Yavor Miltenov

Book Review: Попова, Татьяна. Г. Первый славянский перевод Лествицы Иоанна Синайского. Москва – Санкт-Петербург: Нестор-История, 2020. 320 pp. ISBN: 978-5- 4469-1705-1

History, Review, General Reference Works

Notes on Stefan the Hagiorite’s Narratio De Sancto Monte Athonensi Together with an Edition of the Text According to Ms. F.I.643 from the Russian National Library in Saint Petersburg (olim St Paul Monastery on Mount Athos) / Narratio de sancto Monte Athonensi (Tale of the Holy Mount Athos) is one of the late medieval ancestors of the Bulgarian historical thought from the period of the National Revival. It is the most literate, well-structured and sophisticated South Slavic work on the history of Athonite sacredness and true orthodoxy. The author, Stefan the Hagiorite, a Bulgarian monk from the Zograph Monastery, proves himself a skillful compiler with aptitude for combining both sources and approaches. The paper offers an overview on the history of the text with special attention on its sources, witnesses, dissemination, and influence on other Slavic works. An edition of the most reliable and previously unpublished copy is also appended.

MS Voskr. 115-bum., kept in GIM-Moscow (V), originates from the Hilandar monastery – it was written by the well-known scribe Damian, who worked there in ca. 1340–1380. The manuscript consists of 27 Chrysostomian and Pseudo-Chrysostomian homilies (1r–129v) and a miscellany, which contains unedited and unstudied copies of works of Preslav provenance (130r–247v). The aim of the present paper is to describe the Chrysostomian collection in V, that has not been a subject of detailed research so far, and to examine its relations with the longer and shorter collections of the Zlatostruy (Chrysorrhoas) corpus. The comparative textual analysis has shown, that none of these is the source of V and most probably it is an independent selection from the original Simeonic Chrysorrhoas.

The paper attempts at a comparative study between Slavonic copies of Minor Prophets with commentary, covering its text in full. A list of the most important variae lectiones is arranged, where primary or secondary origin of a certain reading is supported by its Greek parallel, if available. The analysis of variant readings is preceded by a reconstruction of the history of the text before the emergence of the protographs that have started the Russian and South Slav manuscript traditions, then these two branches are compared. The further investigation comes to the conclusion, that the Russian copies should be a subject of an intensive future research, as they preserve to the greatest extent the features of the Old Bulgarian Glagolitic original. The text of the Minor Prophets with commentary found in South Slav copies shows numerous deviations from the archetype – missing text fragments, which are about half of the translation (527 of 1049 verses and their commentaries) and over 450 cases of text displacements and transpositions; omissions of single phrases and words; various mistakes made in the process of copying; incorrect changes; lexical replacements and intentional emendations. Thus one major principle in Slavonic textual criticism is once again corroborated – the earlier chronology of certain copy and/or its affiliation to the language and provenance of the original do not prove its reliability.

In the article the mechanic omissions and mistakes in the text of the Erotapokriseis of Pseudo-Kaisarios are analyzes on the bases of the textological examination of nine of so far eleven known Slavonic copies of the composition. It is established that in it there are three types of absences of text: 1) due to a lack of pages in the hyparchetype of part of the existing testimonies, 2) due to a physical defect in the Old-Bulgarian protograph, from which the Russian copies derive and 3) absences which occurred during the translation. Published for the first time are fragments, which were absent from the edition done by arch. Leonid. In the article some typical mistakes and new meanings are also studied, whose appearance is related to the technology of the translation. The number of the mistakes, which could not have been made if the text had been before the translator’s eyes, leads to the assumption that the translation of the Erotapokriseis was probably done through dictation, aloud pronunciation of the Greek text.

The Slavonic translation of the Erotapokriseis of Pseudo-Kaisarios was made in the first quarter of the X century, but was kept only in Russian manuscripts from XV-XVII century, where it is distributed under a new title and with considerable absences of texts in the beginning and end of the work. The article is dedicated to the composition of the questions and answers in the Erotapokriseis. Examined is the possibility to obtain data about the translation itself, as well as its Greek prototype, from the organization and segmentation of the Slavonic text. The data studied in the article show that the translation of the Erotapokriseis was made completely, without eliminating parts of the text of adding others. The exposed arguments lead to the conclusion that the reason for the absences of text in the Russian copies is a physical fault in their Bulgarian protograph.

The article examines a passage from the Apocryphal Apocalypse of John the Theologian, originated probably in the 5th century in Byzantium, whose source is found in texts from the most ancient period of Christian literature. In the written sources the fragment existed in the lost work ‘Clarification of the Lord's Sentences’ by Papius of Hierapolis and in the Aversus haereses of Irenaeus of Lyons. In the course of the research, it was found that this fragment is based on a written oral tradition. an extremely ancient basis of the oral traditions that spread in Asia Minor probably even before the recording of the Gospel texts in the form in which we know them today.

Report of the ICS Commission for Computer Processing of Medieval Slavonic Manuscripts and Early Printed Books (1998 -2003) (in Russian)