Bibliographic note: Acts of the Greek Nezhin brotherhood, copied and published by Professor A. A. Fedotov-Chekhovsky

Among the books and brochures published on the occasion of the anniversary celebration of the University of St. Vladimir, according to official data, among other things, is “Collection of patents of Kyiv metropolitans and Little Russian hetmans related to the Greek Nizhyn church brotherhood and civil society” (Journal of the Ministry of People's Education, part ССХХХV, p. 30). This “Collection” was donated by its publisher, a former professor of Roman and civil laws, A. Fedotov-Chekhovsky, as the news of the ministerial journal says, to the University of St. Vladimir. – Interest in the fate of the Nizhyn Greeks and in everything that concerns their life and church-civil structure gave us a desire to get acquainted with this collection, and a happy accident made it possible to satisfy this desire through a careful reading of the Collection, which in the press received, although loud, but far from accurate, the name: “Acts of the Greek Nizhyn brotherhood, copied and published by Professor A. A. Fedotov-Chekhovsky.” In this bibliographic note, we intend to share with readers our impressions drawn from reading these “Acts” or “Collection”. This edition of the “Acts”, copying in appearance, i.e. in paper format, in the layout of each page into two columns, etc., the publications of historical and archaeological commissions, differs significantly from the latter in the absence of the so-called introduction or preface, in which, although not extensively, the importance and historical significance of the published documents are explained, as well as where these or other acts were taken from publishers. Prefaces also bring together documents that are often separated by significant gaps, giving them completeness and clarity; in a word, in them, in advance, before reading the documents themselves, readers become acquainted with the internal and external aspects of this or that institution or this or that person. The Nizhyn Greeks, who received civil independence and a well-known church-administrative structure, from the time of the publication of the universal of 1657 on May 2 by the Little Russian hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky, for two and a half centuries lived within the Russian state in a special position, enjoyed the special patronage of the Russian sovereigns and Little Russian hetmans, who endowed them with various kinds of rights and privileges. Having first grouped themselves around the Macedonian priest Christodoulos, a highly determined and enterprising man, they formed at the churches built by this Christodoulus a brotherhood in honor of the holy officials of the Archangel Michael and Gabriel and all the saints. This brotherhood, founded in 1696, received a solid organization and was endowed with a “charter” that very precisely regulated all the relations of the brothers among themselves, with priests, with churches founded with their assistance, etc. Subsequently, the brothers achieved lynching, “beyond criminal cases,” which they so firmly organized and placed in such a position, thanks to ignorance of the Greek laws by which the Nizhyn Greeks were tried, and the Greek language by Russian state functions, that the decision of the “court of the Greek Nizhyn brotherhood” was for the most part peremptory or led to many years of “red tape” for the litigants, and in the end, ruining both, i.e., the culprit and the accusers, ended in nothing or began again. In 1785, since the publication of the so-called “city regulations” by Empress Catherine II, the Nezhin Greek brotherhood ended its existence and in its place the “Greek Nizhyn Magistrate” was established. But only the name was destroyed, replaced by a new word; in essence, the “Greek Nizhyn magistrate” was the same brotherhood. The names: protefor, kivernitis, idromelion, etc. were replaced by burmistras, ratmans, etc. etc., but their meaning, influence on affairs, the performance of their duties, in general, the essence of the matter remained without any change until the seventies of this century, when the “Greek Nizhyn magistrate” was closed, and the Greek Nizhyn society was merged with the Nizhyn society of Russian citizens under the control of the local city duma. A preface of this kind or something similar was necessary in the “acts” of Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky in order to arouse readers’ interest in the disappeared Nizhyn Greek brotherhood, about which there was absolutely no information in the press until recently. Without this preface, a whole swarm of questions crowds into the reader’s head, even with a quick glance at the printed acts. So, for example, under the name “acts of the Greek Nizhyn brotherhood”, acts are published in this brochure that have nothing to do with the brotherhood and that came to light much earlier than the very establishment of the brotherhood, which in fact is recognized to have existed only since 1696. For example, the brochure contains acts of 1657, 1658, 1659, 1660, 1665, 1666, 1672, 1675, etc., years in which not a single word is mentioned about brotherhood. There are further acts that, although they were written after 1696, that is, after the establishment of the brotherhood, they say nothing about this latter, but are talking about the structure of the Greek Nizhyn society, about its rights and privileges (for example, charter No. 10, 1699, decree of 1735, etc.). All this clearly tells us that the title of this brochure was given by the publisher very inaccurately and the ministerial magazine understood its meaning more correctly, describing it as follows: “a collection of patents of Kiev metropolitans and Little Russian hetmans related to the Greek Nizhyn church brotherhood and civil society.” The absence of the same preface raises other questions when reading the acts of Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky, that is, the question of the place where these acts were copied and about the original from which they were copied. The answers to these questions are a publishing secret, but they are not difficult to discover. At first glance, judging by the title of the brochure, one might think that the place of storage of these acts is either the “Greek Nizhyn brotherhood” itself, replaced in 1785 by the “Greek Nizhyn magistrate,” or this latter, or, finally, the Nizhyn city duma, which in 1873 accepted the documents of the Greek Nizhyn magistrate for storage. But, according to information, it turns out that neither in one, nor in the other, nor even in the third place such acts exist and, therefore, Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky did not borrow them from here. The assumption about the Greek magistrate as the place where Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky copied his acts is destroyed by the undoubted data that we have, thanks to the kindness of the recently deceased director of the Greek Nizhyn Alexander School N.G. Mantsev. The latter gave us two “registers” of 1798 documents related to the history of the Greek Nizhyn society and stored in the Greek Nizhyn magistrate. Their full title is as follows: a) “Register of letters of various eminent bishops to the Greek Nizhyn society data on the belonging of the Greek church and its presbyters to the sole department of diocesan eminent bishops, established on October 1798, 10 days” and, “Register to the hetman generals, the highest letters of rights and liberties to the Greek Nizhyn society complained and followed in confirmation of the same by a personal highest decree, carried out on the 10th day of December 1798.” Comparing both of these “registers” with the table of contents of the “letters of Greek hierarchs and Kyiv metropolitans” and “universal hetmans”, printed under the “Acts of the Nizhyn Greek Brotherhood” by A. A. Fedotov-Chekhovsky, we see that the number of “letters” and “universals” in both cases is not the same. In the edition of Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky we do not see the universal of Hetman Ivan Bryukhovetsky of 1665 on March 16th, which, according to our “register” (No. 11), should be, according to the account, the third 1, the universal of Hetman Daniil the Apostle of 1729 on December 23rd, decree of the Little Russian Collegium, in the Greek Nizhyn Brotherhood of 1775 May 16 under 3274 received, with sending a copy of the Governing Senate of the decree with the written in it the personal highest decree of February 1775 on the 10th day of the “decree of the Chernigov viceroyal rule, in the court of the Greek Nizhyn brotherhood of 1785 September 24 under No. 25800 received with sending a copy Decree of the Governing Senate, and in it with the prescription of the highest personal decree of 1785. September on the 1st day, in approval of the above universals and letters and about the existence of a Greek court instead of a Greek magistrate held. In the “register” of bishop’s letters against the printed edition of these latter there are two more extra letters: a) “A Greek letter, signed in Greek by many persons, issued on June 1689, 25” and b) “a decree of the Bishop of Chernigov Theophilus on April 1786, 2 under No. 538, given to the Greek Nizhyn magistrate with the approval of Hierotheos, bishop, and Victor, Archbishop. Thus, based on these data, we can conclude that Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky did not take the “originals” for his publication from the archives of the Greek Nezhin magistrate. One cannot think that these “originals” were taken from that elegant or, as Mr. Storozhevsky puts it, “decent box”, which is currently kept in the local Greek Archangel Michael Church, because, with our personal review of the contents in this box, we did not find in it the acts issued by Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky under No. 10, 17, 33, but we did find such acts, which the publisher did not see or deliberately avoided, for example. the decree of Theophilus, Bishop of Chernigov, already mentioned by us, in 1686 with the signatures on it of the rulers of Chernigov Hierotheus and Victor. Consequently, none of the mentioned places could be the place of storage of those “originals” from which Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky copied the published acts. We have in our hands some data from which we can conclude, and the conclusion is unlikely to be erroneous, that in none of the places mentioned was there a publisher of these acts. He described them, in the literal sense of the word, not himself personally, but through an illiterate scribe, from a ready-made collection of these documents, which were quite often copied by the “Nezhin Greeks” who lived on trade business in different parts of the Russian Empire, for their own needs. There were similar “collections” even in Siberia, for example. a collection now kept in our Church Archaeological Museum and sent from Siberia. Collections of these acts also circulated among the inhabitants of Nizhyn. So, for example, between the papers left after the death of the late hieromonk of the Greek Nizhyn church, Fr. Iliodor, we met, by the way, a notebook bound in paper with the inscription: “Acts relating to the Nizhyn Greek churches” (all are kept in original in the Greek Nizhyn magistrate). Looking through this latest collection of acts, we were struck by the remarkable coincidence, the similarity with the collection of acts published by Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky. The same number of acts, the same order, the literally similar description of the episcopal and hetman’s seals, the same notes to the acts - all this led us to the idea that Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky copied his acts from this collection, or from a similar one. In the collection we mentioned, Fr. Iliodor there is even a cursive signature printed by Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky under the translation of the charter of the Patriarch Jacob of Constantinople in 1680, indicating, as it were, the time of “writing off” these acts: “Copied from the original on July 17, 1856” (p. 4). True, there are small differences in the printed edition of the acts, but these differences are of such a kind that they further confirm our idea that the publisher of the acts did not even see the real originals of the Nizhyn Greek acts. So, for example, in the printed edition the translation of the letter of Patriarch Jacob is slightly changed from the real handwritten collection and the Greek text, also copied from bad copies, is added for letters No. 1 and 10, according to the edition of Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky. We are sure that if the publisher of the acts had seen the real original of the letter of Patriarch Jacob, written on magnificent parchment and sealed with a heavy lead patriarchal seal with the image of the Mother of God on one side and the signature “'Iάχωβος, έλέψ Θεοϋ άρχιεπος Κωνστανουπόλεως νέας 'Ρώμης, χαί οίχουιχός πατριάρχης 1679", on the other, which is attached to the parchment by means of a rather thick blue cord, then he would not fail to mention and describe the real seal. Such a silence, in view of the detailed description of the seals, very often similar to one another, of the Kyiv metropolitans and Little Russian hetmans, would be all the more strange since the real seal has a date different from the date of the charter. It seems to us that it would be useful to note this last circumstance. Pointing to the collection of acts of Fr. Iliodor, as the “original” from which Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky copied his acts, we must note in this case that this collection, as the above title shows, contains acts of spiritual persons, i.e., Patriarch Jacob of Constantinople, Archbishop Malachi and the Kyiv metropolitans, but there are no hetman universals in it. This last phenomenon must be explained, in our opinion, by the simple circumstance that for these secular documents there was a special independent similar collection, which we did not see, but which, without any doubt, was at the hands of Professor Fedotov-Chekhovsky. In any case, there is no doubt that these documents were not copied by the publisher from the originals now stored in the Greek Nizhyn Church of St. Michael the Archangel. Everything we have said in this regard can convincingly prove this to us. Among the letters issued by Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky, there are, by the way, two letters, in the Greek original and in the publisher’s translation into Russian (pages 1 and III). But this statement of the publisher is not justified by actual facts. The Russian translation attached to the Greek texts turns out to be not the property of the publisher, but only his rewrite of a ready-made translation, as Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky himself admits. Under the Russian translation of the letter of Patriarch Jacob, apparently due to an oversight by the publisher, a characteristic note was printed in italics and in fairly clear letters, as if to further convince readers: “Copied from the original on July 17, 1856” (p. 4). If now this translation is copied from the original, which existed even earlier on July 17, 1856, then for the publisher there was in fact no need to make a new one, his own publishing translation from the language, which, as we will see below, the venerable veteran professor had sufficiently forgotten. Finally, a very cursory reading of the translations in Mr.’s edition is sufficient. Fedotov-Chekhovsky, in order to make sure that their language is not modern “Russian” and the time of origin of these translations must be attributed almost to the last century. In the interests of science, it would be very useful if the publisher included in his “acts” the oldest translation of the letter, for example. Patriarch Jacob, made in the 17th century and kept between documents in the Greek Nizhyn church, which is scientifically very valuable and can often replace and does replace the original itself. The old translation of the letter was also in the collection of acts of the late Fr. Iliodora. As for letter No. 10, we have never seen the oldest translation and even the original in Greek anywhere and we do not know where Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky got this original from. Obviously, this original has now been lost, but previously it and the translation were kept in the magistrate along with other papers, as can be seen from the already mentioned “register” of letters, compiled in 1798, in which the original and translation are listed under Nos. 9 and 12. Having deviated from the generally accepted rules, when issuing all kinds of acts, by omitting the preface, Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky continues his deviations further. So nowadays, when re-issuing acts, new publishers usually note where these acts were published before, and sometimes indicate the features in their edition. G. Fedotov-Chekhovsky publishes all the acts as a novelty, despite the fact that the letters of the Archbishop of Chernigov, who was the founder of the Metropolitan Throne, Lazar Baranovich, were already published back in 1865 by the Right Reverend Philaret in a book entitled: “Letters of the Reverend Lazar Baranovich with notes,” ed. 2. Chernigov. 1865 pp. 219–124. It is all the more necessary to point out this publication because the Right Reverend Philaret indicates in his book a different date for the letter of this archbishop, printed by Mr. Fedotov-Ekhovsky under No. 8, namely 1682 on November 27, instead of 1689 on November 27 (see Philaret, p. 222 and Chekhov, p. 11). But we can still put up with all the above-mentioned deviations and excuse them with various kinds of assumptions. You may, for example, not know the previous edition of those or other charters or universals, you may consider it unnecessary to write a special preface to the issued acts, but in no way can you put up with the careless publication of these latter. It is now customary to publish documents from ancient times either with diplomatic accuracy, that is, in compliance with the peculiarities of language and spelling, or applying them to modern spelling, to modern figures of living speech. G. Fedotov-Chekhovsky apparently wanted to adhere to the first method, but in his acts we encounter a lot of deviations, i.e., turns of the old language are replaced by new ones, errors are constantly made in spelling and placement of characters and deviations from the originals themselves, instead of which the publisher had bad originals at his hands. We counted such errors and irregularities in this edition of Mr. Fedotov-Chekhovsky, more than half a sheet of small cursive writing. G. Storozhevsky mentions only three generalists of this hetman (page 4 note), and in our register four generalists are counted from Hetman Bryukhovetsky. Obviously, negligence and disorder took their toll and one station wagon has now disappeared without a trace (Watchman. Tender Greek, p. 1). You might be interested in: