“A little Lenten study”: Nadezhda Stepanovna Sokhanskaya (1823–1884) and her “treatise” on the forty-numbered church reading of the prayer “Kyrie eleison”

Abstract

The article is devoted to a rare example of an exegetical work discovered in the archive, created by a XIX-th century writer who did not have a theological education, but knew the Holy Scriptures and church tradition well. The author of the published text is Nadezhda S. Sokhanskaya (1823–1884), known under the literary pseudonym “Kokhanovskaya”. At the end of her life, she wrote for one of her friends (the widow of the historian M. P. Pogodin) an interpretation of the meaning of reading the prayer «Kyrie eleison» forty times, and then made expanded copies for her other two friends. Three versions of this text are compared and commented on in the article.