V. M. Zhivov and the Instruction of the Slavonic-Russian Language by Johann Werner Paus

In his publications concerning the history of the Russian literary language, V. M. Zhivov has dealt with the role of the voluminous Petersburg manuscript of the “Instruction” only from 1996 onwards. The reason for this had been given by the rediscovered “Compendium Grammaticae Russicae” by M. Schwanwitz (1731), whose text shows a lot of borrowings from the “Instruction” and for its part exercised a direct influence on the famous “Anfangs-Gründe der Rußischen Sprache” (1731). In 1994, the cooperation with V. М. Zhivov in Bonn gave birth to the idea to edit the “Instruction” in a better way than what had been done in D. E. Mikhal’chi’s dissertation. As a matter of fact, in 1998 2000 Andrea Huterer(-Leschhorn) in Bonn succeeded in preparing a complete and by far more scrupulous transcript of the text, but as one of the results of her work it became increasingly evident that the writing habits practised by Paus in his personal copy very often do not allow a reliable reading of the text beyond all doubt, and, on the other hand, that wellmeant emendations proposed for unclear or defective passages by editors might lead to obvious misunderstanding of his intentions. It is for this reason that the Bonn transcript will not be printed as a book, but copies of it have been deposited as a sort of reading aid for interested russianists in the Manuscript Division of the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, in the Russian Language Institute of the Academy in Moscow and in the Archives of the Francke-Foundation in Halle/Germany.