Новые греческие источники канона Кириллу Философу
New Greek Sources of the Canon to Cyril the Philosopher

Summary/Abstract: The present article, being a sequel to the one published in Palaeobulgarica, № 4, 2005, discusses the origin of a number of troparia taken from the oldest Slavonic canon to Cyril the Philosopher. On the basis of a comparison between different copies of the canon and Greek troparia it proposes a reconstruction of the source text. While the first article revealed essential stichometric, lexical, and grammatical similarities between several chants from the service dedicated to Cyril and the canon to Paul the Confessor (d. 350), the sequel presents one more Greek canon, the chants of which served as a source for very similar paraphrasing in the troparia dedicated to Cyril. This Greek canon is the canon to Gregory of Nyssa (ca 335 - ca 394) in whose biography there are features that are similar to those in the life of Constantine-Cyril, an observation that holds true for Paul the Confessor as well. In one of the copies of the Greek canon the authorship of the canon is ascribed to a person called Theophanes. S. Eustratiades identified this author as Theophanes Graptos, the well-known hymnographer (d. ca 847). Thus, the possibility that the author of the canon in honour of Cyril paraphrased the texts of a senior contemporary who obviously enjoyed considerable popularity in the 9th century, cannot be ruled out. A comparison between the chants in the canon to Cyril and the Greek sources found recently shows that when the early Slavonic hymnography was created paraphrasing played a most important role. It could materialize both within the framework of a particular stichometric scheme (the heirmos) and outside of it on the levels of meaning and grammar while retaining the majority of the lexical, morphological, and syntactic peculiarities of the original. The latter was adapted to Slavonic realities and to the musical structure of the respective odes only in so far as was necessary and only to a minimal degree. The comparison of the material of all the East and South Slavonic copies of the service dedicated to Cyril, taking into account the Greek sources, allows us to solve a number of textological problems stemming from variation in the manuscript tradition of the canon to Cyril, to reveal incorrect readings that emerged in the process of copying the text, and to restore the original appearance of several troparia of the first, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth odes of the canon.

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