CYRILLIC TYPE BOOKS OF THE XVII–XX CENTURIES IN THE COLLECTIONS OF KUPINO PARISH LIBRARY

Abstract

The article presents the results of work on archaeographic research of the Metropolinate of Novosibirsk parish book collections, done in 2019–2020. The researchers of the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts of SPSTL SB RAS inventoried the books of Cyrillic and civil press kept in the parish library of Holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke in Kupino (Kupinsky district of Novosibirsk province). 35 Orthodox books of the Cyrillic tradition and of the Russian civil type of the first half of the 17th – early 20th centuries were made known, among them, 2 editions of the 17th century printed by the Moscow Print Yard, 4 Old Believer editions of the late 19th – early 20th centuries, 19 Synodal editions of the Cyrillic type from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries and 12 Synodal editions of the Russian civil type. The aim of the article is to present the results of scientific description and an archaeographic analysis of individual features of the most interesting book exemplars. Through complication of describing such book collections, which did not usually preserve intact or partially samples of pre-revolutionary parish book stocks and were shaped from various sources, priority was given to describing the owner’s signs of each sample that reflected the history of their existence in one or another social environment. Among the earliest there were described the perfectly preserved Moscow Gospel of 1627, the owner’s and donative records of which reflected its displacement from the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to Moscovia, where it could have come after Smolensk campaign of Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich. Another interesting example of editions of the Moscow Print Yard already from the post-schism period is the Irmologion of 1657, in which course of the description significant differences from other known copies were revealed. The late Old Believers liturgical books, that preserved the fragments of hand-written and early printed books, give interesting owners signs. The collection of synodal publications of the St Luke parish library covers a wide chronological and thematic range. Besides liturgical books such as psalteries, missal books, miscellanies of Akathist hymns there are also collections of sermons, manuals on theology, church singing and Sacred history. The article presents brief versions of the books of Cyrillic press of the St Like parish library, clearly showing the wide geographical distribution of the Russian Orthodox book both in the late medieval times and in the 20th century, as well as characteristic signs of its existence in various readership.