17th-century book correction in the history of the Church Slavonic translation of the Akathist Hymn

The present study goal was to reveal the main changes in the text of the Akathistos Hymn during the correction of the Lenten Triodion in the 17th century. There are two stages: Kiev correction of the beginning of the 17th century and Nikon correction of the middle of the 17th century. The investigation was performed on the material of Moscow early printed books of the beginning and the end of the 17th century by the method of comparative linguistictextological analysis of variations. The proposed classification of changes is based on the reasons for their introduction in the text of the hymn. In total, six main categories of variations were distinguished. These are the result of 1) textual differences between Greek manuscripts and editions; 2) correction of errors of previous Slavonic versions; 3) reappearance of variants of early Slavonic versions; 4) modernization of the Church Slavonic language; 5) stylistic changes to mark the Church Slavonic language as a sacred language of high literature; 6) “Hellenization” of the Church Slavonic language which was to preserve the sacred component of the translation. Special attention was paid to the last group of corrections aimed at achieving the highest possible word-by-word and morpheme-by-morpheme correlation of the original and translated texts. The consistent introduction of such corrections in view of minimizing the element of interpretation in the sacred text translation and achieving both semantic and formal correlation between the original and receiving languages led to the changes not only in the text being translated but also in the structure of the Church Slavonic language in general.

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