ATHOS: MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS OF THE RUSSIAN STATE LIBRARY

This article analyses documentary information on Athos kept in the Russian State Library, starting with the earliest times. The author traces the times at which the said records appeared and analyses the legend of the "drawing of lots" (whereby the Virgin Mary was dispatched to proselytise on Mount Athos after drawing lots with the apostles), whose dissemination relates to St Maximus and St Stephen of Athos and which is an integral part of the history of Athos. According to the author, heightened interest in Athos and its history was rooted in the self-perception of the nation at the time when Russia was forming as a centralised state, which coincided with Byzantium's loss of its function of a "restraining" power. The self-perception as a spiritual successor brought about interest in Athos as the capital of monasticism, which was conditioned by the sacralisation of its sacred objects and their transfer to Russia in the 17th century. The legend of the drawing of the lots, connected in Russia with Sts Maximus and St Stephen, was later to reappear in The Paradise of Mind, a work published between 1658 and 1659 by the Iversky publishing house of Valday, in the third edition of Segius Shelonin's Azbukovnik. As of the 1650s, the themes of paradise, drawing lots, and flight into desert became the dominating themes of narratives in the creative work of writers of the Nikon era, particularly those of Solovetsky Archimandrite Sergii Shelonin. In the 1690s, the same theme appears in the short narrative of the Chudov Monastery by Hierodeacon Damaskin and the Greek pilgrim John Komnenos Molivd. In the 18th century, Athos was discussed in the notes of the Russian explorer Vasily Grigorovich-Barsky. All these facts prove that throughout the centuries, Athos attracted a lot of close attention, which was a result of the sacralisation of its space and artefacts.