The New Muscovite Cultural History: A Collection in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland

A Kansas Apocalypse:A Russian Manuscript and Its Vision of the Last Days

The New Muscovite Cultural History: A Collection in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland. Valerie Kivelson, Karen Petrone, Nancy Shields Kollmann, and Michael S. Flier, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2009, 187–205. A Kansas Apocalypse: A Russian Manuscript and Its Vision of the Last Days* Eve Levin The rare book collection of the University of Kansas, the Spencer Research Library, boasts a small number of Cyrillic manuscripts. One of these manuscripts , catalogued under the number MS C38, is a leather-bound book of 274 folia. The text is written in Russian Church Slavonic in an unskilled semiuncial hand (poluustav). The manuscript does not have a title page or contain an original title. The Spencer Research Library lists it under the title “John Chrysostom, Extracts from the Works, in Russian, with some other works.” The dating in the on-line catalog is “ca. 1600”; the old card catalog reads “16th–17th c.” The Spencer Research Library preserves little information on the provenance of the manuscript. The manuscript apparently was acquired between April 1960, and March 1969.1 Within this period, the Spencer Research Library purchased an item called “Church Slavonic manuscript” from the London rare book dealer H. Fellner. MS C38 has a price in British pounds (£150) written into the inside front cover. However, according to the acquisition record, the University of Kansas paid $33.60 for the item.2 The record contains * Versions of this article were presented at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies of the University of Kansas on April 22, 2008, and at the Symposium on Muscovite Culture in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland at the University of Kentucky on May 17, 2008. The author would like to thank the participants for their guidance and critiques. Exceptional thanks go as well to the staff of the Spencer Research Library, particularly Richard Clement and Karen Cook, and the staff of the Hilandar Research Library, particularly Predrag Matejic, Mary Allen Johnson, and Lyubomira ParpulovaGribble , for their invaluable assistance. None of these parties is responsible for the infelicities that remain. 1 A memo from 11 April 1960, “KU Holdings of Rare Russian items at present located in Special Collections,” does not include any item that could be MS C38. But on March 2, 1960, Oswald P. Backus wrote a note to visiting professor Gotthold Rhode, suggesting library items that will be of interest to him, including a xerox of the catalog card of MS C38. Spencer Research Library, PP 55, Personal Papers of Oswald P. Backus, Box 7, folder “K.U. Library”; Box 11, folder ”Rhode, Gotthold.” 2 Librarian Karen Cook found this item in the Spencer Research Library acquisitions file; it is dated “11-3-60.” 188 EVE LEVIN no information about what prompted the acquisition, but the KU Library was in the midst of vigorous collection development in the Slavic area, spurred in particular by Professor Oswald P. Backus. Backus, a specialist in premodern Russian and East European history, made numerous trips to Europe that combined his personal research with library acquisition efforts. He actively sought to acquire manuscripts that “could be used by graduate students for paleographical study,” as he wrote to his mentor, George Vernadsky.3 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Backus met with a community of refugee monks from the Valaam monastery, from whom he hoped to acquire manuscripts.4 According to Norman Saul, Backus’s colleague, KU actually did purchase numerous items from the Valaam monks, in large part to assist them in meeting their needs. So the arrival of MS C38 in Kansas is cloaked in mystery; perhaps it gravitated to its present home in tune with the state’s longstanding affinity with the Apocalyptic.5 Even a casual reading reveals immediately that the title in the catalog is a misnomer. The manuscript contains a variety of texts, but only six of them— about six percent of the content in pages—are attributed to St. John Chrysostom . An inscription on the obverse of the last folio in a later hand, probably of the 19th century, calls it “Book of the Passion of the Lord” (Kniga Strasti Gospodni). This, too, is a misnomer, although some 111 folia are devoted to a retelling of the last days of Christ. The volume contains 33 items (see Appendix 1), all connected with the theme of the Last Judgment—some explicitly; others through explication of the failings that will lead to condemnation on the fateful day. These texts are accompanied by 99...