Sermon of Stefan Yavorsky on the Treason of Hetman I. S. Mazepa: An Author’s Intention and a Text Editor

The article examines a history of the sermon of Metropolitan of Ryazan and Murom Stefan Yavorsky Trost’, vetrom koleblema (“A reed shaken with the wind”), delivered on November 12, 1708 before the anathematization of Hetman I. S. Mazepa. The text of the sermon is published for the first time based on the author’s autograph from the collection of manuscripts of the Synod of the Russian State Historical Archive in the Appendix. A comparison of the original text with the publication of a later copy, undertaken in the “Proceedings of the Kyiv Theological Academy” in 1865, demonstrated that the editor of the sermon made significant changes to Yavorsky’s intention, which were reflected in the subsequent existence of the text. The study proved that the editor of the text was a church leader and court panegyrist Gavriil Buzhinskiy, who, when correcting the text, used commonplaces characteristic of his works (in particular, a comparison of the traitors of the Peter the Great era and the son of Tsar David Absalom). Among the goals of the editing was to bring the text into conformity with Peter’s unrealized plan for a collection of sermons dedicated to the events of the Northern War. The article substantiates the hypothesis that the text edited by Buzhinskiy was at the disposal of the author of the poems “on behalf of all Russia”, which, based on textual overlaps, are usually attributed to Stefan Yavorsky