Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2022 number

The Petition of 1670 by the Old Believer Monk Avraamii (died 1672) is the most striking polemical work of the early Old Believers, which helped to struggle for abolishing Patriarch Nikon’s church reform. However, the study of the Petition is at an early stage nowadays, the same like a century ago. The main objective is to find out correlation of two known versions of the work. The author supposes that it is crucial to study the handwritten collection by Avraamii “The Christian Secure Shield of Faith” (1667-1669) (Avraamii included its great part in a revised form into the Petition) as well as other writings of the Monk and his associates (Deacon Fedor, Archpriest Avvakum, Geronty of Solovki) also included fragmentally into the Petition. The texts analysis allows confirming the hypothesis expressed previously by researchers that of the two currently known versions of this work the 1^st one should be recognized as the closest to the author’s text. This text version, different from the author’s one, previously published by N.I. Subbotin and most often cited in studies, has signs of purposeful processing. This makes it possible to consider the 2^nd version as a special variant of the Petition. However, the nature of its processing appears to be more complex than was thought previously. It is mainly expressed in rearrangement of the text fragments, and in several meaningful additions. It is proved that the co-creator of the Petition 2^nd version carried out coherent replacement of certain phrases and expressions. But the textological features of the 2^nd version indicate that it better preserved the text of the Petition’s sources in a number of cases. The author suggests that both versions are based on a common protograph, which means that a part of differences in the 2^nd version can be explained by individual manuscripts errors, not by the deliberate will of its creator.