Toward the Image of Agapit Pechersky in Ukrainian Redactions of Walking of Agapios to Paradise in the 16th–17th Centuries

Abstract

The article sheds light on the cultural reception of Walking of Agapios to Paradise, an apocryphal Christian apocalypse of early Byzantine origin, in Ukrainian medieval and early modern literature. In the territory of Rus’ the earliest known translation into Old Church Slavonic was found in the Uspensky Codex of the 12th – 13th century with the title “The Narration of Our Father Agapios about whoever takes his cross and follows Christ”. Along with “The Walk of Zosima to Rahman”, and “The Tale of Macarius of Rome”, this text is a part of the apocryphal corpus full of marvels and fantastic elements and dedicated to the theme of extremely difficult and voluntary journeys of mortals to the earthly paradise. This study is an attempt to trace national varieties of Ukrainian adaptations of the legendary plot and compare Greek redactions of the text (focusing on the Athens manuscript), “The Narration of Our Father Agapious...” from the Uspensky Codex with the late versions of “Walking of Agapios to Paradise” in Ukrainian compilations of the 16th and 17th centuries. It is proven that, in contrast to numerous works of translated literature, “paradisal” apocrypha during adaptation to the local culture were not subjected to radical changes, apart from the fact that both in the Uspensky Codex and early modern Ukrainian manuscripts exotic and fantastic elements found in the Greek original text are reduced to a minimum, whereas the symbolic dimension of narration is fundamental. Special attention is paid to translation strategies of scribes of the Uspensky Codex, Belarusian manuscript from the Chudov Monastery (the 16th century), and Stepan Komarevsky’s manuscript (the 17th century). It is hypothesized that transformation of Agapios the Pilgrim into Agapit the Healer in the late Ukrainian compilations, as well as completely rewritten final episodes of the text in Belarusian manuscript from the Chudov Monastery, can be influenced by the original literature of the Kyivan State, namely “Kyiv-Pechersk Patericon” and the local cult of St. Agapit Pechersky.