Вертоград многоцветный

Anthony Hippisley, Note on Sources

The poems of Vertograd mnogocvětnyj display such an astonishing variety of subject matter that the question has inevitably arisen from time to time, where did Simeon Polockij get his ideas from? As early as the beginning of this century I.M. Tarabrin suggested that Simeon had for some of his poems drawn upon the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais and the Concionum opus tripartitum of the Jesuit writer Matthias Faber[90]. In 1912 P.P. Filippovič added to the list of Simeon's sources the Magnum speculum exemplorum[91], and numerous further suggestions were made in two important articles by A.I. Beleckij, «Stichotvorenija Simeona Polockogo na temy iz vseobščej istorii» (1914) and «Povestvovatel'nyj élément v Vertograde Simeona Polockogo» (1933)[92]. Although students of Simeon have continued to try to identify sources underlying the poems of the Vertograd[93] only a tiny selection of poems from the total number have been more or less convincingly traced back to their source. No attempt has ever been made to calculate to what extent Simeon drew upon other material, nor to indicate whether he had a methodology or system of borrowing.

It can now be seen that the main stumbling-block in the way of productive research into the possible sources of the Vertograd poems has been the fact that the alphabetised copies[94] have been used as the starting-point for such investigations. The autograph manuscript[95], despite its initial appearence of a random collection of materials, in fact reveals the order in which Simeon composed his poems, and this alone makes it the only possible manuscript with which to work if any system of borrowing is to be uncovered. The first scholar to notice an ideological shape in the composition of the autograph manuscript was Lidija Sazonova, who pointed out in 1982 that «Simeon realises his religious, philosophical and ethical ideas in large-scale ideological, thematic and structural units within the manuscript, each of which contains a number of interconnected poems.[96]» From this point of view manuscript A makes sense in a way that B and C cannot do, despite their attractively systematic appearance. A series of poems on the subject of religious faith is to be found in the opening pages of A, but because the poems bear titles beginning with different letters of the alphabet the group is broken up in the fair copies. Conversely, although there is a cycle of poems entitled «Faith» in the fair copies, it contains only some of the original series about faith at the beginning of the autograph (A), and instead includes poems taken from a number of other places in the autograph.

While the investigation of sources underlying the poems of the Vertograd could at best be a random search so long as the alphabetical copies remained the object of study, a careful analysis of the autograph manuscript not only reveals a pattern of thematic units, but also points to their sources. The work upon which Simeon drew most extensively was the Concionum opus tripartitum of Matthias Faber of which he possessed a copy of the Coloniae, 1646 edition. This book, according to Beleckij, was subsequently acquired by the library of Char’kov Seminary[97]. It is a collection of sermons divided into three parts, Hyemalis, Aestivalis and Festivalis, of which Simeon drew heavily upon the second and third when composing the first half of the Vertograd manuscript. His method of borrowing varied. Sometimes he would summarise the contents of an entire sermon in a fairly lengthy poem. The 52-line poem «Aggelov ne iskupi Gospod», čelověki ze iskupi, čego radi» is an exposition of the whole of the first sermon for the 16th Sunday after Pentecost, which is entitled «Cur homines, non Angeli post lapsum reparati». Such long poems often have marginal numbers corresponding to the numbered sections of the Faber sermon. At other times Simeon concentrated on only one small item in a sermon and created a poem from it. Immediately following «Aggelov ne iskupi...» in A is a poem entitled «Bog, jako choščet, tvorit», in which Simeon compares God's sovereign right to do as He wishes to that of Pharaoh, who, having cast two of his servants into prison together with Joseph, spared one and hanged the other. This poem derives from section 6 of the same Faber sermon and forms part of the discussion about why God redeems men but not angels. Simeon often lifted a section of a Faber sermon out of its context, creating a poem that cannot be traced back to its source unless one sees it in the manuscript A, where it will be surrounded by many other poems going back to the same source. The poem «Diogen» was taken from the introductory paragraph, called the Thema, of Faber's eighth sermon for the 15th Sunday after Pentecost. The title of this sermon is «De sepultura Christianorum, eiusque causis», which helps to explain why it should open with an anecdote related by Cicero in which Diogenes is asked by his friends why he does not wish to be buried. The near-proof that Simeon took his material from Faber rather than Cicero rests on the fact that forty of the preceding forty-three poems in A also derive from Faber's sermons for this same Sunday[98].

The poems in A occupy fols. 4—547, and the section that derives from Faber is from fol. 4 to the first poem on fol. 315. Not all the poems in this section are taken from Faber. Of the total of 1 909 poems in the section, it can be demonstrated that 1 213 go back to Faber, leaving 696 poems that do not. Of those 696 poems, however, 261 come under the heading «Vivlia» and represent captions to biblical pictures, twenty are captions to icons, and ten are epitaphs. If these 291 poems are discounted because of their special genre, the number of poems not taken from Faber is 405. This means that in the first three hundred or so leaves of A the proportion of Faber to non-Faber poems is 75%:25% Although the remaining 25% of poems have not as yet been traced back to any particular source, it seems likely that they too will eventually prove to be less original than they appear.

As to the rest of the autograph manuscript (A) of the Vertograd, it has been possible to identify three groups of poems that derive from the Hortulus Regime sive Sermones Meffreth, of which Simeon almost certainly possessed a copy[99]. The first is on fols. 317—348^v, where 117 out of 132 poems derive from Meffreth; the other two are on fols. 382—388^v and fols. 397—404^v, where Meffreth accounts for 33 poems out of 34, and 37 out of 39 respectively. Like Faber, this book is a collection of Jesuit sermons set out according to the Sundays and festivals of the Church year.

Another important source, especially for the narrative moralising poems in the Vertograd , is the Magnum speculum exemplorum, first published anonymously in 1482 and later edited by the Belgian Jesuit Jan Major. It seems virtually certain that Simeon possessed at least one copy of this work, but the only copy preserved in the Sinodal'naja tipografija library today is one that his disciple Sil'vestr Medvedev acquired after Simeon's death. It is therefore not possible to say with certainty which edition he owned. The exempla tended to be repeated from one edition to the next, but with ever more additions. For poems deriving from the Magnum speculum exemplorum the Commentary refers the reader to the Duaci, 1603 and Coloniae Agrippinae, 1653 editions. There was also a Polish translation by Symon Wysocki published in Cracow in 1612, 1621 and 1633 entitled Wielkie zwierciadło przykładów, and Simeon may well have owned a copy. It is occasionally possible to assign the language of Simeon to a Latin rather than a Polish original[100], but usually the question remains an open one. Not all the narrative poems in the Vertograd which derive from the Magnum speculum exemplorum do so directly. For example, the poem «Běganie iz cerkve» may be traced back to the second exemplum under the heading «Ecclesia» in the 1653 edition, but when one looks at the place that the poem occupies in A one can demonstrate that Simeon's immediate source was Meffreth's third sermon for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost. Meffreth is also the immediate source for the poems «Desjatina» and «Demon ispovSdi pakost"», though the anecdotes go back to «Decimae» No. 2 and «Contritio» No. 10 respectively in the Magnum speculum exemplorum.

We regard the task of investigating the background to the poems of the Vertograd as far from complete. However, it is now clear that the question is no longer whether Simeon relied on specific sources, but rather which sources. There are 2 763 poems in the autograph manuscript A, or 2 496 if one regards the cycle entitled «Vivlia» as one poem[101]. Of this total, well over half have now been traced back to their source in either Faber, Meffreth, the Magnum speculum exemplorum, or the Hortus pastorum of Jacobus Marchantius, another Jesuit priest. The Commentary at the end of each volume of the present edition identifies those sources about which there can be no reasonable doubt, and an Appendix at the end of the third volume will list those sources that have come to light in the course of preparing the text for publication. Thus, the Commentary does not so much provide comment as factual information about the origins of particular poems. This information is so important for an understanding of both Simeon's worldview and his creative process that it has been felt necessary to quote extensively from his sources, especially as these works are not to be found in most university libraries. Although it might also have been desirable to provide translations of the numerous Latin passages quoted in the Commentary, considerations of space have rendered this impracticable. Simeon Polockij was deeply immersed in Latin culture, and a good working knowledge of Latin is a great asset to the student of this remarkable Russian poet. Indeed, the paucity of present-day scholars who bridge the gap between classical and Slavonic studies is one reason why research into Simeon Polockij has not been as exhaustive as it might have been. It is hoped that the present critical edition of the Vertograd will advance that research into a new and productive phase.

Anthony Hippisley