DOCUMENTARY TEXTS IN THE LITERARY TRADITION OF THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD (ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE DOCUMENTARY GENRE IN THE LITERARY AND HISTORICAL ENVIRONMENT OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 17TH CENTURY)

The article is devoted to the interaction of documentary and literary beginnings in Russian booklore in the 17th century. The object of study is a special booklore genre of Ancient Russia - "ceremonials", in a particular case, "wedding ceremonial" that contains a detailed description of the wedding ceremony. The article considers how the documentary genre acquired art features during the historical and literary processes of the transitional period on the example of the literary monuments of the 17th century. The author pays particular attention to the literary composition by Grigory Kotoshikhin "On Russia during the Reign of Alexey Mikhailovich" (1666-1667), previously not widely investigated by the domestic medievalists. However, the literary monument of the transitional period taken for the research allows tracing the interaction of two traditions: documentary and literary in the framework of the author's text. At the same time, the conducted analysis shows the creative evolution of the author's ideas about the nature of the documentary genre. Ritual text serves the author as a basis for building the plot of his own work and does not hold back his creative possibilities. In this regard, Grigory Kotoshikhin's work is significant and fits well into the processes that took place during the transitional period in the development of Russian literature. While considering the work, the comparison of two variants of "wedding ceremonial" is emphasized that the author introduces -the royal wedding ceremony and the folk tradition of wedding celebration. The comparison reveals individual artistic techniques the author introduced in the text of originally documentary nature. Resulting the creative work made by the author in his essays based on the perception of the Western reader, the literary monument goes beyond the genre tradition of the document and finds the characteristics and attributes of the work with elements of journalism, in which the author creates a generic image of a contemporary, with his characteristic traits. Due to these peculiarities, Grigory Kotoshikhin's work fits the literary context of the epoch. The epoch was characterized by secularization of the author's thinking, searching for new techniques in the image of character and events, the subjectivity of the author's view on the subject of the image, introduction of special techniques to the text that simulated a direct address to the reader, which creates the effect of a dialogue between two subjects of the verbal expression.