An Old Believer’s confessional questionnaire from Latgale: linguocultural analysis of the text

During the expedition to the Old Believers in Latgale (Latvia) a group of Slavists investigating the Russian language of Old Believers abroad got a scanned copy of the confessional questionnaire as a present from Basil Trishkin, a mentor of Gayok Old Believers’ House of Prayer (Daugavpils). This questionnaire is used by Basil Trishkin during confessions in conversations with the parishioners. As the study of the manuscript revealed the questionnaire according to its content, structure and features of language dates back to the pre-Raskol texts of the XѴII century. The next expedition, 2017, confirmed the assumption that the questionnaire is a part of the Old Believer’s prayer book. The expeditions did not pursue archeographic objectives, the conversations with mentors were mostly focused on prohibitions and prescriptions in the Old Believers’ community in Latgale for the purpose of its further sociolinguistic and ethnolinguistic analysis. Nevertheless the scanned manuscript certainly deserves attention as a piece of the Old Believers’ written culture. On the one hand, the Old Believer’s prayer book is written in Church Slavonic. On the other hand, the scanned manuscript is a source of information about the Latgalian Old Believers’ Russian language as a language for everyday communication, including lexical and other dialect features. The oral comments of the mentors Basil Trishkin and Ioann Zhilko about prohibitions in the Old Believers’ community, use of the questionnaire in the practice of worship and opportunities to pass it on to a group of researchers, with subsequent publication of the text, are particularly noteworthy