E-mail: himins@yandex.ru Tel.: +7 (499) 750-01-11
11, Volokolamsk hwy, Moscow, 125080, Russian Federation
PhD in Philology, Associate Professor, Russian Biotechnological University (Rosbiotech)
This article compares Slavic eschatological folk narratives with those that have come down to us as part of the literature of Late Antiquity. It analyzes a narrative model that constructs the future end of the world according to that of eschatological myths and depicts future eschatological events as a series of world catastrophes; these are followed by the depopulation of the earth and the future rebirth of life from a small group of surviving people or from an only surviving human couple. The works that demonstrate the greatest similarity of plot and motif to Slavic eschatological folk narratives are the first two books of the Sibylline Oracles; chapters 15–16 of the Fourth Book of Ezra; and the eschatological section of The Divine Ordinances by the Christian apologist Lucius Lactantius. A certain proximity to this model is also exhibited by certain motifs that have come down to us in the works of Roman poets of the pre-Christian era (Virgil’s Eclogue. IV, the poem “Pharsalia, or On the Civil War” by Mark Annaeus Lucan). Analysis of these texts demonstrates that the eschatological ideas that existed in the Roman Empire had much in common with those in later Slavic eschatological texts; and in many cases their parallels cannot be accounted for as a result of the influence of early Christian literature. The most likely explanations for this may be the cultural contacts of the Slavs with the GraecoRoman world in the Migration Period; the common Indo-European heritage; or the existence of even older, similar eschatological ideas among the population of Eurasia.
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