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Rude & Barbarous Kingdom Revisited: Essays in Russian History and Culture in Honor of Robert O. Crummey. Chester S. L. Dunning, Russell E. Martin, and Daniel Rowland, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2008, 215–29.       Nil Sorskii and Prosvetitel’ David M. Goldfrank Of   the   heretics   who   appeared   in   the   first   years,   everyone   knows,   enlightened   by   the   light   of   Or-­‐‑ thodoxy,  and  holds  under  a  curse,  having  learned   from   the   Divine   Writings.   But   that   now   in   our   years,  the  devil  has  sown  many  heresies  by  means   of  the  godless  heretics,  I  have  truthfully  presumed   to  recount,  so  that  we  flee  their  doctrines  and  hate   them  with  perfected  hate.   —Likely  Author:  Iosif  Volotskii;  Scribe  of  Earliest   Extant  Copy:  Nil  Sorskii*     Prosvetitel’   (as   it   has   come   to   be   known)—Iosif   Volotskii’s   magnum   opus   against  dissidents  lumped  together  by  him  as  the  “Novgorod  Heretics”  and   commonly   called   “Judaizers”—stands   out   as   Old   Russia’s   most   significant   original   comprehensive   religious   treatise.   Strangely,   it   has   never   been   thor-­‐‑                                                                                                                           *  Но  яже  в  первых  летех  явльшаяся  еретик,  вси  ведять,  православиа  светом  про-­‐‑ свещаемии,  и  под  клятвою  сих  имуть,  от  божественных  писаний  научившиеся.  А   еже  ныне  в  наша  лета  многи  ереси  диавол  безбожными  еретики  всеавь,  праведно   непщевах   сказати,   яко   учения   их   убежим,   и   съвершеною   ненавистию   възнена-­‐‑ видим   их.   Text   here   as   in   Iosif   Volotskii,   Prosvetitel’;   ili,   oblichenie   eresi   zhidovstvuiu-­‐‑ shchikh,  4th  ed.  (Kazan’:  Imperatorskii  universitet,  1903;  repr.  Farnborough:  Gregg  In-­‐‑ ternational  Publishers,  1972),  27–28;  cf.  N.  A.  Kazakova  and  Ia.  S.  Lur’e,  Antifeodal’nye   ereticheskie  dvizheniia  na  Rusi  XIV–nachala  XVI  v.  (hereafter  AfED)  (Moscow-­‐‑Leningrad:   ANSSSR,   1955),   466.   The   potentially   confusing   translation   at   the   top   of   the   page   at-­‐‑ tempts,  in  the  words  of  the  innovative  stage  director  Roger  Bensky,  my  long-­‐‑standing   Georgetown  colleague  in  French  Theater,  to  “meet”  and  “encounter”  the  text,  its  rhe-­‐‑ toric  and  poetics,  rather  than  simply  translate  to  the  best  of  my  ability  using  contem-­‐‑ porary  English  phraseology,  as  here:  Everyone  who  is  enlightened  by  the  light  of  Orthodoxy   knows   of   the   heretics   who   appeared   in   the   first   years,   and,   having   learned   from   the   Divine   Writings,  holds  [them]  under  a  curse.  I,  though,  have  presumed  truthfully  to  recount  how  now   in  our  years  the  devil  has  sown  many  heresies  by  means  of  the  godless  heretics,  so  that  we  flee   their  doctrines  and  hate  them  with  perfected  hate.  The  latter  translation  foregrounds  “eve-­‐‑ ryone”  and  the  author.  The  author  however,  with  his  initial  predicates,  chose  to  fore-­‐‑ ground  the  ancient  and  contemporary  heretics.   216 DAVID M. GOLDFRANK oughly  analyzed1  or  translated  into  another  language.2  Specialists,  moreover,   have  known  for  30  years  that  from  Nil  Sorskii’s  pen  issued  about  40  percent   of  the  earliest  extant  copy  of  Prosvetitel.3  Yet  to  my  knowledge  no  one  to  date   has  attempted  an  analysis  of  that  link.  Leaving  a  full  study  of  this  work  for   monographic  treatment,  this  essay  will  attempt  to  specify  Nil’s  role  or  at  least   speculate  on  some  reasonable  possibilities—as  consultant,  editor,  or  even  par-­‐‑ tial   author—and   to   assess   a   few   of   the   major   scholarly   judgments   of   Nil’s   activities  regarding  orthodoxy  and  dissidence.  I  shall  touch  briefly  on  redac-­‐‑ tion  families,  but  devote  more  attention  to  comparisons  of  the  structure,  style,   and  content  of  the  sections  Nil  copied  with  both  the  rest  of  the  work  and  his   other  writings.  Unfortunately,  a  festschrift  essay  of  this  type  lacks  the  space   for   an   adequate   discussion   of   historical   background   and   the   structure   and   textological  issues  of  this  complex  work,  as  we  set  the  parameters  of  what  we   can  know  regarding  Nil’s  place  in  its  development  and  what  this  all  means   for  our  understanding  of  Nil  as  a  historical  and  literary  figure.     A   response   of   the   most   forceful   Russian   monk   of   the   day   to   the   emer-­‐‑ gence,   at   least   in   the   eyes   of   the   Moscow-­‐‑appointed   Archbishop   Gennadii                                                                                                                             1  Elements   of   such   can   be   found   in   N.   A.   Bulgakov,   Prepodobnyi   Iosif   Volotskii   (St.   Petersburg,  1865);  Ivan  Khrushchev,  Issledovanie  o  sochineniiakh  Iosifa  Sanina,  Prep.  Igu-­‐‑ mena  Volotskogo  (St.  Petersburg:  Tip.  Imperatorskoi  Akademii  Nauk,  1868);  B.  Vasil’ev,   “Prosvetitel’”  Iosifa  Volotskogo:  Istoriko-­‐‑literaturnoe  issledovanie  (Kiev,  1912,  MS,  formerly   GPB  Ukr.  SSR,  Rukopisnyi  otdel,  no.  2181);  Irene  Holzwarth,  Der  “Prosvetitel”  des  Jo-­‐‑ seph   von   Volokolamsk   (dissertation,   typescript,   Berlin,   1944);   AfED,   305–523;   Tomáš   Špidlík,  SJ,  Joseph  de  Volokolamsk:  Un  chapitre  de  la  spiritualité  russe,  Orientalia  Christiana   Analecta  146  (Rome:  Pont.  Institutum  Orientalium  Studiorum,  1956);  Ia.  S.  Lur’e,  Ideo-­‐‑ logicheskaia  bor’ba  v  russkoi  publitsistike  kontsa  XV–nachala  XVI  veka  (Moscow-­‐‑Leningrad:   ANSSSR,  1960),  95–127,  261–66,  458–80;  Thomas  M.  Seebohm,  Ratio  und  Charisma:  An-­‐‑ sätze   und   Ausbildung   eines   philsophischen   und   wissenschaftlichen   Weltverständnisses   im   Moskauer   Russland,   Mainziger   Philosophische   Forschungen   17   (Bonn:   Grundmann,   1977),  255–77,  484–86,  490–91,  493–505,  509–19.   2...

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