On the Creative History of the Solemn Sermons by Metropolitan Stefan Yavorsky

Abstract

Questions of the creative history of the homiletic heritage of Metropolitan Stefan Jaworski remain unexplored. The study of the unique manuscript of the first quarter of the 18th century and its comparison with later versions of solemn tales allowed us to conclude that the author undertook a significant content, stylistic, and lexical editing of the pieces. A comparative textual analysis of the lifetime autograph and later versions of sermons suggested that the author’s revision of the original draft could have been carried out by Metropolitan Stephen in the period from 1711 to 1718, during his preparation for publication of a collection of the most significant victory tales of the first decade of the 18th century. After Yavorsky’s death, Gabriel Buzhinsky collected and copied Yavorsky’s laudatory sermons, which gave researchers reason to assume that he was the editor and compiler of this collection. However, our textual analysis of the versions convincingly proved that Buzhinsky was not the editor of Yavorsky’s work but apparently relied on the versions of the sermon texts already edited by the author.

Keywords

• metropolitan stefan yavorsky
• solemn tales
• sermons
• editing
• author’s autograph
• content editing
• stylistic editing
• lexical editing.