The Solovetskiy Monastery Copies of the Vita of St. Constantine-Cyril  Cover Image
  • Price 4.50 €

Соловецките преписи на Пространното житие на св. Константин-Кирил
The Solovetskiy Monastery Copies of the Vita of St. Constantine-Cyril

Author(s): Maja Ivanova
Subject(s): Language studies
Published by: Институт за литература - BAN

Summary/Abstract: When one studies the manuscript history of the Long Vita of St. Constantine-Cyril special interest is evoked by the monastery collections in which we find copies of this vita. The paper presents four complete Cyrillic copies of the Long Vita from the collection of the Solovetskiy Monastery (now kept in fund 717 in the Russian National Library in Saint Petersburg): Sol. 503/522 – in a Reading Menaion from the end of the 15th century; Sol. 501/520 – in a Reading Menaion from the 16th century (June 1562 – September 1569); Sol. 509/528 – in a Reading Menaion from the 16th century; Sol. 502/521 – in a Reading Menaion from the 17th century (1647) and one compilation made up of the Long Vita and the Prologue Vita of Cyril: Sol. 849/959 in a Collection of vitae and discourses from the 17th century. The four Solovetskiy Monastery copies are representatives of the October copyist tradition, though one of them is in a February Reading Menaion (Sol. 509/528), and all of them without exception are united by a number of peculiarities characteristic of the group. With regard to the lexical content, however, the Solovetskiy Monastery October tradition is uniform. No special attention has been paid to this so far. If one assumes that the same text lies in the basis of the four copies, from the 15th to the 17th centuries it was subjected to changes, which gives us ground to distinguish three branches: 1. Sol. 501/520 is absolutely identical with the preceding October pre-Makary and Makary copies and of all Solovetskiy Monastery copies it is nearest to the "classical" October model; 2. Sol. 509/528 deviates from Sol. 501/520, because of the corrections, which are visible in some places and which have been brought into the February model; 3. Sol. 502/521 and Sol. 503/522 (the second stratum, which gives ultimately its complete characteristic) coalesce. To make what has been said clear I shall point out that lexical comparison takes place both within the framework of the Solovetskiy Monastery copies and with a representative of the February reading menaion tradition. The Solovetskiy Monastery compilation (Sol. 849/959) will not be discussed as a separate copy, because it does not have the structure of a complete copy (after I became familiar with its textological characteristics I decided to exclude it definitively from the group of the complete Cyrillic copies). The paper draws the conclusion that as has been shown by the Solovetskiy Monastery copies, work on the manuscripts in the monasteries has not kept the tradition in its pure theoretical form.

  • Issue Year: 2007
  • Issue No: 37-38
  • Page Range: 69-90
  • Page Count: 22
  • Language: Bulgarian