Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2016 number

Academic publication of the Siberian chronicles, based on codicological and textological analysis of manuscripts, offers extensive material for further research. The revealed redactions and types of texts show that the Chronicle of Savva Yesipov had been actively used in the book culture of the XVII century. The Tale of Yermak’s seizure of Siberia became a metatext for the Siberian chronicles. While studying the chronicles it is important to determine the degree of the text’s variation and basic trends in the development of historical prose from the viewpoint of an editor as a reader and as an author. Analysis of the manuscript tradition that was created mostly by the scribes of the XVII-XVIII centuries shows the significance of the text’s functions and its elements such as titles, word order, introductions, conclusions etc. In the Siberian chronicles the unlimitedness of events typical of the All-Russian chronicles was replaced with delineated boundaries and limits of the course of historical action which is expressed in titles, forewords and special endings of the narrative. The paper presents some key results of analysis of these elements based on the study of types, redactions and versions of the Yesipov Chronicle. The objective of textological analysis is to determine the evolution of the authorial intention in the history of the text of this monument that was used in dozens of copies in the XVII-XVIII centuries. The titles are the most inconsistent elements in the Old Ancient writings. It is stated that within the Siberian chronicles the titles performed representational function from the reader’s point of view and nominative function - from the writer’s (editor’s) point of view. A variety of titles determined the goals of chronicals’ narrative in its historical and cultural development. Introductions appeared in the later redactions of the Siberian chronicles. They were designed for establishing contact with the reader and explaining the conception of the historical narrative. The ending, marked by the chronicle’s editor, focuses the reader’s attention on the chronicle’s compiler. The chronicle has an open structure due to the absence of such endings in some of its versions.