Ancient Russian eschatological works as part of Pechora manuscript collections

The article presents an overview of the eschato logical writings that existed among the Pechora Old Believers, and presents the main results of the study of these works by Syktyvkar philologists. Pechora peasants actively read and copied medieval eschatological writings: a large number of their copies has been preserved. This layer of handwritten texts has not been studied much yet, but they are an important part of the manuscript-book tradition that was formed at the Lower Pechora in the XVIII and XIX centuries. The authors of the article pursued the task of determining the peculiarities of the existence of eschatological writings in the Old Believers’ environment. These writings can be divided into works of “big” and “small” eschatology, but there are monuments that combine elements of both directions of the eschatological teaching, for example, “The Life of Basil the New”. Local interpretations and compilations on the topic of the end of the world and the posthumous fate of the soul have become widespread in the Old Believers’ environment. The authors of the article and other Syktyvkar philologists studied the Pechora copies of “The Life of Basil the New”, “The Visions of the Apostle Paul”, “Agapius’s Walk to Paradise”, “Tales about the Twelve Dreams of Shahaisha”, conducted their informative, compositional, and textual analysis, identified the features of the Pechora copies, established which editions they originated from, identified similarities and differences between the Pechora copies. Special attention was paid to editorial revisions of the studied works made by Ivan Myandin, a famous Pechora scribe of the XIX century, revealing the main techniques of the scribe’s work on eschatological texts and the degree of their revision.