“This whole matter was surrounded by some kind of mystery”: the fate of the manuscripts of Svyatoslav’s Izbornik and the book tradition of Siberian Old Believers of the second half of the 19th–21st centuries
Authors:   National Research Tomsk State University, Borodikhin Andrey Yu. 
Published: October 2024

The article examines the stages of preparation for the publication of one of the most famous manuscripts of the Russian Middle Ages – the Izbornik of Svyatoslav of 1073. It is suggested that the consequence of this was a surge of increased interest among the Old Believers at the end of the 19th century. to “Questions of Anastasius Sinaita”, which constitute the main content of the Izbornik. The features of the recently identified group of Siberian lists dating back to the edition of the Ovchinnikovsky List of 1619 are presented, and a conclusion is drawn about the location of the supposed scriptorium of the Belokrinitsky Old Believer community, where the Siberian manuscripts of this work were created. The reason to address this topic was a remarkable archaeographic find by employees of the State Public Scientific Library of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, made relatively recently in the Yenisei region of Krasnoyarsk Krai, as well as the discovery of the closest “relatives” of Krasnoyarsk finds in the collection of the Regional Museum of Local Lore in Tomsk. As the study has shown, the Siberian lists belong to the group of manuscripts of the Izbornik, dating back to the List of 1619 from the collection of P.A. Ovchinnikov (F. 209 RSL) No. 108. A characteristic feature of the Ovchinnikov manuscript, which was then adopted by copies from it, is the presence of references in the margins. The carefully executed decoration of the manuscript is noteworthy: the presence of initials with ornamental appendages, ligature in the headings, and pointing fingers in the margins. The 19th century copies, each in its own way, reproduced this side of the manuscript. Siberian lists are also characterized by special attention to the external design of manuscripts: intricate multi-colored initials, headpieces, and endings. And even the texts as a whole reproduce the features of this particular group of “Questions of Anastasius Sinaita”. Taking into account the desire of the Old Believer writers in their work to rely on the ritual and dogmatic tradition of the fund of Slavic-Russian books available to them, it seems possible to raise the question of the circulation in the Old Believer environment of specific books, monuments of the Cyrillic tradition, from among those known to archaeographic science, described in manuscript collections, including those published for wide use, or, conversely, little known, reflected only in references to their availability in home libraries. As a result of the study, the reason for the increased interest in the Izbornik of 1073 among the Old Believers was established; the features of the Siberian copies of this book monument were analyzed, and the circle of scribes who worked over the replication of the Izbornik in the 1890s was identified; an assumption was made about their connection with the scriptoria of the Kazan monastery of the Belokrinitsky Old Believers, located not far from Tomsk.