The disease concept and disease interpretation in the collection The Great Mirror

A collection of religious and didactic novels The Great Mirror is one of the most famous, but least studied compositions of Russian translated literature of the 17th century. The attention of the author was attracted by the theme of disease (illness), which has not been investigated until recently. The aim of the study is to characterize the understanding of disease in the Russian translation of The Great Mirror taking into consideration the linguistic representation of disease as a phenomenon. The author relied on the approach of the Kemerovo school of conceptual research in the definition of the concept and methodology of its study. Describing the term "conception" the author of the article relied on the definition of the conception given by the researcher V.L. Abushenko. The author separated these terms in their content and semantic completeness and described the conception as the "world view" of a particular society, or national consciousness, an important part of which is the concept as a culturally significant entity, expressing the mental characteristics of consciousness by means of language. The text of two translations of the collection of the late 17th century from Polish into Russian included in the manuscript of the State Historical Museum, Synodal Assembly No. 101 (830 novels) was the material for studying. The author made the following conclusions. The concept of disease in the The Great Mirror is based on the Christian understanding of disease as God's punishment. A significant part of the novels with the content about punishment of a sinner with disease as a test is closely related to hagiography and patristic teachings, where special attention was paid to the subject of the dependence of people's physical and spiritual condition on their actions. A number of novels interprets disease as one of the forms of asceticism and contains a description of a diseased state with elements of exaltation and detailed visualization, emphasizing the spiritual dignity of man. The novels of the collection have much in common with the Old Russian book tradition; however, in the West European collection the explanation of disease and its causes is more rational, practical and sometimes literally and naturalistically expressed. The lexical-semantic field of the disease phenomenon is not characterized by diversity, in contrast to the core of the "disease" paradigm, in which a wide range of words denotes the state of disease recorded by the dictionaries of the Russian language in the time of The Great Mirror translation. The content of the concept "disease" in the collection reflects the Christian etiology of the notion with interiorization when its visible manifestations are the result of the inner, spiritual organization of man. The didactic orientation of the book, vividly expressed in the representation of the concept of disease, ensured the popularity of The Great Mirror in the Russian culture of the transitional period, readers' demand in our time and its influence on the Russian literary process.

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