Александр Кравецкий – Александра Плетнёва [Aleksandr Kravetskii – Aleksandra Pletneva]: Катехизисы и русский литературный язык XVIII в.: Феофан Прокопович, Платон Левшин, Гавриил Петров

 

DOI 10.17846/pdjkss.2026.110-125

 

Александр Геннадьевич Кравецкий, кандидат филологических наук, ведущий научный сотрудник Института русского языка им. В. В. Виноградова РАН;

Александра Андреевна Плетнёва, кандидат филологических наук, ведущий научный сотрудник Института русского языка им. В. В. Виноградова РАН (Moscow, Russia)

 

 

Catechisms and the Russian Literary Language of the Eighteenth Century: Feofan Prokopovich, Platon Levshin, Gavriil Petrov

 

Abstract

The article examines eighteenth-century catechisms as sources for the formation and development of the Russian literary language. Drawing on Feofan Prokopovich’s First Instruction for Young Men (Pervoe uchenie otrokom), the catechisms of Platon (Levshin), and an unpublished catechism by Bishop Gavriil (Petrov), the study explores the choice of linguistic means in texts intended for religious instruction. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between Church Slavonic and Russian elements, morphological and syntactic features, the use of Slavonicisms, word order, and the lexical composition of the texts. The article demonstrates that Feofan’s language reflects the linguistic transformations of the Petrine era, combining Russian innovations with the Church Slavonic tradition. Platon’s catechisms show a considerably more consistent orientation toward the emerging new Russian literary language and, in a number of syntactic features, anticipate the language of the following period. The unpublished catechism by Gavriil, by contrast, retains a closer connection with the Church Slavonic bookish tradition. A comparison of these texts makes it possible to identify the range of linguistic strategies employed in the formation of the Russian theological language in the second half of the eighteenth century.

 

Keywords

Russian literary language; Church Slavonic; catechisms; language standardization; linguistic variation; religious texts.

 

How to cite this article

Кравецкий, Александр Геннадьевич и Плетнева, Александра Андреевна (2026). Катехизисы и русский литературный язык XVIII в.: Феофан Прокопович, Платон Левшин, Гавриил Петров. In: Žeňuchová Šašerina, Svetlana (ed.). Písomné dedičstvo, jazyk a kultúrna pamäť v slovanskom svete. Nitra: Univerzita Konštantína Filozofa, s. 110-125. ISBN 978-80-558-2449-9 (tlač), ISBN 978-80-558-2450-5 (online). DOI 10.17846/pdjkss.2026.110-125

 

Public License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

 

Celý text: PDF