On the version of the Izbornik of 1073 stored in Tomsk

The article analyzes late copies of famous ancient Russian texts of the 11th-15th centuries. When considering the history of this kind of texts, researchers usually confine themselves to the 17th century, although texts were also copied in a later period. Analysis of late copies could provide additional information about the existence of ancient Russian texts in the Old Believers’ environment over a wide chronological period, up to the beginning of the 20th century. The article deals with copies of the text of the Izbornik of 1073, stored in Tomsk Museum of Local History; they date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both copies are associated with Old Believers, although one of them existed for some time among the Orthodox clergy. One of the copies includes, in addition to the text of the Izbomik of 1073, a copy of a scribers’ record, similar to the record in the Ovchinnikov copy. This made it possible to put forward a hypothesis that at least one of the copies belonged to the Complete (Svyatoslav) Edition of the text. The two Tomsk texts were listed article-by-article and compared with the Ovchinnikov copy of 1617 (the numbering of chapters in the texts and the table of contents; the composition and structure of the texts in general; the headers). It has been established that the two Tomsk copies can be attributed to the second group of the Complete (Svyatoslav) Edition; the Ovchinnikov copy belongs to the same group. The existing discrepancies between the Ovchinnikov copy and the Tomsk copies can be attributed to scribal errors. There are also minor discrepancies between the Tomsk copies. Thus, the Tomsk copies of the Izbornik can be attributed to the group of the Ovchinnikov copy, but they were not directly copied from it. The conclusion is made about the existence of a group of copies of the Izbornik of 1073 that originated from the Ovchinnikov copy; they were widespread not only in the European part of Russia, but in Siberia as well. In view of a significant number of such copies, also stored in Moscow, the great popularity of the text of the Izbornik of 1073 among the Old Believers in the late 19th - early 20th centuries is indicated. An assumption is made about the reasons of the long existence of the text of the Izbornik in the Old Believers’ environment. This is the encyclopedic nature of the text of the Izbornik, which illuminated different aspects of not only the Christian world view and morality, but also life in general. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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