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Old East Slavic literature, [1] also known as Old Russian literature, [2] [3] is a collection of literary works of Rus' authors, which includes all the works of ancient Rus' theologians, historians, philosophers, translators, etc., and written in Old East Slavic. It is a general term that unites the common literary heritage of Russia [ broken anchor ], Belarus and Ukraine of the ancient period. In terms of genre construction, it has a number of differences from medieval European literature. The greatest influence on the literature of ancient Rus' was exerted by old Polish and old Serbian literature.
Most of the monuments of Old East Slavic literature have been preserved in the form of manuscripts. The most common type of manuscript was literary collections. Notebooks written by a single scribe could then be bound by the scribe or binder himself. Such collections can be of a certain ("Zlatostruy", "Izmaragd", "Solemn", etc.) or indefinite content, reflecting the individual tastes and interests of one or another scribe who selected materials for himself or for his customer.
Unlike other traditionalist literatures, the Old East Slavic literature is characterized by syncretism, lack of clearly expressed poetological reflection, conscious rejection of rationalism and specification of theoretical knowledge. It differs from Byzantine literature by its emphasized irregularity, the blurring of genres and boundaries between the prosaic and the poetic, and the lack of a clear conceptual apparatus. [4]
Voluminous works could be copied and intertwined into separate books: some letopises, works on world history, paterics, works of a liturgical nature, prologues, etc. Small compositions, for example, "Praying of Daniel the Immured" or the Tale of the Destruction of the Rus' Land did not make up separate books, but were distributed in collections. [5]
The early examples of pre-Christian Old East Slavic Rus' literature should primarily include the oral epic: legends, myths and fairy tales. Most of the Old East Slavic oral folklore was recorded only in the 18th and 19th centuries.[ citation needed ]
Among the oral works, stories about the meeting of a person with an otherworldly force were particularly distinguished. Such a story by genre was divided into a bailichka , where a meeting with evil spirits is told on behalf of an "eyewitness", and a byvalschina , an oral story about a case that allegedly took place in reality, without focusing on the personal testimony of the narrator. Bailichka and byvalschina were often told in the villages to friends or children in order to wean them to walk far from home, and, according to Yevgeny Meletinsky, they became the prototype of "scary fairy tales". [6]
Later, a special type of druzhina poetry began to take shape – bylina, Rus' epic poems about heroic or mythological events or remarkable episodes of national history. In some ways, bylina are similar to skaldic poetry: both are divided into songs of praise and blasphemy and glorify some historical event. Bylina, as a rule, are written in tonic verse with two or four accents.[ citation needed ]
Almost all the literature of Rus' – original and translated – was handwritten. Handwritten works were distributed by copying by scribes or ordinary people.[ citation needed ]
In Rus', the apocrypha about the Last Judgment was especially popular. Among such works, a special place was occupied by the life of Basil the Younger, the second part of which (scenes from the vision of Vasily Gregory's pupil about the Last Judgment and a lengthy story about Theodore) spread as independent works.[ citation needed ]
Later, the original Old East Slavic apocrypha began to be created, the most famous of which is "The Walking of the Virgin through the Torments". Its plot is similar to the Greek "Revelation of the Most Holy Theotokos", but it also has many original features: for example, pagans who worship Troyan , Veles and Perun are in the first circle of hell, and there are a number of anti-Semitic statements in the text itself.[ citation needed ]
According to the philosopher Sergei Bulgakov, the special popularity of apocryphal literature in Rus' is indicated by the fact that of the seven most important monuments of the Jewish apocalyptic (except for the books of the prophet Daniel), three were preserved exclusively in Old Slavonic translations. [7]
Presumably, both epics and folk tales were not recorded by contemporaries for the reason that Rus' inherited from the Byzantine Empire a ban on literary fiction and the presence of a purely artistic function in the works. Back in 1073, the compilers of the Izbornik Svyatoslav warned against worldly writings based on artistic imagination. Fiction developed only in the late period.[ citation needed ]
However, despite some limitations, scientific and artistic works had to answer questions related to natural history (the origin of the world, cosmology) and the development of human society (the settlement of peoples, the origin of power, the state, the meaning and purpose of human history).[ citation needed ]
The first original works in Kievan Rus' were instructive collections, which are the most common type of manuscripts (even after the beginning of printing in Russia in 1569, manuscripts have not lost their popularity). The scribe copied various works according to some attribute or genre in a notebook. Notebooks written by one scribe could then be bound by the scribe himself or the bookbinder into a separate book. The bookbinder could collect notebooks of different times and different scribes and connect them because they were of the same format or were combined by them according to content. Such collections are currently called convolutes. Such collections of teachings as Izmaragd, Golden Chain, Bee, Palea, Solemn, Zlatostruy (origins), Pchela (of Byzantine origin) were originally intended for home and cell reading. Of these, the most interesting[ editorializing ] is Palea (also Explanatory Palea), which is a collection of several interconnected ancient Rus' works that set out Old Testament history with additions from apocryphal monuments, as well as with theological reasoning. [8]
Already in the early period of the development of Rus' literature, one can trace the understanding of Rus' not only as an ethno-political and religious community, but also as the Kingdom of Christ. In the Sermon on Law and Grace of the middle of the 11th century (the future Metropolitan Hilarion), the newly baptized Rus' people are called new. The perception of the people who were baptized in the "last times" (before the Last Judgment) as new, endowed with special grace, was characteristic of Rus'. The widespread idea of an imminent dreadful judgment was strongly reflected in the Old East Slavic literature of that period; ascetic creations and instructive literature became an introduction to soteriology (the doctrine of the salvation of the soul).[ citation needed ]
As most modern researchers note, there is no clear division of literature into genres in ancient Rus'. There were only a few authors who clearly defined the genre of their works (among such were the monk Phoma, Nil Sorsky, Metropolitan Macarius, and the nameless author of "The Tale of Mikhail Tverskoy"). Thus, the lexeme Word (Old East Slavic : Слово, romanized: Slovo, also translatable as Tale, Lay or Discourse [lower-alpha 1] ), often perceived as the name of a genre, could mean a didactic teaching, a chapter of a book, a conversation, a speech, articles of various content, etc. [14] [15]
Nevertheless, Nikita Tolstoy made an attempt to classify ancient Rus' literature; [16] later, the classification was edited by Evgeny Vereshchagin (the latter version is somewhat different from Tolstoy's):
This classification does not distinguish between primary genres (for example, hagiographies) and unifying genres that include small works as source material (prologue, menaiat-chets, etc.). This difference is taken into account in the classification based on the systematics of Dmitry Likhachev, who distinguished between monumental and small genre forms. [15] Nikolai Prokofiev gave the following classification:
The most important feature of epic genres is the object of the image and lyrical purpose. [19]
In the early period after the Christianization of Kievan Rus', there was no special church calendar, and the Old Slavic calendar was not suitable for calculating church holidays. Therefore, many authors had to make their own calculations in their works, which ranked their works among not only Paschal, but also mathematical treatises. For complex calculations, schoty was often used.[ citation needed ]
The earliest mathematical work of Kievan Rus' is considered to be "the doctrine of numbers" by Kirik the Novgorodian, a treatise on the calculus of time, combining an essay on mathematics, chronology and Paschalistics.[ citation needed ]
However, later mathematical treatises did not receive a proper development in Kievan Rus'. Among the works equal to the "doctrine of numbers", scientists include the "Charter of military Affairs" created in the 15th and 16th centuries, which set out the tasks of triangulation on the ground, and the "Book of soshny writing", dedicated to land surveying. Later works include an extensive manuscript entitled "Synodal No. 42", the first textbook in Rus' on theoretical geometry.[ citation needed ]
The early cosmological works of Kievan Rus' were partially influenced by apocryphal writings, mixed with pre-Christian ideas about the structure of the world.[ citation needed ]
Thus, much attention is paid to the creation and structure of the world in two of the most significant early works: the Dove Book and "About the whole creation". Both works have a complex structure and are probably based on Old East Slavic apocryphal legends that existed for the early period after the Christianization of Kievan Rus'.[ citation needed ]
It is also interesting that in the "Depth Book", as in two other ancient Rus' monuments – "The Conversation of the Three Saints" and "The Conversation of Jerusalem" – for some reason, whales are endowed with supernatural power. In the "Conversation of the Three Saints", the Earth floats on top of the great sea on three large whales and 30 small whales; the latter cover 30 sea windows; "The Conversation of Jerusalem" and "Depth Book" connect the movement of the whale with the end of the world. According to the "Depth Book" — "The Whale-fish is the mother of all fish. On the Whale-fish the earth is founded; when the Whale-fish turns, then our white light is finished (the end of all things will come)".[ citation needed ]
The so-called "fortune-telling books" (also "divinatory books") can probably also be attributed to cosmological works, which are currently not officially assigned to any of the genres of Kievan Rus'. [20] Fortune-telling books ( Volkhovnik , Gromnik, Kolyadnik, Trepetnik, Enchanter, etc.) were mainly distributed secretly: they were copied, sewn into other books, and passed on by inheritance. Officially, the distribution of such literature was persecuted by the church; lists of forbidden (so-called renounced) books of Kievan Rus' were compiled, in which divinatory literature was equated with apocrypha. [21]
Very popular in ancient Rus' were the lives of saints (zhytie), a kind of genre of hagiography that describes the life, deeds and miracles of ancient Rus' saints, martyrs and miracle workers.
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The scientist Alexander Panchenko refers to the earliest forms of Old East Slavic versification as the so-called "penitential poems" (the metrical nature of which is not yet clear), [22] single poetic texts written by the monk of the Kirillo-Belozersky monastery Efrosin, as well as separate chapters The Tale of Igor's Campaign and the Tale of the Destruction of the Rus' Land containing a metric constant.[ citation needed ]
Despite this, versification in Kievan Rus' was most often not approved, because was considered inherent only in "Latins". This position was most consistently expressed by Archpriest Avvakum: “Do not look for rhetoric and philosophy, or eloquence, but live with a sound true verb. [lower-alpha 2] Therefore, а rhetorician and philosopher cannot be a Christian. Alexander Panchenko pointed out that the Old East Slavic church poetry was strongly influenced by West Slavic, especially Polish literature. [22] Simeon Polotsky, releasing his "Rhymed Psalter" (1680), wrote that in Moscow they loved "the consonant singing of the Polish Psalter".[ citation needed ]
Some of the earliest representatives of Old East Slavic syllabic poetry are such poets as Karion Istomin, Simeon of Polotsk, Theophan Prokopovich, Antiochus Kantemir, Sylvester Medvedev and Mardary Khonykov . The principle of syllabic symmetry was dominant. A twelve-syllable verse with a caesura after the fifth or sixth syllable was used; there are, for example, such complex schemes as: 5-6-8|8-6-5|7-7-4-5-3-5 (12 verses of Irmos "Земьнъ къто слыша таковая"...) or 8|5-5-5|8-8|5-5-5 (9 verses of Irmos "Вьсъ еси желание"...) There were also schemes where the number of syllables in each verse was a multiple of three (from St. Trinity, the sacred number "three" for Christians). [22]
The detailed life in the monastery can be judged by the syllabic poem by Karion Istomin "About speaking from people, how monks live in the monastery": [23]
Мънози глаголют, что монахи деют,
- где в монастыре дела не имеют.
Бутто так сидят, ничего не знают,
- како ли Богу честь, поклон взношают.
Надобно кому себе искусити
- и в монастыре хоть время прожити.
Узнает, как кто в кельи пребывает,
- како помыслы, страсти отвергеет...
(Many say that the monks do, where in the monastery they idle. As if they are sitting like that, they do not know anything, only honor and bow to God.)
The acrostic form became very popular in Ancient Rus' poetics. It was also widely developed there. The earliest work in the genre of acrostic in ancient Russia is considered to be the Azbuchna Prayer , translated from Old Bulgarian. The acrostic in the Old East Slavic book poetry was also known in later times. Thus, the acrostic is found in one of the "greetings" of Karion Istomin to Tsarevich Alexey Petrovich:[ citation needed ]
Аминь буди слава,
Любовь чиста, права
Единому Богу,
К себе в слогах многу.
Исраиль нелестный,
Избранный и честный
Царев сын, царевичь
Алексий Петровичь,
Радуйся блаженно,
Емли жизнь спасенно,
В Господе изрядствуй,
Излестно отрадствуй,
Человеком в ползе,
В златых летах долзе.
Езди умне в книгах,
Чти мудрость в веригах:
Ности она златы,
Общит в любовь браты.
Жити с нею благо,
Имство всем предраго.
Взрасти тя Бог в славе,Имети ю здраве!
Here the acrostic is "Alexy Tsarevich live forever" (Алексий царевич вечно живи; in the fourth verse in the original, the first letter is the Slavic "xi"). [22]
In Kievan Rus', there were a number of canonical and legal statutes and rights. The special charters, judicial books, contractual, spiritual certificates and contribution certificates were common for the people and for the church. Most collections of Kievan Rus' law are strictly divided into civil and ecclesiastical. The exception is the Merilo Pravednoye, which is both a collection of church-canonical and civil legal legal nature.[ citation needed ]
The legal basis of the Kievan Rus' state [24] [25] was the Russkaya Pravda, Lithuanian statutes and Moscow Sidebniks. [lower-alpha 3] In 1649, the Sobornoye Ulozheniye was added to these written laws.[ citation needed ]
The so-called Russkaya Pravda ("Rus' Justice") is of great importance for the study of Kievan Rus' law. The Russkaya Pravda is a collection of legal norms of Rus', dated from various years, starting from 1016, the oldest Rus' legal code. [26] The Russkaya Pravda contains the norms of criminal, compulsory, hereditary, family and procedural law. It is the main source for studying the legal, social and economic relations of Kievan Rus'.[ citation needed ] The Russkaya Pravda is similar to earlier European legal collections, such as Germanic law (the so-called Leges Barbarorum, "laws of the barbarians"), for example, the Salic law, a collection of legislative acts of the Frankish state, the oldest text of which dates back to the beginning of the 6th century.[ citation needed ]
The short version consists of the following parts:
As many researchers have noted, the most ancient part of the Russkaya Pravda (the oldest pravda) preserves the custom of blood feud, characteristic of the laws of pre-Christian Kievan Rus', although it limits it to the circle of closest relatives.[ citation needed ] The lengthy version includes about 121 articles and consists of two parts-the Charter of Yaroslav Vladimirovich and the Charter of Vladimir Vsevolodovich Monomakh. According to most researchers, the Lengthy Truth is based on the Short text, which was amended and supplemented, including those adopted during the Kiev reign of Vladimir II Monomakh. [27] [28]
With the Christianization of Kievan Rus', church law arose. The most important source of church law in Kievan Rus' was the sudebniki, the most famous of which is the Zakon Sudnyi Liudem (the South Slavic legal Code of the 9th and 10th centuries, although some scholars consider it a reworking of some Byzantine and Jewish laws). However, most often in the ecclesiastical sphere of Kievan Rus', they used kormchaia books, legal collections that contained both church rules and the decisions of the Roman and Byzantine emperors on the church.[ citation needed ]
From the translated Byzantine collections of ecclesiastical law in Kievan Rus', nomocanons, Eclogue , Proheiron , and Zanon books (translation of Byzantine laws) were used. However, despite the widespread existence in the written tradition, Byzantine law did not have a significant application in legal practice, and its full reception did not occur. Rus' ecclesiastical law was based primarily on the ecclesiastical statutes issued by the knyazes, based on local law and only limited borrowing of Byzantine law. [29]
Later, in 1551, the comprehensive religious collection Stoglav was created, combining the norms of judicial, criminal and ecclesiastical law. Stoglav tried to solve the following pressing issues:[ citation needed ]
"Books of law" and "Merilo Pravednoye", one of the first Kievan Rus' collections of a civil and ecclesiastical-legal nature, contain both excerpts from Byzantine legislation and identical articles of Rus' origin, probably included in collections from an older one that did not come down to us of the collection of Kievan Rus' law. [30]
Yaroslav I Vladimirovich, better known as Yaroslav the Wise, was Grand Prince of Kiev from 1019 until his death in 1054. He was also earlier Prince of Novgorod from 1010 to 1034 and Prince of Rostov from 987 to 1010, uniting the principalities for a time. Yaroslav's baptismal name was George after Saint George.
The Russian Primary Chronicle, commonly shortened to Primary Chronicle, is a chronicle of Kievan Rus' from about 850 to 1110. It is believed to have been originally compiled in or near Kiev in the 1110s. Tradition ascribed its compilation to the monk Nestor beginning in the 12th century, but this is no longer believed to have been the case.
Old East Slavic was a language used by the East Slavs from the 7th or 8th century to the 13th or 14th century, until it diverged into the Russian and Ruthenian languages. Ruthenian eventually evolved into the Belarusian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian languages.
The Tale of Igor's Campaign or The Tale of Ihor's Campaign is an anonymous epic poem written in the Old East Slavic language. The title is occasionally translated as The Tale of the Campaign of Igor, The Song of Igor's Campaign, The Lay of Igor's Campaign, The Lay of the Host of Igor, and The Lay of the Warfare Waged by Igor.
The Christianization of Kievan Rus' was a long and complicated process that took place in several stages. In 867, Patriarch Photius of Constantinople told other Christian patriarchs that the Rus' people were converting enthusiastically, but his efforts seem to have entailed no lasting consequences, since the Russian Primary Chronicle and other Slavonic sources describe the tenth-century Rus' as still firmly entrenched in Slavic paganism. The traditional view, as recorded in the Russian Primary Chronicle, is that the definitive Christianization of Kievan Rus' dates happened c. 988, when Vladimir the Great was baptized in Chersonesus (Korsun) and proceeded to baptize his family and people in Kiev. The latter events are traditionally referred to as baptism of Rus' in Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian literature.
The Russkaya Pravda was the legal code of Kievan Rus' and its principalities during the period of feudal fragmentation. It was written at the beginning of the 12th century and remade during many centuries. The basis of the Russkaya Pravda, the Pravda of Yaroslav, was written at the beginning of the 11th century. The Russkaya Pravda was a main source of the law of Kievan Rus'.
The culture of Kievan Rus' spans the cultural developments in Kievan Rus' from the 9th to 13th century of the Middle Ages. The Kievan monarchy came under the sphere of influence of the Byzantine Empire, one of the most advanced cultures of the time, and adopted Christianity during the Christianization of Kievan Rus'. After the gradual fragmentation of the dynasty into many Rus' principalities in the 13th century, Kievan Rus' culture faded with the Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus' in the 13th century, and Batu Khan's establishment of the Golden Horde as the regional hegemon of Eastern Europe.
Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachev was a Russian medievalist, linguist, and a former inmate of Gulag. During his lifetime, Likhachev was considered the world's foremost scholar of the Old Russian language and its literature.
The Tale of the Destruction of Ryazan (by Batu) (Russian: Повесть о разорении Рязани Батыем, romanized: Povest' o razorenii Riazami Batyem) is a Russian literary work about the capture of the city of Ryazan by the Mongols in 1237. It is compiled from earlier manuscripts.
Medieval Bulgarian literature is Bulgarian literature in the Middle Ages.
The word Rus' referred initially to a group of Scandinavian Vikings, also known as Varangians, who founded the medieval state of Kievan Rus' in Eastern Europe in the 10th century. The term gradually acquired the meaning of the aforementioned dynastic polity itself, and also the geographic region of its heartlands Kiev, Pereiaslavl' and Chernihiv. Russia is a Hellenized rendition of the same word, and Ruthenia is its Latinized form.
Kievan Rus', also known as Kyivan Rus', was the first East Slavic state and later an amalgam of principalities in Eastern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century. Encompassing a variety of polities and peoples, including East Slavic, Norse, and Finnic, it was ruled by the Rurik dynasty, founded by the Varangian prince Rurik. The name was coined by Russian historians in the 19th century to describe the period when Kiev was at the center. At its greatest extent in the mid-11th century, Kievan Rus' stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south and from the headwaters of the Vistula in the west to the Taman Peninsula in the east, uniting the East Slavic tribes.
Medieval Serbian literature or Old Serbian literature refers to the literature written in medieval forms of Serbian language, up to the end of the 15th century, with its traditions extending into the early modern period. During the Middle Ages itinerant scribe monks from the Balkans travelled to Kievan Rus and beyond and their Church Slavonic writings became a common literary language for centuries among all Slavs.
The Kórmchaia Book, also known as the Books of the Pilot (Russian: Ко́рмчая книга, Ко́рмчая from кормчий, Church Slavonic: кръмьчии 'helmsman, ship's pilot'; Pidalion or Nomocanon, are collections of church and secular law, which constituted guide books for the management of the church and for the church court of Orthodox Slavic countries and were also the transmission of several older texts. They were written in Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic.
Church Statute of Prince Volodimir is a source of church law in Old Rus', defined legal authority of church and legal status of clergy by the state: prince (knyaz) and his administration. Vladimir's Statute was a short legal code, regulated relationship between the church and the state, including demarcation of jurisdiction between church and princely courts, and defined index of persons and organizations within the church jurisdiction. The church also got under its supervision the system of weights and measures, and monthly support: tithe from all princely income. The statute was written at the beginning of the 12th century and remade during many centuries. The statute was written in Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic. It was one of the first church sources of Kievan Rus' law. The Church Statute of Prince Yaroslav and other Kievan Rus' princely statutes served closely related purposes. One of the sources of the statute was Byzantine law, including the Kormchaia.
The Church Statute of Prince Yaroslav is a source of church law in Kievan Rus', defined legal authority of church by the prince (knyaz), his administration and churchmen. Yaroslav's Statute was a short legal code, regulated relationship between the church and the state, including demarcation of jurisdiction between church and princely courts, index of persons within the church jurisdiction, rules of family law and sanctions against moral violation. The statute was written at the 11th–12th century and remade during 13th–16th centuries, in Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic. It was one of the first church sources of Kievan Rus' law. Church Statute of Prince Vladimir and other Rus' princely statutes served to closely purposes. But church jurisdiction was expanded in comparison with Vladimir's Statute. A part of the lawsuits in the Yaroslav's Statute was referred to the church jurisdiction, and a part - to joint jurisdiction of the church and the prince. One of the sources of the statute was Byzantine law, including Nomocanon.
Kievan Rus' law or law of Kievan Rus', also known as old Russian law or early Russian law, was a legal system in Kievan Rus', in later Rus' principalities, and in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the 13th century. Its main sources were early Slavic customary law and Zakon Russkiy, which was partly written in Rus'–Byzantine Treaties. A number of articles have similarities with the Germanic (barbarian) laws, for example, the "Salic law" – a collection of legislative acts of Francia, the oldest text of which dates back to the beginning of the 6th century. The main written sources were Russkaya Pravda and Statutes of Lithuania.
The Rus' chronicle, Russian chronicle or Rus' letopis was the primary Rus' historical literature. Chronicles were composed from the 11th to the 18th centuries, generally written in Old East Slavic, about Kievan Rus' and subsequent Rus' principalities and history. They were one of the leading genres of Old Rus' literature in medieval and early modern Eastern and Central Europe.
Pravosudiye Mitropolichye, lit.Metropolitan's Justice) is a source of Old Russian law. It reflects the influence of the secular norms on Old Russian church law.
The Tale of the Destruction of the Russian Land is a text of Old East Slavic literature dating back to the 13th century and known from two manuscripts of the 15th and 16th centuries. It is a reflection on the Mongol invasion of Rus.
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