A Nativity Sermon in the 13th Century Tolstovskiy Sbornik: Textology and Language Features

Abstract

The paper focuses on the composition, lexical, and grammatical features of a Nativity sermon in the 13 th century Old Russian Tolstovskiy Sbornik (National Library of Russia, F.p.I.39). The author considers its Byzantine sources, principles of editorial work, and the differences from original rhetorical structures. Attributed to John Chrysostom, the sermon turns out to be a complicated compilation from various early Byzantine sermons. The compilation is based both on rearranging fragments of the same source and on combining excerpts from different sermons in a small context. Such transformations indicate the lack of cohesion in sermon texts, due to their independence from the causation and time factor. Non-attributed parts of the Old Russian text may be original since they demonstrate a certain similarity with Kirill Turovskiy orations in the same anthology. The lexical level of the sermon contains non-standard solutions that reinterpret the Greek source text, which may indicate either the missionary nature of the translation or a tendency to the poetic decoration. In some cases, the semantic mismatch of lexical units within Greek-Slavonic correlations is due to errors. At the grammatical level, there are also grammatical inconsistencies of Slavonic and Greek units; they affect the categories of time, number, gender, as well as parts-of-speech status.