About the Miscellany of Charms from the Collection of V. M. Undolsky

Abstract

The article deals with a collection of handwritten charms of the second half of the 17th century from the collection of V. M. Undolsky (Russian State Library. F. 310. No. 1179). The manuscript was published twice by L. I. Sazonova and A. L. Toporkov (in 2000 and 2002) with a commentary, but it has not yet been the subject of textual and linguistic investigations, which are necessary in the study of texts circulating in the handwritten sphere. These purposes make possible to draw conclusions about the origin of the collection, the pecularities of its creation and sources. The article presents the results of the study manuscript de visu. The special attention is paid to the peculiarities of handwriting, scribe’s mistakes and reflections of live pronunciation which is considered in the context of the handwritten culture of Old Rus’. In present article the observations is based on the textual, linguistic and comparative research methods that are relevant in the study of medieval manuscripts. The investigation allowed to propose several commented refinements to the edition based on a detailed study of paleography, textual features, and language, as well as the involvement of other manuscript and printed texts, historical and dialect dictionaries. The scribe’s errors in the manuscript from the collection of V. M. Undolsky are related to the existence of the antigraph, which does not allow us to agree with the publishers’ assumption that the collection was recorded from an oral source. The dialectal features of the charms leads to the conclusion about the Central or Middle Russian dialect of the scribe. It is possible that the owner of the manuscript, Vasily Volotsky, is the podyachy Vasily Volotsky, who is mentioned in the documents of 1699 and 1701 years of the Arzamas clerk’s izba.