» From this point of view manuscript
A makes sense in a way that
B and
C cannot do, despite their attractively systematic appearance. A series of poems on the subject of religious faith is to be found in the opening pages of
A, but because the poems bear titles beginning with different letters of the alphabet the group is broken up in the fair copies. Conversely, although there is a cycle of poems entitled «Faith» in the fair copies, it contains only some of the original series about faith at the beginning of the autograph (
A), and instead includes poems taken from a number of other places in the autograph.
While the investigation of sources underlying the poems of the Vertograd could at best be a random search so long as the alphabetical copies remained the object of study, a careful analysis of the autograph manuscript not only reveals a pattern of thematic units, but also points to their sources. The work upon which Simeon drew most extensively was the Concionum opus tripartitum of Matthias Faber of which he possessed a copy of the Coloniae, 1646 edition. This book, according to Beleckij, was subsequently acquired by the library of Char’kov Seminary[97]. It is a collection of sermons divided into three parts, Hyemalis, Aestivalis and Festivalis, of which Simeon drew heavily upon the second and third when composing the first half of the Vertograd manuscript. His method of borrowing varied. Sometimes he would summarise the contents of an entire sermon in a fairly lengthy poem. The 52-line poem «Aggelov ne iskupi Gospod», čelověki ze iskupi, čego radi» is an exposition of the whole of the first sermon for the 16th Sunday after Pentecost, which is entitled «Cur homines, non Angeli post lapsum reparati». Such long poems often have marginal numbers corresponding to the numbered sections of the Faber sermon. At other times Simeon concentrated on only one small item in a sermon and created a poem from it. Immediately following «Aggelov ne iskupi...» in A is a poem entitled «Bog, jako choščet, tvorit», in which Simeon compares God's sovereign right to do as He wishes to that of Pharaoh, who, having cast two of his servants into prison together with Joseph, spared one and hanged the other. This poem derives from section 6 of the same Faber sermon and forms part of the discussion about why God redeems men but not angels. Simeon often lifted a section of a Faber sermon out of its context, creating a poem that cannot be traced back to its source unless one sees it in the manuscript A, where it will be surrounded by many other poems going back to the same source. The poem «Diogen» was taken from the introductory paragraph, called the Thema, of Faber's eighth sermon for the 15th Sunday after Pentecost. The title of this sermon is «De sepultura Christianorum, eiusque causis», which helps to explain why it should open with an anecdote related by Cicero in which Diogenes is asked by his friends why he does not wish to be buried. The near-proof that Simeon took his material from Faber rather than Cicero rests on the fact that forty of the preceding forty-three poems in