Orest Nasturel’s Unknown Note in the Catecheses of Theodore the Studite

Abstract

The article investigates and publishes a previously unknown note-autograph of Orest Nasturel, a famous book figure of the first half of the 17th century, who made a significant contribution to the popular education in Wallachia. Orest Nasturel held the high position of the second logothete at the court of the Wallachian ruler Matei Basarab. Despite his busy schedule, he devoted much of his time to collecting ancient manuscripts, translating Latin and Church Slavonic books into Romanian, and publishing them. Establishing the facts of Orest Nasturel’s biography is based, in historiography, on the analysis of the records he left in books. The scientific novelty of this research stems from the fact that, for the first time, there is introduced into scientific circulation Orest Nasturel’s handwritten owner’s entry, found in the manuscript book of Catecheses of Theodore the Studite in the Collection of SlavonicRussian Manuscripts of E.E. Egorov of the Russian State Library (Manuscripts Department, coll. 98, no. 949). According to this record, dated 1642, Orest Nasturel, inspecting once the sovereign’s monasteries, found in the Snagov Monastery (now Romania) an ancient manuscript crumbling from decay. Since it was not possible to save it, Orest Nasturel made a long journey to Rybnitsa (now the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic), where a famous book master named Nikolai made for him, in 1642, a copy of this book, which Orest then put into the Trinity Cozia Monastery (now Romania.) In the 19th century, the book was taken in Russia, probably by Russian old believers, where it first came to the collection of the antiquarian-bookseller I.L. Silin, and then was purchased from him by E.E. Egorov. The author conducted the dating of the manuscript’s watermarks (the 1640s) and compared the note’s handwriting with known autographs of Orest Nasturel. It is noted that the beautiful head-piece and the initials of Egorov’s Collection are close to the manuscript of Octoechos of the middle of the 17th century, stored in Belgrade in the Library of Serbian Patriarchate. According to a postscript in it, the Octoechos was made in a Slavic monastery of Athos. It is established that such decoration was quite popular for South Slavic manuscripts in the middle of the 17th century, and, therefore, it was hardly copied by the scribe Nikolai from an ancient original. The main results of the study are the detection, identification, attribution, reading and publication of the previously unknown note-autograph, as well as geographical and chronological localization of the list. The author emphasizes the value of Egorov’s Collection for studying by the specialists in the field of philology and linguistics, and sets a promising task of recreating the content, language features and dating of the lost protograph.