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Nil Sorskii and Prosvetitel'
- Slavica Publishers
- Chapter
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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...