| Annotation |
The book is not only an important part of the religious culture of Old Believers, but also an
inherent part of their daily practice. A significant part of literary culture is manuscript tradition that
reflects the whole dogma of non-reformed Orthodox Christianity, its canonical and non-canonical
components. The paper deals with the issues of attribution of a unique Trans-Baikal book and
manuscript tradition of the Old Believers’ manuscript of the early twentieth century compiled by
a prisoner of war. This book was discovered by the 2011 archaeographic expedition in the Kuytun Village of the Tarbagatai Region in the Republic of Buryatia. For the first time researchers have an
opportunity to study the functioning of a handwritten book in the military life of Old Believers in
the Transbaikal Region and to compare the materials synchronically and diachronically. The authors
analyze the origin of the collection and its contents. The Kuytun (Osaka) book includes prayers
for everyday religious life, as well as apocryphal and incantatory writings that are vital to a person
in distress. The discoveries of similar texts and collections about the military everyday life of Old
Believers are not rare and they are found in other Old Believers regions. The comparison with
similar archeographers’ findings in other regions reveals that in the extreme conditions of war handwritten
books of Old Believers perform not only sacred, informative, and cognitive functions but
other functions as well. In fact, this type of handwritten texts becomes a talisman (amulet).
Keywords: Old Believers, Transbaikalie, hand-written tradition, manuscript collection,
apocryphal text, prayer, Russian-Japanese War. |
