An Epitaph to Theodore Tveritin: At the Origins of the Genre

The history of Russian epitaphs starts on rather late. The people in Rus’ were not accustomed to place any inscriptions on the tombstones for several centuries after the Conversion. The first inscriptions are found on the burial monuments dating back to the late 15th century. However, for a long time, until the second half of the 17th century, the inscriptions on the stones were extremely laconic. Their austere formular was usually limited to the date of death of the deceased and his name. A rhetorically decorated epitaph for a certain Theodore Tveritin stands out against the background of the typical inscriptions of the epoch. The epitaph lacks the name of its author. It is copied among additional texts in two manuscripts containing the works of Maxim the Greek. The article proves that he is the real author of the epitaph. The surviving text is a translation from a lost Greek original. This original was written in elegiac distichs, but it was translated into Church Slavonic as prose. The article suggests that the epitaph, like several other texts by Maxim the Greek, was written on occasion of the renovation of the Tver cathedral. This cathedral was completely distroyed by the fire in 1537. The author of the article assumes that Theodore Tveritin, to whom the text is dedicated, is Theodore the Good, the bishop of Tver of the 14th century. His burial was located in one of the cathedral’s aisles. The epitaph by Maxim the Greek is written according to the Byzantine traditions, and it can be added to a series of the writer’s experiments in different rhetorical genres (etopoeia, prosopopoeia). The epitaph for Theodore Tveritin is published in the Appendix of the article. The work by Maxim the Greek is important for the reconstruction of the author’s Greek-language legacy as well as for the history of the epitaph as a literary genre.