"The Siberian Ladder" in Slavonic writing

A groundbreaking hypothesis challenges the long-held attribution of 'The Siberian Ladder,' a 17th-century Slavic literary monument, to Metropolitan Filofey Leshchinsky. This study proposes that the work may instead have been authored by an anonymous monk from a Kyiv monastery at the end of the 17th century, supported by linguistic-textological analysis and systematic documentation of 32 surviving manuscripts—four of which remain undiscovered. The research employs descriptive and statistical methods to analyze these texts, with 14 manuscripts housed in Ukrainian institutions, including the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra and Saint Sophia Cathedral collections. To validate this hypothesis, further historical and philological examination of the oldest Kyiv manuscripts is recommended, alongside a thorough review of Filofey Leshchinsky's biography to either confirm or refute his authorship.

Popova, T. (2021). “The Siberian Ladder” in Slavonic writing. Rukopisna Ta Knižkova Spadŝina Ukraïni, (27), 71–81. https://doi.org/10.15407/rksu.27.071