Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2015 number

Collected preparatory works of the “Deacon’s Answers” make it possible to characterize the process of collective work of several generations of Old Believers who gathered testimony in favor of their advocated point of view with regard to the novelties introduced to the Ritus and liturgical practices during the Patriarch Nikon’s Church reform. The article shows how the collectors used the works written by the monks of Solovetsky Monastery and sel ected citations from the Holy Script in order to prove the illegitimacy of all these novelties. This work was started by Timofey Lysenin who managed not only to collect and systematize all fragments from the authoritative books (that had by then been selected by the defenders of Old Belief) but also referred to the original texts for the purpose of verifying the accuracy of reproduction of the text and describing a manuscript or a printed edition. His book was taken by the compilers as a basis for the collections of preparatory works. The article draws attention to the fact that compilers of the collections regarded the texts of their predecessors as a material that could be used for stating their own opinion. Being respectful of the text they used, reproducing the fragments practically verbatim, they considered it possible to change the logic of argumentation, supplementing it with new citations and comments. It is concluded that each collection resulted fr om a collective work of several generations of defenders of Old Belief. The collective character of their work was due to the fact that even in the Modern Age the Old Believers retained a traditional attitude towards citations and creating their own manuscripts that was typical of the Old Russian scribes.