The Life of Sergius of Radonezh in the Old Believer manuscript tradition: Codicological observations on the B-5678 collection

The aim of the article is to consider the problem of the existence of Old Russian texts in the Old Believer environment on the example of the text of the Life of Sergius of Radonezh. An attempt was made to find out whether Old Russian texts continued to exist in the manuscript environment after the text was published. The authors list a number of works that consider the problem of the correlation between handwritten and printed books, which is far from being completely solved, and also indicate the most significant works on the study of the Life of Sergius of Radonezh. The source for the research was the B-5678 collection from the Department of Manuscripts and Book Monuments of the Tomsk State University Research Library. The collection is dated to the 1830s and contains, among other things, the text of the Life of Sergius. The collection came to the Tomsk State University Research Library from Tomsk Theological Seminary. Judging by the owners’ record, the book belonged to the inhabitants of the village Kulikovka, Ust-Tartas volost; it was a place of traditional residence of Old Believers of various groups. The study used the methods of textology and codicology. To determine the version of the Life of Sergius as a part of the collection under consideration, a comparison was carried out with the text published in 1646 in the edition of Simon Azaryin. It was found that the manuscript under study refers specifically to this edition, but contains only 19 chapters instead of 88. It was also found that the chapters were not rewritten in the order in which they appeared in the edition; one of the reasons was that the notebooks of the block were mixed up during their binding. When checking the texts of the edition and the manuscript, numerous lacunae and text losses were revealed, although the collection as a whole is in good condition. In addition to fragments of chapters that break off long before the end of the text, there are also two chapters, where significant deletions were found at the middle. Here chapters 7 and 53 especially attract attention: they have such losses, and they are repeated and significant in volume. Thus, for the study, the manuscript was chosen that is quite traditional in content, but original in construction. From the records it can be seen that the same person copied and ordered the copying of texts for the collection. The appearance of the word “Amen” at the end of some obviously unfinished chapters, which is absent in the 1646 edition, is also important. Perhaps, in this way the scriber emphasized that the text was missing further, despite its obvious incompleteness. As a result of comparing the texts of the edition and the manuscript, it was found that the 1646 edition could not be the protograph of the manuscript under study. Probably, the prothograph was a defective copy from the edition, in which the sheets were also mixed up. The research has established that the appearance of the publication of the text of the Life of Sergius of Radonezh did not mean the end of its existence in the handwritten Old Believer tradition. Also, some practices of the work of the Old Believer scriber, who worked in the first half of the 19th century, were reconstructed.

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