Novosibirsk State University Philologists found a copy of one of the famous works by Ivan the Terrible.in a Biysk museum. The manuscript was found by NSU students who had internships at the museum. The pages of this manuscript were pasted into a book, which used to belong to the Old Believers.
Two weeks ago a dark leather-bound ancient prayer book was brought to the museum by an 85-year-old resident of Biysk, Maria Kuzminichna. The book is a collection of prayers that are meant to be read throughout the day. The woman was not able to say much about the book that had been preserved by her family and given to her by her parents who moved to Biysk fr om the Vladimir Region. The woman brought the prayer book to the History Museum for Altai Spiritual Missions wh ere there is a collection of hand-written and printed books from the 17th-20th centuries that have been collected by the Museum founders.
The prayer book was brought to the Museum just as the students were beginning their internships. This is the 11th year the Museum has hosted archeographic interns from the NSU Philology Department. Future philologists under the guidance of NSU teachers and graduate students who have chosen ancient Russian literature as their specialty. In addition the prayer book assessment will include experts from the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the State Public Scientific and Technology Library SB RAS who make detailed descriptions of old books using specially developed "fields" using a number of parameters: the content of texts, the size and format of the book, font, ornamentation, etc.
The students identified the prayer book as similar to specimens in catalogs of old books printed in different print shops in Russia from the XVII century to the first quarter of XX so it is appropriate that the book stay in the Museum. So, this interesting and detailed work requires students to rely on their knowledge from studying Old Russian literature, paleography, codicology, textology, Old Slavonic language, etc.
Maria Kuzminichna’s prayer book went to Sofya Sugachevskaya, a sophomore in the Philology Department at the NSU Humanities Institute. She also found hand-written pages pasted into the printed edition. From the catalogs that Sophia reviewed together with the teachers, it became clear that the prayer book was printed at the end of the 18th century (after 1790) in Fedor Kartashov’s secret Old Believer printing house.
Sofya talked about the discovery,
“This is the second old book I have worked with. The first was an alphabet book ("A Primer by a Man Who Desired to Study Books"), and there were no challenges working with that book since it was described in detail in the reference literature. So, of course, it was much more difficult to work on the prayer book. On the advice of the teachers, I tried to understand whether the prayer pages were included in the book in place of lost printed sheets or as a special ins ert. I realized that I was dealing with two separate texts woven in to the main book. It appeared as if they were copied by different people because the handwriting of complex letters, at first glance, differed."
Establishing the authorship of this work of literature, time and place of its creation is a complicated process, but philologists managed in a few days to understand that the two inserts in the prayer book are hand-written copies of well-known works from the second quarter of the 16th and the first quarter of the 17th century. Both texts are examples of hymnography - the main form of poetic creativity in Old Russian literature.
The first of these, "The Canon of the Angel of the Terrible Commander", is known in manuscripts authored by Parthenia Udrovivoy. The same name was signed on an essay based on polemics that was conducted by Tsar Ivan the Terrible with the Czech pastor Jan Rokita. Already by the XIX century there was a suggestion that Parthenius Urodivy was a pseudonym for the Tsar himself. In the twentieth century, this assumption was scientifically justified by Academician D.S. Likhachev, who published an essay in the series "Monuments of Ancient Rus Literature" along with other poetic works by the autocrat.
An Associate Professor at the NSU Department of Ancient Literatures and Literary Source Studies,Valentin Melnichuk, gently leafed through the darkened pages and stopped at the most striking epithets in which the Tsar appeals to the angel: "terrible warrior", "formidable messenger", "wise cunning", "winner of the enemy forces" and explained, “ In the canon, the worshiper refers to the angel - "The Terrible Commander of the Heavenly Tsar", who will meet his soul after death and take him to court. The canon emphasizes the author's fear of the angel as "formidable and deadly." This canon was not known among the Moscow Printing House publications, but existed exclusively in handwritten manuscript form and was carefully preserved among Russian Old Believers. This text, of a literary individual is colored by the feelings of the author himself and reveals Grozny to be a talented poet and connoisseur of hymnography.”
The second handwritten text was also very interesting. This is a short version of the "Service Icon of Sophia Wisdom of God", created by the famous Russian writer from the first half of the XVII century, Prince Semyon Shakhovsky. Scientists note that Siberia appeared several times in his biography. He was here both in exile, in Tobolsk and Tomsk and as a soldier in Yeniseysk.
Like the "Canon of the Angel of the Terrible Commander", "The Service of the Icon of Sophia the Wisdom of God" was distributed exclusively in manuscript form. Researchers speak of this piece as an outstanding example of Russian hymnography. It is interesting that the "Service of the Icon of Sophia the Wisdom of God" is written in acrostic form ("organized alphabetically"). The first letters of the seven troparia (hymns) are comprised of 18 letters of the Slavonic alphabet and in the eighth and ninth troparia, the author encrypted his name, "Simeon".
While working on the prayer book, the philologists came to the conclusion that the handwritten inserts were placed in the book almost 100 years later. This is evidenced by the type of paper they are written on which is a very important parameter for specialists.
“On the paper that was used for prayer book, the grid is visible for highlighting the sheets. The longitudinal and transverse lines are the so-called vertices and ponce (?) and filigree (watermarks) that makes it possible for you to date the book within a five year accuracy. The book has publication data but they are a "hoax", since the book is printed in a secret Old Believer printing house and the exact date of its appearance can only be determined by specialists. said Vasil Podoprigora, Junior Researcher at the Department of Rare Books.
Podoprigora continued his description of the paper,
“It is hand made paper, it was not produced from wood pulp as we make it today, but from old linen rags. Unlike the prayer book, the handwritten compositions inside used machine-made paper called "roll". Paper machines that produced this type of paper appeared in Russia no earlier than the 10th year of the XIX century, cellulose paper dates to the middle of the same century. This paper is without watermarks, but it has dating signs. The time of the manuscript’s creation helps and the handwriting. In this case, it is an Old Believers' half-charter ? from the end of the XIX to the beginning of the XX century.”
What do these manuscripts and the book tell scientists? Elena Ivanovna Dergacheva-Skop, Novosibirsk State University Professor and well-known Russian philologist and founder of an NSU archaeographic school explained,
“These findings are evidence of the importance of preserving traditions, our historical and cultural memory. Carefully rewritten texts speak of the importance and special attention that was paid to these writings. For the Old Believers, who included them in the composition of the prayer book, a book intended for prayer as well as for teaching children, it was spiritual reading. It was in the life of the Old Believers that works from the Old Russian tradition were in great demand. Think about it, created a few centuries ago these texts were still a part of the everyday life of a man in the late XIX - early XX century!”
The work done by students, in collaboration with specialists, on the description of books in the Biysk Museum gives researchers new information about old publications that have been preserved in Siberia. According to the NSU philologists, these detailed descriptions will become part of the consolidated catalog in the future. Dergacheva-Skop provided more details about the past and the future of the manuscripts and the student’s experience,
