Эпитафия Феодору Тверитину: у истоков жанра
An Epitaph to Theodore Tveritin: At the Origins of the Genre

Summary/Abstract: The history of Russian epitaphs starts rather late. It was not customary for the people of Rus’ to place any inscriptions on the tombstones for several centuries after the country’s conversion to Christianity. The first inscriptions found on the burial monuments date back to the late 15th century. However, for a long time, until the second half of the 17th century, the inscriptions on the stones were extremely laconic. Their austere formular was usually limited to the date of death of the deceased and to his name. A rhetorically decorated epitaph to a certain Theodore Tveritin stands out against the background of the typical inscriptions of the epoch. The epitaph lacks the name of its author. It is copied among additional texts in two manuscripts containing the works of Maximus the Greek. The article proves that he is the real author of the epitaph. The surviving text is a translation from a lost Greek original. The original was written in elegiac distichs, but translated into Church Slavonic as prose. The article suggests that the epitaph, like several other texts by Maximus the Greek, was written on the occasion of the Tver cathedral renovation. This cathedral was completely destroyed by fire in 1537. The author of the article assumes that Theodore Tveritin, to whom the text is dedicated, is Theodore the Good, the bishop of Tver in the 14th century. His burial was located in one of the cathedral’s aisles. The epitaph by Maximus the Greek is written according to the Byzantine traditions, and it correlates with a series of the writer’s experiments in different rhetorical genres (etopoeia, prosopopoeia). The epitaph to Theodore Tveritin is published in the Appendix to the article. This work by Maximus the Greek is important for the reconstruction of the author’s Greek-language legacy as well as for the history of the epitaph as a literary genre.

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