On the History of Creation of the Akathist to St. Sergius of Radonezh: A Gifted Copy from the Library of Peter I

Abstract

Written by Sylvester Medvedev Akathist to St. Sergius of Radonezh (BAN. P I A No. 85), with a low popularity of the copy itself and a broad publicity of the text contained in it, stands alone among a few dozen gifted manuscripts of the library of Peter I. The book is specially decorated in a ceremonial way: it is written in elegant semi-uncial font, bound in red morocco with gold embossing. The manuscript presented to Tsarevna Sophia Alekseyevna in 1689 contained one of the last works of the soon-to-be executed monk, favorite student of Simeon Polotsky, court poet and prominent figure of the theological and political group of the so-called Latinists (in the 1680s). The talented writer mastered perfectly the techniques of both baroque literature of the early modern period and traditional hymnography. In the second half of the 17th — early 18th centuries different authors wrote four akathists to St. Sergius; the text of Sylvester Medvedev was erroneously attributed for a long time to another author (prince S. I. Shakhovsky, the author of the text of another akathist to St. Sergius of Radonezh) and was even published under that name at the end of the 18th century. The subject of this article is the existence of the gifted manuscript text and its features. The article also considers direct sources of the text of this akathist the genre of which is centonic construction. The author created his work based on the Great Akathist to the Mother of God (its vocabulary and figurative system are consistently used in all stanzas of the Akathist), ikoses and kontakia (it is this part of the canon that becomes the basis of the text of Sylvester Medvedev), as well as troparia of the services of St. Sergius of Radonezh and hagiographic materials. Having conducted a comparative analysis of the original and modern texts of the akathist, the author makes a conclusion about the nature of changes in the vocabulary of this text. The ambiguity of the figure of Sylvester Medvedev who was the author of the text widely used in worship and private prayers, and at the same time a monk too deeply immersed in politics and church controversy, has allowed one to see the tragedy of an extraordinary personality at the turning point in history.

Keywords

• akathist
• hymnography
• st. sergius of radonezh
• sylvester medvedev
• hand-written gifted copies