Abstract:
The abundance of apocryphal material in the text of the Pilgrimage by Daniel the
Traveler has become the subject of several special studies in the past, by Ya. I. Gorozhansky, M. A. Venevitinov, P. A. Zabolotsky, V. P. Adrianova-Peretts, and M. Garzaniti. All of these studies, however, were based on the text of the First Redaction
of the Pilgrimage (according to Venevitinov’s classification) and they did not
consider the work’s literary history. The present study reveals the various ways in
which the reproduction of apocryphal subjects appears in different redactions of
the Pilgrimage (both full-text and abridged) and its later adaptations made in the
16th and 17th centuries. One of the examples is the description of Nazareth, which
is accompanied by an apocryphal version of the Annunciation in the Pilgrimage.
This version differs from the Bible text (Mt 1:18–25, Lk 1:26–28) in that it tells about
the events directly preceding the Annunciation: the pre-Annunciation at the well,
where Mary comes to draw water, and the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel to
her in a cave. In the group of abridged copies of the 16th century from the Kirillo-
Belozersky Monastery, this information is missing, and the only thing said about
Nazareth is that “Archangel Gabriel announced to Her [Mary] there.” Thus, the
complete story appearing in the full-text redactions of Daniel’s Pilgrimage was
replaced by a compact report consistent with the Bible narrative.
The nature of the variant readings presented in this paper remains to be
interpreted, as these variants may be later interpolations in the text made by
redactors or they may represent traces of the earlier period of the history of the
text. At the same time, any reconstruction of the literary history of the Pilgrimage
has to take into account the peculiarities of the reproduction of apocryphal
subjects in different redactions of the text.
