A Sticheron to Archpriest Avvakum in the Chant by the Dvinsky Mentor Daniil Mikhailov

Abstract

The article is devoted to a previously unknown work of hymnography — a sticheron to Archpriest Avvakum, whose chant was composed and recorded in “hooks” notation by Daniil Davydovich Mikhailov, mentor of the First Daugavpils Old Believer community in the 1930s and 1940s. The record of the chant is preserved in the Latgalskoe collection (no. 39) of the Ancient Manuscripts Repository (Drevlekhranilishe) at the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Pushkinskij Dom) in St. Petersburg. The circumstances of its entry into the collection are disclosed in letters of the Baltic group of Old Believers to Vladimir Malyshev, the founder of the Drevlikhranilishe, who was searching for everything related to the memory of Archpriest Avvakum. Daniil Mikhailov, one of the most prominent Baltic Old Believers of the 20th century, a precentor, an educator and an associate of Ivan Zаvoloko, was also known as an outstanding singer, a connoisseur of the ancient ­Znamenny chant and a scribe of musical manuscript books written in “hooks” notation. Mikhailov composed the sticheron to Archpriest Avvakum on the text of the doxastikon from the aposticha of the 6th echos from the Service to Bishop Pavel Kolomensky. The chant of the sticheron is original, but nevertheless it is based on certain genre ­prototypes found in the Old Russian tradition. The article examines the sticheron in the context of the Old Belivers’ hymnographic activity in the 18th — 20th centuries. The study also takes into account the little-known illuminated copy of the Service to Bishop Pavel Kolomensky in the Chuvanov’s collection of the Library of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg (Chuvanov 177).