The Book of Psalms in the Church Slavonic, Greek, and Polish Languages from Simon Azarjin’s Library

Abstract

This article is devoted to research on the Book of Psalms manuscript written in the first half of the 17th century from Simon Azarjin’s book collection. The Book of Psalms is written inter-linearly in three languages: Church Slavonic, Greek, and Polish. The availability of the text in Polish in the Orthodox psalms makes this memorable text unique. The research concentrates on the clarification of the aim that led to the creation of the Book of Psalms. The lack of a preface or any other evidence of its author, time, or place of its translation forces us to turn to indirect facts, namely, to research of the textological character and to an analysis of Church Slavonic and Polish texts. Textological research of the Church Slavonic edition of the Book of Psalms reveals its similarity with pre-Nikonian texts and the analyses of the text in Polish allows us to affirm that the author had used the Catholic Leopolita’s Bible in 1561, exposed it to a profound edition—both textological as well as linguistic. The analysis of the inserted changes into the text in Polish and the alternated language itself enables us to assume that the author of the manuscript might have been a native from West Russia, while the text itself had probably been created in the Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius. The efforts aimed at adaptation of the Polish text into the text in Church Slavonic prove that the tri-lingual Book of Psalms might have been created for the inhabitants of the previous territories of Great Principality of Lithuania who converted from the Catholic Church or from the Greek Catholic into the Orthodox Church. The text in Polish had thus been needed especially for those believers practicing the Orthodox religion in order to understand the Church Slavonic language of worship.