Old Believer comics: To the history of the emergence of creolized texts in Siberia

Abstract

The article aims to consider the history of the appearance of the creolized text (CT) on Siberian materials of the late 19th century. A comic book is considered as a special case of such a text. Previously this kind of materials have not been used to study the history of CT. The article lists and briefly characterizes a number of works, mainly by domestic authors, on the problem of CT. It also indicates the presence of studies of certain types of CT, in particular - comics. The source of the study is a manuscript containing “Fasting Words” by Isaac the Syrian. The manuscript is stored in the Research Library of Tomsk State University (B-5548). It was written in 1894-1895 on the territory of Tomsk Province and belonged to one of the local Old Believers. The records on the manuscript - a scriber’s record of the work done and a record of the transfer of the manuscript as a schismatic one to Tomsk Theological Seminary - allow reconstructing its history. The illustrations of the manuscript were examined. Among them, those that can be called comics were identified: they include several plot-related parts and show the development of the story. Two illustrations were found that can be called comics: about silence and about nutrition. Each of the illustrations consists of three parts; to indicate the movement of time, the artist used a different position of the sun over the heads of the characters. Also three illustrations were found that can be called proto-comics. They do not have plot development, but they are a case of CT: there are images with captions that are closely related to the content of the main text. An important feature of the discovered illustrations is literalism in the transfer of the author’s text. A similar technique is used in modern advertising. There are other similar cases described by researchers. For instance, G.V. Markelov describes “frieze” miniatures in one of the manuscripts from the Northern Dvina. These are images glued together from several sheets of paper and containing several sequentially unfolding scenes from the text. The article concludes that the phenomenon of CT, including comics, which currently attracts a lot of attention from researchers, has a very long history, partly already covered in studies. CT can be observed in the Russian provinces at the end of the 19th century. It is characteristic that CT is seen primarily not in official publications, but in works related to reader reception - in handwritten books in particular. Thus, CT in the form of a comics book was known to the Siberian reader and was used to illustrate, in particular, patristic texts. The author declares no conflicts of interests.