Works by Pierre de Besse in the Written Heritage of Simeon Polockij

Abstract

This article investigates previously unidentified Latin sources of several works by Simeon Polockij. The texts examined include a funeral sermon from the sermon collection Večerja duševnaja (Spiritual Evening Meal, 1683); two poems from the Rhymology (Rifmologion, ca. 1678); and testamentary preambles from the Synodal Collection of the State Historical Museum (no. 229), ca. 1672-1673. Textual comparison demonstrates that the principal source of Simeon Polockij’s instructive exempla and quotations was a collection of sermons on death by the French Catholic preacher Pierre de Besse (1567-1639). De Besse was an authoritative preacher at the court of Louis XIII and the author of a collection of annual sermons, first published around 1605, with a Latin translation appearing ca. 1611. This collection is known to have exerted influence on Orthodox authors in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Although the original edition of de Besse’s Conciones is not preserved in the book collection of Simeon Polockij and Sil’vestr Medvedev (Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents), an abridged revision by the German Dominican Johann Coppenstein (d. 1638) is extant there. Coppenstein’s compendium reproduces, in summarized form, de Besse’s Sermones de morte together with their full illustrative apparatus, which reappears almost verbatim in the aforementioned texts by Simeon Polockij. The study thus not only identifies a concrete channel of transmission from Western Catholic to Orthodox didactic literature, but also substantiates and refines earlier, fragmentary observations concerning the shared repertoire of sources, exempla, and rhetorical strategies across Simeon’s poetic and prose works.