The Classical and Jesuit Erudition of Stefan Iavorskii in His Panegyrics to Varlaam Iasinskii

Abstract

This article offers an overview of the Greco-Latin and early modern Jesuit sources of Stefan Iavorskii’s (1658–1722) three bilingual panegyrics addressed to his patron Varlaam Iasinskii, rector of the Kiev-Mohyla college (1669–1689), the Orthodox metropolitan of Kiev (1690– 1707), Hercules post Atlantem infracto virtutum robore honorarium pondus sustinens published in Chernihiv in 1684, Arctos Caeli Rossiaci in Gentilitiis Syderibus and Pełnia nieubywaiącey chwały w herbowym xiężycu (The Plenitude of Inexhaustible Glory in the heraldic moon), published in Kiev in 1690 and 1691. Both these works are prosimetric bilinguals (some sections are in Latin, others in Polish), testifying to a significant classical erudition of their author. However, Hercules is one most traditionally “classical” in its dispositio and elocutio, while the style of the other two, written after Iavorskii’s educational journey through Jesuit schools in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, is much more innovative, highly metaphorical, allegorical, relying on the argumentation of surprise (based on acumen- and argutia-theory expounded in the rhetoric of Jan Kwiatkiwiecz) and emblems due to an extensive use of combinations of multiple pictorial-verbal themes (especially in Pełnia).