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Nil Sorskii and Prosvetite/' 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: losif Volotskii; Scribe of Earlies! Extant Copy: Nil Sorskii Prosvetite/' (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- ,.. Ho JI)I(e B n e pBblX AeTex 5lBAblllaJlOl epeTMK, BOI ne4JlTb, npaBOCAaBMa cneTOM rrpocnemaeMl1J .1, 11 nOA KAJlTBOIO CMX MMyrb, OT 60)l(eCTBeHHhlX fll1CaHl1M HaYl.Jl1BWl1eCJI. A e)Ke HbIHe B Hallla AeT3 MHorM epecM AMaBDA 6e36o>KHLIMM e peTMKl1 BceaSL, rrpaBeAHo H en w,eBax CKa3aTI1, RKO yqeHl1JI MX y6e)l(l1M, 11 CbBeprne Holo HeHaBl1CTl1IO B'b3HeHaBMA ,l1M I1X. Text here as in lasif Volotskii, Prosvetitel'; iii, oblichel'lie eresi zhidovstvuiushchikh , 4th ed. (Kazan': Imperatorskii universitet, 1903; repro Farnborough: Gregg international Publishers, 1972), 27-28; d. N. A. Kazakova and la. S. Lur'e, Alltifeodal'lIye ereticheskie dvizhClliia 110 Rusi XIV-lIachala XVI v. (hereafter AfED) (Moscow-Leningrad: ANSSSR, 1955), 466. The potentially confusing translation at the top of the page attempts , 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 rhetoric and poetics, rather than simply translate to the best of my ability using contemporary English phraseology, as here: Evenjone who is elllightened by the light ofOrthodoxy blOWS of the heretics who appeared ill the first years, alld, havillg learned from the Diville Writillgs, holds [them] ullder a curse. I, though, have presumed truthfully to recoullt how 1I0W ill our years the devil has SOWII mOllY heresies by memlS of the godless heretics, so that we flee their doctrines alld hate them with perfected hate, The latter translation foregrounds "everyone " and the author. The author however, with his initial predicates, chose to foreground the ancient and contemporary heretics. Rude & Barbarous Kingdom Revisited: Essays in Russian History and Culture in Honor of Robert 0. Crummey. Chester 5. L. Dunning, Russell E. Martin, and Daniel Row land, eds. Bloomington, IN: siavica Publishers, 2008, 215-2 9. 216 DAVID M. GOLDFRANK oughly analyzedl or translated into another language2 Specialists, moreover, have known for 30 years that from Nil Sorskii's pen issued about 40 percent of the earliest extant copy of Pro5vetite/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 partial author-and to assess a few of the major scholarly judgments of Nil's activities regarding orthodoxy and dissidence. I shall touch briefly on redaction 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 emergelKe , 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, Issledovonie 0 sochineniiokh Iosifa Son ina, Prep. Igu111eno Volotskogo (St. Petersburg: Tip. Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1868); B. Vasil'ev, "Prosvetitel'" Iosifo Volotskogo: Istoriko-literotunlOe issledovonie (Kiev, 1912, MS, formerly GPB Ukr. SSR, Rukopisnyi otdel, no. 2181); Irene Holzwarth, Der "Prosvetitel" des Joseph von Volokolamsk (dissertation, typescript, Berlin, 1944); AfED, 305-523; Tomas Spidlik, SJ, Joseph de Volokolomsk: Un chapitre de 10 spirituolite russe, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 146 (Rome: Pont. Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1956); la. S. Lur'e, Ideologicheskoio bor'bo v russkoi publitsistike kontso...

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