Titova Lubov V.,
Candidate of Philology, Institute of History of the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Messages of Andrey Pleshcheev and the Protopope Avvakum in the “Book” of Spiridon Potemkin (Text and Context)
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2020-2-8
Spiridon Potemkin was one of the educated scribes who opposed the “reformed” church and one of the first leaders of the Old Believer resistance. The main work of Spiridon Potemkin is his “Book” on faith issues, consisting of his Words, which the defenders of the Old Believe used in order to shape their ideology. Along with the Words “Book” contains two compositions that clearly were not written by Spiridon Potemkin; those are the Message of Andrey Pleshcheev to Archpriest Avvakum and the Response of Avvakum to it, which in the original edition of the “Book” is numbered as the 6th Word. The article attempts to answer one of the important and still unclear questions about the authorship of the Answer to the Message of Andrey Pleshcheev addressed to Archpriest Avvakum. The paper gives a brief description of both Messages, reveals the stylistic peculiarities of the Answer, which serve as an additional argument in favor of his authorship. For the first time, both Andrey Pleshcheev’s Messages to Avvakum and Avvakum’s Answer to him are published in the appendix, in a precise sequence, as a twofold unity, a kind of dialogue about true Orthodoxy in the Russian manuscript tradition of the 17th–20th centuries.
Publishing: 29/04/2020
How to cite: Titova L.V. Messages of Andrey Pleshcheev and the Protopope Avvakum in the “Book” of Spiridon Potemkin (Text and Context) // Historical Courier, 2020, No. 2 (10), pp. 113–123. [Available online:] http://istkurier.ru/data/2020/ISTKURIER-2020-2-08.pdf
Links: Issue 2 2020
Keywords: Old Believer writings; leaders of the early stage of the Old Believer movement; “The Book” of Spiridon Potemkin; Message from Andrey Pleshcheev; Response of Archpriest Avvakum; stylistic features