“Verses presented to readers” in the life of St. Alexander Svirsky dating from the XVIII century

The article examines The Life of St. Alexander Svirsky, whose Embellished Edition has a verse adaptation of one of the hagiographic chapters, an afterword by Hegumen Herodion, the author of an earlier Menaion version of the text, as one of its distinctive features. This case is known to be unique in the eighteenth-century hagiography. Sometimes this edition of The Life is accompanied by two other poetic elements: the opening foreword and the acrostic that concludes the text of “The Message of Decease”. These elements are found in the earliest manuscript of this edition dating from 1715 and kept in the State Russian Museum. The purpose of this article is to suggest possible authors, the time when and the place where the texts were created, and the logic behind including the verses in the copies. It turns out that the studied verses were probably created by three authors at different times or simultaneously. The first possible author could be a well-known highly skilled scribe Joasaph. He specialized in conducting correspondence, as well as copying and decorating manuscripts for the Alexander Svirsky Monastery in 1713-1715 and was the one who signed the manuscript of The Life. The second name emerges thanks to the cinnabar preserved in three manuscripts with the acrostic - it could be Archimandrite Isaiah who was in charge of the monastery in 1705-1708. Therefore, he is obviously the author of “The Message of Decease”. The Embellished Edition of The Life differs from the previous one mainly by its stylistic features obviously inspired by the baroque culture. The monastery library received “The Tale of Barlaam and Josaphat” edited by Simeon of Polotsk almost immediately after it was published, and it seems to be similar to the new edition of The Life in composition, accompanying verses, design, and titles of verse chapters. Thus, it could very likely become a literary model for the new edition of The Life, and in this case it was also written by Archimandrite Isaiah, which shifts the time of its creation to the early XVIII century.