Old Believers (4 results)
More imagesPublished by Russia, 18th century.
- Hardcover
Seller: Antiquariat INLIBRIS Gilhofer Nfg. GmbH, Vienna, A, AustriaAntiquariat INLIBRIS Gilhofer Nfg. GmbH
Contact seller5-star sellerCondition: Used
£ 75,051.60
£ 25.72 shippingShips from Austria to U.S.A.Quantity: 1 available
Add to basket4to (184 x 236 mm). Russian Church Slavonic manuscript on paper. 366 ff., ca. 20 lines of Cyrillic half-uncial in three hands. Watermarks: arms of Amsterdam and Pro Patria. Rubricated titles and initials, decorated headpieces, initials, and borders; 143 full-page colour-wash miniatures within decorated borders. Contemporary Russ…ian red velvet over bevelled wooden boards, 2 brass clasps with velvet-covered leather straps, brass furniture on rear cover, all edges gilt and goffered. A splendidly illustrated Old Believer miscellany devoted to the Passion, exemplary sanctity, and the fate of the soul. This copy stands out for the scale and ambition of its pictorial programme, preserving 143 full-page miniatures in a rich contemporary Russian velvet binding. - The volume assembles five key didactic and devotional texts from the Old Believer manuscript tradition, blending biblical, hagiographic, apocryphal, and popular material in a form designed to instruct as much as to move. The Passion Narrative recounts the events of Holy Week; the Life of St Basil the New with the visions of St Theodora and St Gregory unfolds the punishments of sinners and the posthumous passage of the soul; the Legend of Joseph follows the patriarch from birth to Egypt and Pharaoh's dream; the final two texts, conceived as picture books with minimal text, treat Creation, the destiny of the soul, and filial redemption from Purgatory. - Particularly striking are the eschatological scenes in the vision of St Theodora, where the soul passes through the aerial toll-houses and confronts demons who record sins on scrolls and attempt to drag it to hell. Elsewhere the manuscript dwells on the Harrowing of Hell, the Crucifixion, Cain and Abel, the decay of the body after death, and the charitable rescue of a mother's soul, shaping coherent moral instruction through image as much as text. - Old Believer book culture regarded the manuscript as a synthesis of verbal and visual art, and its communities deliberately sustained archaic textual and pictorial modes in resistance to both ecclesiastical reform and the authority of print. Produced after the schism provoked by the reforms of Patriarch Nikon and the Synod of 1666, manuscripts of this kind linked persecuted communities to an imagined continuity with Ancient Russia while serving as vehicles of devotion, instruction, and confessional identity. The present manuscript is thus both a major survival of Old Believer visual culture and an unusually luxurious witness to its devotional life, preserved with its full cycle of miniatures, ornamental apparatus, and sumptuous contemporary binding. - Extremities and scattered small areas of covers and joints rubbed. Brass clasps and three short clean tears to spine velvet repaired. Small loss at foot of rear joint. A little worming to pastedown margins. Lower outer corners and margins finger-soiled. One long clean horizontal tear to a miniature, repaired on blank verso without loss. Occasional minor very light marginal waterstaining or ink marks. A couple of tiny wormholes to first and last gathering. A very good example. - 1) Morozov family, until 1994. - 2) Sam Fogg, London, January 1994. - 3) Martin Schøyen, with his bookplate and manuscript number MS 1799 to front pastedown. - Schoyen MS 1799. Cf. F. Carey, The Apocalypse and The Shape of Things To Come (Toronto, 1999). N. I. Medvedeva, "Repertuar staroobrjadcheskoj rukopisnoj knigi v Rossii: XVIII-XX vv.", Vestnik SPbGIK 17 (2013). D. Rogers, The Old Faith and the Russian Land (Ithaca, 2010).
Published by Moscow, 1912., 1912
- Hardcover
Seller: Antiquariat INLIBRIS Gilhofer Nfg. GmbH, Vienna, A, AustriaAntiquariat INLIBRIS Gilhofer Nfg. GmbH
Contact seller5-star sellerCondition: Used
£ 1,324.44
£ 25.72 shippingShips from Austria to U.S.A.Quantity: 1 available
Add to basketFolio (240 x 375 mm). 8, (1), 342 ff. Colour frontispiece of St John Chrysostom writing, decorated initials. Original blind-tooled leather binding with remnants of clasps. The sermons of one of the great Fathers of the Orthodox Church in a splendidly bound Old Believer volume. Printed shorty before the Revolution, this volume is… a testimony to the resilient devotion of those who upheld the oldest traditions in the face of centuries of persecution. - Laid out in elegant, pre-reform Cyrillic type, the volume contains 114 Sermons of John Chrysostom. The publisher's blind-tooled binding bears the marks of the turbulent times to follow, but retains a handsome dignity: both sides have elegant vine-patterns, and parts of the original clasps remain. The printing date of 1912 is rendered in Old Church Slavonic numerals as 7420, following the Byzantine "Anno Mundi" system, dating from the creation of the world 5509 BC. - The introduction of western-style dating was one of the many modernisations introduced in seventeenth-century Russia that were rejected by the Old Believers, who sought to maintain the purity of the Orthodox rite as it had been handed down through the ages. Relentlessly persecuted by the Tsars and the Soviets, there are now very few Old Believer communities left, with emigration having scattered them around the world. - St John Chrysostom (344-407) earned his nickname (meaning "of the golden tongue" in Greek) through the extraordinary power of his oratory. Although Patriarch of Constantinople from 398 to 404, his frequent conflicts with secular power and the intransigence of his viewpoints led to his banishment shortly before his death. His steadfastness would have made him a particularly appropriate model for the Old Believers, who clung to their ways in defiance of secular power. - An authentic remnant of Old Believer devotion from a Russia on the verge of Revolution. - Binding worn and rubbed, clasps lost. Some light browning at front, light foxing throughout, some marginalia in pencil and ink, but surfaces largely clean, edges neat. A tear to the lower flyleaf. Altogether in good condition.
More imagesPublished by Oral (Uralsk, Kazachstan), Andrey Vasilievich Simakov, 1907., 1907
- Hardcover
- First Edition
Seller: Antiquariat INLIBRIS Gilhofer Nfg. GmbH, Vienna, A, AustriaAntiquariat INLIBRIS Gilhofer Nfg. GmbH
Contact seller5-star sellerCondition: Used
£ 13,244.40
£ 25.72 shippingShips from Austria to U.S.A.Quantity: 1 available
Add to basket4to (204 x 242 mm). 3, 366, (9) ff. Engraved head- and tailpieces, text rubricated throughout. Original full reddish-brown morocco over bevelled boards. Gilt spine title; low bands with repeated zigzag roll in gilt, foliate lozenges to the compartments with similar cornerpieces, elaborate concentric panelling in gilt and blind t…o both boards. Metal bosses to the lower, brass hook-clasps cast with the publisher's name, on leather straps. Moiré effect endpapers. All edges goffered and gilt. First edition. Rare Old Believer prayer book printed in Uralsk, Kazachstan, soon after the imperial 'Edict on Toleration' of 1905, which relaxed restrictions on Old Believer worship. Issued from the pioneering press of the merchant-publisher Andrey Vasilievich Simakov, the first legally operating Old Believer printing house in Uralsk, established on the initiative of Bishop Arsenius of the Urals and Orenburg (Anisim Vasilyevich Shvetsov). By 1910 the Uralsk enterprise had expanded to six steam presses and some seventy workers, serving a long-established Starovéry community in the region. - Printed in Church Slavonic and carefully rubricated throughout, the book contains the fixed texts of the daily cycle of Orthodox prayer preserving the pre-Nikonian Russian rite. A superb example preserved in the provincial publisher's deluxe binding, combining gilt-and-blind panelled decoration with goffered gilt edges and brass hook-clasps personalised with the publisher's name. - Very scarce: a single institutional copy traceable online, at the State Historical Museum, Moscow. One heavily worn copy recently sold by a Russian bookseller; no other copies seen in the trade. - Binding slightly rubbed with some cracking on the joints; lower clasp lacking the angled hook; some soiling and toning to the text-block throughout, the lower right-hand corners in particular showing varying degrees of finger-soiling; mild dampstaining to foredge towards the rear, affecting about 20 leaves, some colour transfer from the binding barely encroaching on the margins. Remains very good and handsome. - Purchased from a Russian emigrant family in Florida. - Not in OCLC.
More imagesPublished by [Northern Russia: c.1765], 1765
Seller: Peter Harrington. ABA/ ILAB., London, United KingdomPeter Harrington. ABA/ ILAB.
Contact seller5-star sellerCondition: Used
£ 6,750.00
£ 22.00 shippingShips from United Kingdom to U.S.A.Quantity: 1 available
Add to basketAn Old Believers' miscellany, with interesting annotations from a community in the village of Tolozhno, in the Okulovsky district, near Novgorod. Among the annotations is the 19th-century inscription "No passport", likely a reference to the Old Believers' resistance to owning state documents. Some Old Believers saw the very act…of owning a passport as a sin, as equalling "the seal of the Antichrist" (Mon. Chr. Spec., p. 650). There is also an ownership inscription whereby Dariy Ivanovich gave this book to "the sweet" Katerina Mikhailovna. Old Believers' manuscripts typically blended the biblical, the hagiographic, and the didactic, canonical and traditional motifs, as well as scriptural, apocryphal, and popular sources. Generally, they saw printing itself "as a symbol of detested Tsarist authority" (Carey, p. 207), fostering a large manuscript production within local communities. This miscellany comprises nine dialogues, preceded by an introduction, on death and repentance, all based on the works of the most important Orthodox authorities, including the Greek and Syrian Church Fathers and the Saints of the Russian Church, such as John Chrysostom, Theophylact, Athanasius, Dorotheus, and Methodius of Patara. Archpriest Avvakum (d. 1682), a major opposer of Nikon's reforms, is also mentioned. The community of the Old Believers (Raskolniki) developed after the religious reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon in 1652, which advocated greater alignment with the practices of the Greek Orthodox Church. Nikon's reforms met with strong resistance by the supporters of the old Russian ritual in Moscow. The Pan-Orthodox Synod (1666), spearheaded by Tsar Alexis, precipitated the situation towards a schism (raskol) of the Russian Orthodox Church; previously-imprisoned Old Believers were declared heretical and sentenced to exile and imprisonment in remote monasteries. "The mass flight of Old Believers from persecution by the authorities, towards the outskirts of Russia, contributed to the creation of centres of Old Believer manuscript literature" (Medvedeva, p. 69), especially in remote areas of the country. Provenance: Katerina Mikhailovna, Tolozhno, Novgorod - Arno Collection, New York (-1995)- Sam Fogg, London, April 1995 - Martin Schøyen. N.I. Medvedeva, 'Repertuar staroobrjadcheskoj rukopisnoj knigi v Rossii: XVIII-XX vv.', Vestnik SPbGIK, vol. 17, 2013; The Monthly Christian Spectator, 1851-1859, 1858. Octavo (160 x 100 mm), manuscript on paper. Ff. 70 (- fol.19), 25 lines per full page in Cyrillic half-uncial. Watermark: Pro Patria by J. Honig (cf. Klepikov I, 1135 and 1144, dated 1762 and 1765). Rubricated headings and initials, 2 black and green ornamental headpieces and borders. Contemporary Russian black calf over bevelled wooden boards, outer border double blind ruled with dentelles, central panel with lozenge-shaped centrepiece and stamped fleurons in blind to corners, all edges red. Later Russian inscriptions in ink, pencil, and red crayon to one blank and last verso. Extremities rubbed, minor loss to front cover, lacking two clasps, half a dozen scattered small worm holes, a little craquelure to spine, contents toned, light water stain and finger soiling to lower margin, occasionally to centre, long clean tear along outer border of one decorated border, one leaf torn away: a very good example.
