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The Beginning of Written Slavic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Extract
The lucid account of the Moravian mission of Constantine–Cyril and Methodius that Professor Dvornik has given is a persuasive and up–to–date statement of widely accepted views. Yet scarcely a single specialist would be willing to agree unhesitatingly with all the details even in such a brief résumé of the quarter-century of relations between the emerging Slavic nations and their neighbors. Indeed, some, as his footnotes suggest, might take exception to certain of his major points.
The difficulty lies in our historical sources–in their paucity, their unclear allusions, their omissions, and, worst of all, their contradictions. First of all, so little of the ninth–century material has survived that we are dependent on the views written decades or even centuries after the events. Then, even the contemporary writings have come down to us in modified form, owing to varying amounts of recopying and editing, with inevitable distortions, omissions, reinterpretations, and interpolations.
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1963
References
1 The traditional name is the “Pannonian Legends,” where the epithet is due to a mistaken nineteenth-century theory that Old Church Slavonic was a Pannonian dialect, while the noun is a technical term for the life of a saint. I prefer to avoid the term “legend” here because of the automatic association of that word with fiction and fantasy; these two Lives are biographies of solid historical value that emphasize the sanctity and piety of the “heroes” without attributing supernatural powers or miracles to them.
2 The standard edition of these and almost all other Slavic source texts is unfortunately very rare: (
) (Leningrad, 1930). A new edition of VC and VM, with most of the Latin sources directly connected with the brothers, is now available: F. Grivec and F. Tom§i£, Constantinus et Methodius Thessalonicenses: Fontes (Radovi Staroslavenskog instituta, Vol. IV; Zagreb, 1960). It includes a full Latin translation of the two Lives and a brief commentary about the manuscripts. Nonetheless, a reprint of Lavrov would be highly desirable.
3 I defer to Father Dvornik in using this South Slavic form for the West Slav whose name is recorded correctly in VM as Rostislav.
4 Cf. J. Kurz, Slavia, XXXII (1963), 314.
5 So, most recently, B. A. (
) (Moscow, 1963), p. 105. Istrin is remarkably ignorant of the content of the works written in various alphabets and extraordinarily cavalier about the shapes of the letters themselves. His reproduction of others’ theories leaves a great deal to be desired.
6 Apologists like Istrin doggedly ignore the point that the occurrence of a reading in all copies does not make it a part of the original VC, but merely takes it back to some point in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. At least one crippling error ((
) uncle”) is common to nearly all copies and to the excerpts in Croatian breviaries: it thus probably dates from no later than the eleventh century. Of course any emendation for such a passage can be only plausible, but Jakobson long ago pointed out that in VC xvi the list of nations already praising the Lord in their own tongue includes the Syrians, Suri, but in two of the relatively old and accurate copies they are called Rusi (cf. Grivec and Tomšić, op. cit., p. 136, note ad XVI.8). I noted that in the Novgorod First Chronicle the mitropolit, surtskyi (“Syrian bishop”), whose arrival in Kiev constitutes the sole entry under 6412/1104 in the oldest copy (Synodal), has been naturalized to ruskyi in all other copies.