Implicit expression of the author’s self-awareness in Francysk Skaryna’s works

The aim of the article is to substantiate the presence of implicit forms expressing the author's self-awareness in the works of Francysk Skaryna, the most prominent representative of the 16th century Belarusian culture. The choice of this personality is connected with the fact that the earliest manifestations of the author's self-awareness in Belarusian literature can be found in his works. The analysis is preceded by an introductory section, which provides a brief overview of the extent to which the concept of «the author's self-awareness» has been developed in contemporary literary studies. In the first part of this article we consider the problems through the prism of F. Skaryna's poetic experiments, which were found in the prefaces to his translations of the Bible. Poetry as a specific field of creativity allows us to most accurately reveal the hidden signs of the author's self-awareness. In the second part the author’s self-awareness is regarded through a popular genre of church lyrics – the akathist, namely, its kontakion part. Despite the canonical status of the akathist, due to its poetic and melodic nature, it allowed a certain freedom in organizing the material. The author comes to a number of conclusions. The author of the article made a number of conclusions. First-ly, the implicit manifestations of the author's self-awareness in F. Skaryna's works are dualistic in nature, their adequate interpretation is only possible in combination with extra-textual information of the cultural context. Secondly, in his prefaces F. Skaryna uses the methods of tonic and syllabic verse which not only allows him to focus the reader's atten-tion on the important meanings, but also reveals the author's attitude to spoken accented verse, traditional for common people. Thirdly, in the kontakion verse of acathistus F. Skaryna deals exclusively with the rhythmic experiments.