Penitential poems from «Bohohlasnyk» (1790)

The purpose of the publication is to reveal the nature of penitential tendencies in the penitential poems from the collection «Bohohlasnyk» (Pochayiv, 1790) and their intertextual connection with the Byzantine and Latin traditions. The category of penitential poems includes songs from the fourth part of the miscellany with numbers 213–221. Six of them are written in the Late Middle Ukrainian, one contains a parallel text in Latin and Ukrainian, and two – in Polish. They can be attributed to the genre of metaphysical poetry. Two authors are mentioned: Luka Dlonsky and Dostoevsky (perhaps the ancestor of the famous Russian writer), the rest of the poems are anonymous. The miscellany was published in the last years of the heyday of the Pochayiv Basilian Monastery, which remained under the rule of the Polish king after the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772. Its printing house was the main center for publishing books in the Ukrainian language at that time. The Basilian Order is often accused of being an instrument of Latinization of the Uniate Church. But the penitential poems testify to the consistent orientation of the authors to the Eastern, Byzantine spiritual tradition. They agree with the prescriptions of the Zamoscia Synod of 1720. The Zamoscia Synod did not introduce significant changes in the penitentiary practice, only shifting the attention from external, formal elements of repentance to internal, spiritual factors. These characteristics were reflected in the book «Narodoviščaniye», published in Pochayiv Monastery in 1768. The intertextual strategy of penitential poems is directed to the biblical and hymnographic perspective. The image of the prophet David is introduced as a model of sincere repentance, the motives of Psalm 50 attributed to him and Psalm 13 are developed. The painful self-analysis of the sinner takes the form of a dialogue of soul and body. The coming punishment is portrayed as a hellish abyss engulfed in eternal fire, and earthly trials as a stormy sea of passions. Salvation from punishment requires tears, the gift of which is perceived as heavenly grace. This corresponds to the ascetic tradition of the monastic East. Thus, the penitential poems testify to the preservation in the Pochayiv monastery of national spiritual traditions embodied in the typical Baroque genre forms