Slavic paleography: problems and research methods

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PHJ №1 (45) 2025 — M. S. Krutova. L. P. ZHUKOVSKAYA’S WORKS ON PALEOGRAPHY IN HER PERSONAL COLLECTION IN THE DEPARTMENT OF MANUSCRIPTS OF THE RUSSIAN STATE LIBRARY

The article provides a comprehensive overview of the works on paleography contained in the personal archive fund of L. P. Zhukovskaya. The collection encompasses both published and unpublished works, materials related to their composition, as well as correspondence and biographical and official documents. It is evident that L. P. Zhukovskaya devoted significant attention to the paleographic characteristics of handwritten books. However, it is noteworthy that she demonstrated particular interest in the dating, attribution of scribal handwriting, the nature of the writing material and the artistic features of these manuscripts. The study of paleographic features of the handwritten source was a reliable foundation for conclusions about the textual andlinguistic characteristics of book monuments.

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PHJ №1 (45) 2025 — M. V. Korogodina, N. N. Levchenko. CONVOLUTE OR MISCELLANY: THE PROBLEM OF TYPOLOGY

Researchers of the manuscripts often use the terms “convolute”, “miscellany” or “collected manuscript”, “miscellany with additions”, putting different concepts into them. The article examines codices that have a complex structure: books collected in monasteries from fragments of earlier manuscripts, or compiled by a scribe over decades. In some cases, parts of the codex are united by dating, theme or scribe, though other features do not allow to consider the manuscript written at the same time. Such books require detailed descriptions. The authors of the article offer their definitions of the terms “convolute” and “miscellany”, relating the first to the codicological structure of the manuscript, and the second to its content.

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PHJ №1 (45) 2025 — T. V. Anisimova. ARCHAIC FEATURES OF TIKHONRAVOV CHRONOGRAPH WRITING

The article explores the archaic graphic and orthographic features of the 13th-century antigraph reflected in the letter of the first half of the Tikhonravov chronograph (dating from the end of the 15th — beginning of the 16th centuries), in particular cases of writing the letter “г” with the so-called “hammer”, and the use of the forms of the asigmatic aorist of the verb “рѣщи”: “рѣхъ”, “рѣхомъ”, and the preservation of reduced forms in combination with smooth forms: *tъ-rъ-t, *tъ-lъ-t. Examples of dialect features of writing and relatively later (16th century?) cinnabar marginal notes are given, indicating the creation and existence of the manuscript in the Western Russian contact zone. A close similarity was found between the drawings of pointing fingers on its margins and similar drawings on the margins of the Vilna chronograph. It is noteworthy that there are no extant examples in the historiography of the use of the grapheme “г” with a “hammer” by ancient Russian scribes. However, in the Tikhonravov chronograph, these letters are present in various sources of its text and thus uniquely mark the initial layer of articles of the manuscript’s antigraph, which ends with an extensive prophetic compilation. The archetype of this compilation served as the source of the “Philosopher’s Speech” in the Tale of Bygone Years. The absence of archaic traces in the rest of the text may indicate some kind of mechanical connection in its antigraph of different-time manuscripts.