A collection of daily church services, hymns of the main feasts and private prayers of the Orthodox Church in Russian.

ru Tatyana Trushova If you found an error - write to e-mail saphyana@inbox.ru ExportToFB21 10.11.2011 OOoFBTools-2011-11-10-12-29-53-1037 1.0 Missal YMCA–PRESS Paris 1989

V. Adamenko

Missal

FROM THE PUBLISHER

At a conference dedicated to the 1000th anniversary of the baptism of Rus' (Leningrad, February 1988), Archbishop. Kirill (Gundyaev) of Smolensk openly raised the question of the intelligibility of the Church Slavonic language in our days. For those who are concerned with the problem of ecclesiastical witness, the liturgical language used in our Church today seems to be an obstacle to the assimilation by contemporaries of the richness and beauty of Orthodox worship, since this language, not only for the people, but also for the intelligentsia, has lost the share of intelligibility that it undoubtedly possessed in the past."

The Cyril and Methodius tradition, which brought the Holy Scriptures and divine services in their language to the Slavs, inspired in the fourteenth century. St. Stephen of Perm, and in the nineteenth century St. Nicholas of Japan, should be effective in our days in relation to the Slavic peoples: thus the Serbian Church has already to a large extent switched to the living Serbian language.

Whatever the practical solutions to this question may be in Russia (further approximation, by correction, of the Church Slavonic language to Russian, a partial – in the readings – or a complete transition to the modern literary language), it is necessary that the faithful already now become acquainted with the Russian translation of the main texts of Orthodox worship.

For this purpose, we propose a republication of the collection compiled in 1926 by a cleric of the Nizhny Novgorod diocese, Fr. V. Adamenko (later monk Theophanes). As far as we know, this collection is the most complete that has ever been compiled. Published in Nizhny Novgorod in the amount of 2000 copies, at the height of the persecution of the Church, it is an extreme bibliographic rarity.

BIOGRAPHY

Vasily Ivanovich Adamenko was born in 1885 in the village of Poputnaya in the Sotradinsky district of the North Caucasian Territory, not far from Armavir, in the family of a poor Kuban Cossack. He graduated from a one-class school. From an early age, Vasily was distinguished by his religiosity; he often preached on the banks of the Kuban, where many believers gathered.

On the recommendation of the rector of the stanitsa church, Fr. Nikolai Polyansky, in 1909, Vasily left for Odessa, where he entered the courses of anti-sectarian missionaries, at the same time working as a bookseller at the diocese. He lived at the metochion of the Athos St. Andrew's Monastery, since 1910 he served as a psalmist.

After the courses, Adamenko was a freelance missionary in Armavir, Kuban region, then until 1916 - a missionary in Odessa. As early as 1908, he was inspired by the idea of translating Orthodox services into Russian, he even wrote about it to John of Kronstadt, but did not receive an answer, although he believed that he felt a prayerful answer.