Russian Copyists of the OlTranslation of Athanasius of Alexandria’s Orations against the Arians

Abstract

The Old Bulgarian text of the Orations against the Arians by Athanasius of Alexandria has survived in ten Russian copies, dating between the 15th–18th centuries (middle of the 17th c.), all of them preserving the colophon of Tudor Doksov, according to which the translation was done by Constantine of Preslav in 906. The article discusses how five, six or seven centuries after the Old Bulgarian translation, the Russian copyists perceived certain specific linguistic markers from the translation done by Constantine of Preslav: the theological terms, neologisms such as сонтьство φύσις, бышьнъ γενητός, лоучьшение βελτίωσις, the participle сон/сони as an epithet of God, the archaisms братръ, съцѣглъ μόνος and some morphosyntactic devices (the adverb сегда/сьгда, the particle есе, the conjunction небонъ). Their substitution with other lexemes can be explained by diverse reasons: inability to understand the authentic meaning, inaccurate copying, adaptation of the text to certain theological interpretations in view of the time and place of the copying process. The copyists’ mistakes and reinterpretations of the lexemes that were irrelevant for the 15th–18th century serve not only as a revealing comment on various aspects of the copyists’ practice but also as a tool to look into the textual history of the composition.