Series:

Harvard Lib of Early Ukrainian Literature - Texts (HUP)

2 total works

Cover of Collected Works of Meletij Smotryc'kyi

Meletij Smotryc'kyj (ca. 1577-1633), a man of great learning and wide cultural horizons, was one of the outstanding figures of the cultural revival in the Ukrainian and Belorussian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. First as a staunch advocate of Orthodoxy and then after 1627 as an equally ardent defender of the Uniates, Smotryc'kyj wrote numerous polemical, homiletic, philological, and theological works that well illustrate the complexity of the intense confessional and cultural competition between Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox.

This volume reproduces in facsimile the original printed editions of eleven of his most important religious writings, beginning with the famous Threnos (1610) and concluding with Exaethesis (1629). The Introduction surveys the controversial details of Smotryc'kyj's biography and critically analyzes the corpus of works attributed to him.

Cover of The Jevanhelije Ucytelnoje of Meletij Smotryckyj
Meletij Smotryc'kyj viewed his Homilary Gospel (Jevanhelije ucytelnoje, Vievis, 1616) as a crucial requirement for the ?spiritual good? of the Ruthenian (Ukrainian-Belorussian) nation. In light of the fierce debate over the Union of Brest (1596) he saw the need for an Orthodox collection of Gospel pericopes and sermons in the vernacular to supplant reliance on Polish Catholic and Protestant postils. Thus, he translated into Ruthenian a Church Slavonic collection of sermons on the Gospels, while simultaneously introducing formal revisions that allowed the work to compete more successfully with similar Polish texts.

As a result, the Homilary Gospel is important as a critical polemical text from the Catholic?Orthodox debate and also as a monument of early Ukrainian literature. This volume reproduces in facsimile the original printed edition along with three different versions of the Preface written by Smotryc'kyj. The Introduction sets the work in its literary and religious contexts and discusses Smotryc'kyj's methods of translation and adaptation.