Guard your sight and curb your tongue. Two moralistic poems from the archive of Simiaon Polatski (1629–80)

The article presents unpublished authorial working copies (chernoviki) of two poems, “Oko” (“The Eye”) and “Iazyk” (“The Tongue”) by the Belarusian-born monk-poet born Samuel Sitnianovich-Piatroŭski and better known as Simiaon Polatski, or in Russian as Simeon Polotskii. Along with the verse text of “Oko”, the author provides glosses to the text which illustrate the psychological chain of events from inception of an act/sin to its eventual conclusion, reflecting the moral theology of the Roman Catholic Church – ideas which the Orthodox-born, future Orthodox monk-poet learned as a student of the Jesuits in Vilnius. The poem also illustrates the author’s artistic method, for he incorporates Church Slavonic equivalents of the glosses into the very lines of the poem – a practice which is evident in other texts in the same manuscript. In the second poem,“Iazyk”, the poet warns of the great devastation wreaked by the power of that smallest of organs – the uncontrolled tongue. Where in the first poem the author foregrounds his moral authority, in this second text he relies on the reader’s ability to recall the scriptural texts underlying certain of his lines. The article highlights at the micro level the cultural literary processes at work in the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the seventeenth century

Art · Commonwealth · Ethnic group · Literature · Poetry · Power (physics) · Sociology · Anthropology · European Cultural and National Identity · Historical and Cultural Studies of Poland · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History

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