The article discusses the issues of working with personal documents (ego-documents), particularly, a special kind of sources – published materials (autobiographies, diaries, etc.), which are still seen from a biased view, since, besides the author, there is an editor with his or her own worldviews who usually works on it. Thus the question arises whether these published ego-documents can be used. To answer this question the author briefly describes religious narrative and narratology. Two different documents about religious conversion of the Old Believers in Orthodoxy (mid-19th century) and deconversion (debaptism in the early 20th century) were considered, the main ways of applying the narrative theory in religious studies were outlined. The main object of the text study is the «event», what the author of the document experienced and what he tries to get across. The study of the published ego-documents from the perspective of narratology proves to be effective, it makes it possible to expand the source base and improve the quality of religious studies in the future.

Folieva Tatyana Alexandrovna, Candidate of Sciences (Philosophy), Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Saint Tikhon’s Orthodox University of Humanities, 23b, Novokuznetskaya st., Moscow, 107497, Russian Federation, e-mail: tatiana_folieva@yahoo.com

Folieva T.A. Revisiting the Narrative in Religious Studies. The Bulletin of Irkutsk State University. Series Political Science and Religion Studies, 2020, vol. 32, pp. 107-116. https://doi.org/10.26516/2073-3380.2020.32.107 (in Russian)

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