Origins and language of commentaries on the acts in the 14th century Tolstovskii apostolus

The paper characterizes unknown fragments of patristic commentaries on theActs of the Apostles contained in XIV-century Tolstovskii Apostolus (National Library of Russia, Q.n.I.5), which belongs to continuous text type and presents the Preslav translation of Acts and Epistles. There is a certain relationship between this manuscript and the commented text type of Old Slavonic Apostolus. The author considers contents, Byzantine sources, grammatical and lexical features of the commentaries’ Slavonic translation. It is found out that the Greek parallels of the commentaries are contained in John Chrysostom’s first homily on the Acts and in a patristic catena, which both have a long textological provenance. The language peculiarities of Slavonic translation are as following. The syntax level demonstrates both reduction and expansion of the source text with word order and syntactic transformations. The commentaries’ morphology shows cases of flexible interpretation of grammatical categories according to Slavonic usage requirements or contextual peculiarities. The lexical level reflects the influence both of the Preslav translations tradition and the Greek text variations. Cases of hypernyms creation and descriptive translation are also detected. The identified features demonstrate the liberal transfer of the translated text, which is inherent for ancient Slavonic New Testament translations, both Cyril and Methodius and Preslav.