Anna-Maria Totomanova

The paper explores the sources, from which the newly converted Bulgarians could obtain information about the deviations from Orthodoxy and the most famous heresiarchs. It seems that most of the notices are contained in the translations dated to the first decades of the 10th c. during the reign of Simeon the Great. The fact should not surprise us given the role this ruler played in the cultural and literary policy of the new Christian state. Could we however speak about a conscious policy in this regard, or is this a mere coincidence?

Book Review: Златанова, Румяна. Книги на пророците Осия, Софония, Агей, Захария и Малахия в старобългарски превод (Диалог и духовност 9). София: TEMTO, 2022. 392 pp. ISBN 978-954-9566-94-9

The paper includes the edition of the recently discovered second witness of the Letter of Patriarch Callistus to the Bulgarian spiritual leader Theodosius of Tǎrnovo and his associate Romanus (RGB, f. 98, Egorov N 274). The edition is accompanied by variant readings taken from Syrku’s edition of the text found in RNB, F I 211, which has been the only known witness of the document for more than a century. Both witnesses have a western Russian provenance and date to the second half of the 15th c. (the new one has recently been dated to the last quarter of the 15th c.). The witnesses were compared in terms of orthography, grammar and lexis in order to establish their connection to a supposed Bulgarian original. The detailed philological analysis allows us to conclude that though both witnesses show significant traces of the Second Slavic influence on Russian literature, the two scribes introduced the innovations in different ways and to a different extent. Taking all this into account we dare to suppose that both witnesses descend rather from an earlier copy-mediator with Russian spelling features than directly from a Middle Bulgarian original.

Prof. Tatyana Slavova has just turned 65 this year. She was born on February 9, 1957 in Dimitrovrad and completed secondary school in Burgas in 1975. That same year, she enrolled in the Faculty of Slavic Philology at the St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia graduating with a master’s degree in Bulgarian philology in 1979. In 1980 she specialized in Old Bulgarian Glagolitic and Cyrillic palaeography and epigraphy supervised by Prof. Ivan Dobrev (then still associate professor). This research resulted in her doctoral thesis which she defended in 1985 on the subject of „Преславска редакция на старобългарския евангелски превод“ [“The Preslav Redaction of Old Bulgarian Translation of the Gospels”]. In 2001 she was awarded the academic degree of doctor of sciences (DSC) for her dissertation on the „Тълковната палея в контекста на старобългарската книжнина“ [“The Palaea Interpretata in the Context of Old Bulgarian Literature”].

The article is focused on the structure of the first part of the so-called Slavic version of the Chronicle of George Synkellos. Narrative refers to the years from the Creation to the Resurrection of Christ and is organized entirely according to the chronological and the Christological concept of early Christian writer and historian Julius Africanus. Dates are calculated according to the testimony of the Bible based on the so-called прэимьнаа лэта, i.e. the age of the Biblical patriarchs at the birth of their firstborn sons, and according to the years of managing various leaders of the Jewish people the so-called воеводами. Most of them, as well as relevant considerations coincide chronologically with preserved chronologies and fragments by Julius Africanus. Additional chronological axis by Olympic cycle that synchronizes the year of the first Olympiad of the reign of Ahaz, and input data for the Olympic history of the Hellenistic states and Ancient Rome, it takes us back again to Julius Africanus. Following A. Geltser the author assumes that the fragment of Julius Africanus chronicle was founded on Greek soil in the early ninth century and was used to create the historiography compilation preserved in Slavonic translation misidentified as a Chronicle of George Synkellos.

In the article consequently have been analyzed all cases with a held weak “yer” in the prefixes “sa-“, “va-“ and “vaz-“ in the contemporary Bulgarian language. In the prefix ”sa-“ the “yer” vowel is kept not only before a following root with an initial s or z, but also before any kind of consonants, compare sabariam, sabitie, sablazan, sablicham, sabludavam, saboleznovavam, sabudia, sabuia, savet, saveshtavam, saglasna, saglasia se, sadeistvam, sajalia, sakrusha, sachinia, sashia. Before a following consonant the “yer” is always kept, compare for example saedinia, saesha, saoraja, saumeia, saorudia, saobrazia, etc. Especially significant are the cases where with one and the same morpheme structure, once the “yer” has dropped, as its phonetic position requires, and in another – it is preserved. Such cases are not scanty in the Bulgarian language, compare sbera, sbiram, sbor, but sabera, sabiram, sabor; svestia, sviast, savest; svarshen and savarshen, sgledam, sgleda and sagledam; sgrada and sagradia; sgresha and sagresha; sdruja and sadruja; sdarjam and sadarjam; skria, skrit, but sakroven, sakrovishte; spregna and saprejen; storia and satvoria. The prefix “va-“ usually loses its final yer before following verb roots with an initial consonant, as here, the very peculiarity of the newly formed consonant combination (in a number of cases in full contradiction with the inherited from proto-Slavonic structure of the syllable, compare vstapvam, vstrastiavam, vsmukvam, vsmakvam) helps the morpheme parsing of the word and the distinguishing of the prefix. The generalization of the preposition- prefix as f in the colloquial language is also an expression of the aspiration to achieve a clear morpheme structure. In the prefix “vaz-“ with exception of some Russian borrowings such as vzriv and vzvod the weak yer is always kept. The only exception in a domestic word is the verb vzema, which in Bulgarian is considered to be formed by zema and the prefix v, as we can see from its derivatives – izzema, vazzema, etc., whose fate clearly shows that the drop of the yer in vaz- leads to the breaking of the uniform morpheme vz- in the preposition v- and the initial root z- to an undesired decomposition of the word. The behaviour of the weak yer-s in the suffixes is also subject of morphological restrictions, mostly connected with the aspiration to generalize the base of the word. In some cases the holding of the weak yer brings additional grammatical information: in the suffix –aka the yer is held in a weak position, only if the substantive is a noun, compare jaltak, jaltaci and malak, malki; the countable form and the definite form of the masculine nouns also hold the weak yer, etc. The detailed analysis shows that similar to the behaviour of the root yer-s, the behaviour of the yer-s in the prefixes and suffixes is also subject mainly of morphological and morphonological regularities and in a smaller degree it simply depends on phonetical conditions.