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Abstract:

The creative history of Metropolitan Stefan Yaworsky’s homiletic heritage still remains unexplored. The hypothesis about the existence of an established author’s collection of festive sermons, put forward earlier, needed textual material to rely on. The study of the unique manuscript of the first quarter of the 18^th century (The Russian State Historical Archive, f. 834, op. 2, No. 1592g) — the author’s draft autograph of sermons — and its comparison with later manuscripts of festive speeches allowed us to conclude that the author undertook a serious substantive, stylistic and lexical editing of the speeches included in the collection. A comparative textual analysis of the manuscripts suggested that the author’s revision of the original draft was carried out by Metropolitan Stefаn in the period from 1711 to 1718, in the course of preparing for publication a collection of the most significant victorial speeches of the first decade of the 18th century. In this regard, we come to the conclusion that Gabriel Buzhinsky, who collected and copied Yavorsky’s laudable sermons after his death (in 1722‒1726), was not the editor and compiler of this collection, but relied, apparently, on the versions of these texts already edited by the author. This is supported by the fact that there are no copies of autograph (No. 1592) in the manuscript tradition of the 18^th century.

Keywords: Metropolitan Stefan Yavorsky, Homiletics, Festive Sermons, Textual Criticism.