Literary history of the tale of St. Abraham: textual criticism, poetics

The article is devoted to the literary history of The Tale of St. Abraham, which is ascribed to Ephrem the Syrian. The Tale was widely spread in the Christian tradition of the West and the East. The article summarizes the results of a study of the 60 Slavic manuscripts of the Tale (Russian, Bulgarian, and Serbian), as well as its publications in the XVII-XIX centuries in Syriac, Greek, Latin, and Polish, which are based on early manuscripts of the Tale. As a result, textological research showed that the Tale was exposed to editing several times in its literary history. We can mark seven editions of the Tale, which are spread in the Slavonic manuscripts. The Main Edition is represented by 42 copies of the XII-XVIII centuries; the First Prologue Edition is represented by a Russian copy of the XII century; the Second Prologue Edition is represented by ten copies of the XVI-XVII centuries; the First Solovetskaya Edition is known in the handwritten tradition through two re-written copies of the XVI-XVII centuries; the Second Solovetskaya and Sofia Editions are familiar only through one re-written copy of the XVI century; the Speculum maius Edition is represented by ten copies of the 1st translation from the XVII-XVIII centuries. The copies’ analysis lets us establish its genealogy and, thus, recreate the existing history of the Tale’s text in the Ancient Rus booklore