Unit 3: Literary language of Kievan Rus

This theme is dealt with in a lot of historical sources. The following citation is to illustrate this:

“The political unification of the region into the state called Rus', from which modern Belarus, Russia and Ukraine trace their origins, occurred approximately a century before the adoption of Christianity in 988 and the establishment of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic as the liturgical and literary language. The Old Church Slavonic language, also known as Old Bulgarian Language, as it was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire's Preslav Academy, was introduced through the Bulgarian Empire. Documentation of the language of this period is scanty, making it difficult at best fully to determine the relationship between the literary language and its spoken dialects.

There are references in Arab and Byzantine sources to pre-Christian Slavs in European Russia using some form of writing. Despite some suggestive archaeological finds and a corroboration by the tenth-century monk Khrabr that ancient Slavs wrote in "strokes and incisions", the exact nature of this system is unknown.

Although the Glagolitic alphabet was briefly introduced, as witnessed by church inscriptions in Novgorod, it was soon entirely superseded by the Cyrillic. The samples of birch-bark writing excavated in Novgorod have provided crucial information about the pure tenth-century vernacular in North-West Russia, almost entirely free of Church Slavonic influence. It is also known that borrowings and calques from Byzantine Greek began to enter the vernacular at this time, and that simultaneously the literary language in its turn began to be modified towards Eastern Slavic. …”

The complete version of this text is at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27

Assignments

1) Give Ukrainian equivalents to the following:

Unification, origins, adoption, approximately, sources, suggestive, corroboration, inscription, superseded, influence, vernacular

2) Give definitions to the following:

Adoption of Christianity, spoken dialects, archaeological finds, literary language

3) Answer the questions on the text:

1. What was the motivation of establishing the Old Church Slavonic language?

2. Where was it developed?

3. What was said by Khrabr about the ancient Slavonic writing?

4. What kind of Slavonic alphabet was used before the Cyrillic?

5. What do you know about Cyril and Mefodiyt?

4) Speak on this issue adding extra information from other sources.

5)What do you know about the origin of the Cyrillic alphabet?

Unit 4: Old East Slavic Literature

This theme is dealt with in a lot of historical sources. The following citation is to illustrate this:

“The Old East Slavic language developed a certain literature of its own, though much of it (in hand with those of the Slavic languages that were, after all, written down) was influenced as regards style and vocabulary by religious texts written in Church Slavonic. Surviving literary monuments include the legal code Justice of the Rus, a corpus of hagiography and homily, the disputed epic Song of Igor and the earliest surviving manuscript of the Primary Chronicle – the Laurentian codex of 1377.

The Book of Veles, said to have been found during the Russian civil war and to have disappeared in WWII, would, if genuine, provide about the only surviving pre-Christian East Slavic literary monument. Since the account of its find and eventual fate has not been confirmed, and its language deviates from the accepted reconstruction, most professional linguists have so far dismissed the book's authenticity.

The earliest dated specimen of Old East Slavic must be considered the written Slovo o zakone i blagodati, by Hilarion, metropolitan of Kiev. In this work there is a panegyric on Prince Vladimir of Kiev, the hero of so much of East Slavic popular poetry. Other eleventh-century writers are Theodosius, a monk of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, who wrote on the Latin faith and some Pouchenia or Instructions, and Luka Zhidiata, bishop of Novgorod, who has left us a curious Discourse to the Brethren. And here may be mentioned the many lives of the saints and the Fathers to be found in early East Slavic literature, starting with the two Lives of Sts Boris and Gleb, written in the late eleventh century and attributed to Jacob the Monk and to Nestor the Chronicler. With the so-called Primary Chronicle, also attributed to Nestor, begins the long series of the Russian annalists. There is a regular catena of these chronicles, extending with only two breaks to the seventeenth century. Besides the work attributed to Nestor the Chronicler, we have chronicles of Novgorod, Kiev, Volhynia and many others. Every town of any importance could boast of its annalists, Pskov and Suzdal among others. In some respects these compilations, the productions of monks in their cloisters, remind us of Herodotus, dry details alternating with here and there a picturesque incident; and many of these annals abound with the quaintest stories.

In the twelfth century we have the sermons of bishop Cyril of Turov, which are attempts to imitate in Old East Slavic the florid Byzantine style. In his sermon on Holy Week, Christianity is represented under the form of spring, Paganism and Judaism under that of winter, and evil thoughts are spoken of as boisterous winds. …”

The complete version of this text is at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27