To Whom They Prayed for the Birth of Ivan the Terrible: “Unknown” and New Prayers of St. Alexander Svirsky

The idea for this article came about as a result of a combination of the revived veneration of St Alexander of Svirsky, and the study of the manuscript tradition of his Life (16th-19th centuries) and is connected with the attribution of prayers attributed to the Venerable in modern liturgical minyas. A study of over 315 folios of the Vita has shown that there is no evidence of the latter in the main source of information about the Monk. However, in the earliest edition, the Mineinaya, his prayers were preserved in the form in which they were recorded 12 years after his repose. One of them is in a sense key to Russian history and is directly connected with the veneration of the saint by the royal family; it is preserved only in manuscripts and is absent in the modern hagiographic text. The objectives of the study were both to establish the probable sources of the modern prayers attributed to St Alexander and to clarify the manuscript tradition of those prayers that were clearly preserved throughout the centuries in the texts of the Life.