On February 13 this year, one of the most brilliant minds in Bulgarian mediaeval
literary studies, Prof. Dr. Klimentina Ivanova, turned 80. Her life has been dedicated
to research into mediaeval Slavonic manuscripts, which she herselfsays are like a time
machine that allows a return to times quite different from the present and a sharing
of the experience of the people who created the books. Klimentina Ivanova’s passion
and love for manuscripts is quite tangible both in her engaging texts accessible even
to young readers not interested in mediaeval studies, such as In the Beginning Was the
Book,
1
and in academic and expert editions like the description of manuscripts from
the collection of Mikhail Pogodin2 or the volume of the works of Clement of Ohrid.3
Her work as a researcher began in the Institute of Literature at the Bulgarian
Academy of Sciences where, even as a doctoral student, she did not only study
medieval Slavonic manuscripts, but was also involved in describing those of them
that had not yet been studied – a difficult task requiring competence in different
fields. That was when she met with the noted Russian scholar Dmitry Sergeyevich
Likhachov, with whom she discussed her ideas about hesychasm and at whose
invitation she went to Russia, where she specialized at the Old Russian Literature
Sector at the Institute of Russian Literature in St Petersburg (1968–1969). Although
short, the period she spent in Russia was full of new discoveries while she described
the manuscripts from the Pogodin collection, the pages of which proved to preserve
works by Bulgarian writers such as Clement of Ohrid and Constantine of Preslav.