Древнеславянский канон первоучителю Кириллу: песнь седьмая
Old Church Slavonic Canon to Cyril, the First Teacher: The Seventh Ode

Summary/Abstract: The article continues research on one of the earliest works of Church Slavonic literature, the canon to Cyril, The First Teacher. Based on the methods developed in the previous articles, an attempt is made at a parallel reconstruction of the original Slavonic text of the canon's seventh ode and of its lost Greek original. The analysis allowed for solving a number of important issues of the textual history of the canon: in particular it could be established that the mysterious 'tower of Canaan' occurring in most of the copies is in fact the phrase 'tower of Calneh (Chalanne)' which was rather popular in Byzantine literature and was used both in its literal meaning denoting the tower of Babel as well as metaphorically, to signify heretical and other religious movements and gatherings. The integrity of the original text of the canon's seventh ode is secured by the fact that the initial letters of the first words in the four troparia constituting it (Λογικαις, Ου, Σέ, Ουρανων) – ΛΟΣΟ – make up part of the word form φιλοσόφω, which, as was proven by S. Temchin, was part of the acrostichic dedication to Cyril. In terms of its composition and contents, the ode is built of skilfully recurring chants of two troparia in honor of Gregory of Nyssa, a theotokion, built on hymnographic loci communes and a strictly 'biographical' troparion where the praise of the polemic activities of Constantine is intertwined with allusions to the Old Testament and the condemning words of Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa's contemporary. The Slavonic translation, in turn, is characterized not only by being semantically and syntactically true to the original but also by the highest accuracy in rendering the metrical pattern of the Greek troparia, as can be seen in the isosyllabicity of most of the colons and their Byzantine originals and even in the conservation of homotony in those cases when the accent patterns of the Slavic language allowed for rendering the Greek accents.

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