EMOTIONAL STRUCTURES OF PERCEPTION OF RELIGIOUS TEXTS (The Image of Kalki in Medieval Puranas)

The article is devoted to the psychological aspects of perception of the mythological image of Kalki - the tenth avatar of Vishnu, the Hindu messiah, whose coming will destroy the moral and religious decline in the last days of Kali-yuga. The emotionality of the artistic text can be reduced to a constant antagonism between the emotional affects of form and emotional content of the text, during which there is a catharsis, provoking the reader's aesthetic response. The use of psychological analysis of emotional structures of religious text on the material about Kalki in the medieval Purāṇas gives the op-portunity to assess the quality and intensity of emotional experiences, associated with the perception of the image of the mythological hero. Our goal is to test the method of Vygotsky, described in the “Psychology of Art”, and to study the emotional content of the religious text on the material of the Purāṇic myth about Kalki.