -sacral - type of legitimization in Ivan the Terrible’s letters.

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