Slavonic Translation Research Articles

The Soterios Project revisited: status quaestionis and the future edition

AbstractNot until 2006 could the scholarly community welcome the first critical edition of the 103 Quaestiones et responsiones ascribed to Anastasius of Sinai (CPG 7746; M. Richard / J.A. Munitiz. CCSG, 59). However, this publication did not solve all topics surrounding Anastasius’s work, because 21 Greek manuscripts contain still another florilegium, the so-called Σωτήριος dating from before 900 AD, whose core is formed by 88 ἐρωταποκρίσεις. Between 914 and 927 a Slavonic translation thereof was made which has been preserved in the so-called Изборник, a codex from 1073. The first and sole critical edition of the Slavonic text was made by O.M. Bodjanskij (1845). The 900th anniversary of the Изборник in 1973 incited the interest in the Greek original. Eventually, in 1996 the decision to edit the Greek text was made, mainly under the impetus of Prof. em. Dr F. J. Thomson. This edition, originally started by Dr D.Tj. Sieswerda, will be continued by the author of this article in close cooperation with Dr L. Sels, specialist in Church Slavonic.

Библейская история в Лѣтовнике: проблема источников

Publication of 9 fragments added to the exposition of the biblical history in Lětovnik, the South Slavic translation of George the Monk. They appear to be translated from the original Greek and stem from the same source that was used by George himself in the 9th century and independently by Symeon Magister in the 10th. This supposed work combined biblical narrative with etiological legends as well as folklore elements, including a version of the well-known story about the child Mo-ses and the Pharaoh.

Славянский перевод апокрифа "Didascalia Domini / Откровение святым апостолaм" (BHG 812a-e)

The New Testament apocryphon Didascalia Domini is one of the least known. Its original was written in Greek, according to François Nau, at the end of the 7th century. Relatively early it was translated into Old Church Slavonic. At present five copies of this translation are known, stretching from the 13th to the 15th century. Three of them belong to the Serbian redaction, one each to the Russian (East Slavic) and to the Middle Bulgarian redaction. According to Michail Nestorovič Speranskij the translation originated in Bulgaria. The Greek copies, the oldest of which stems from the 11th century, have divergent final chapters. Moreover, the Slavic translation has yet another ending not corresponding to any of the Greek texts. The textological analysis of the five Slavic copies makes it possible to get an idea of their mutual relationship. On the basis of the linguistic archaisms of the text one can surmise that the translation has been made in Eastern Bulgaria during the 11th century. At the end of the paper there is a critical edition of the Slavic text.

Преславизмы в апокрифических Вопросах апостола "Варфоломея"

Paper deals with the lexical analysis of the Old Church Slavonic version of the Apocryphal Questions of Bartholomew, a literary monument written most likely in Greek in the 3rd century. The analysis shows that the Slavonic version contains not only lexical elements typical for the Preslav redaction, but also some archaic figures. This leads to the conclusion, that the primal Old Church Slavonic translation may be made in Bulgaria in the 10th century. There are two possibilities of a more exact dating. The text may have been translated in the early 10th century when the lexical elements of the Preslav redaction weren’t strictly used yet and still there occurred many archaic figures. The second possibility is that the translation was made later in the 10th century in one of the distant centers of the Preslav literary school, in which a specific tradition in using Preslav and archaic lexical elements was held. However, a further lexical and language analysis is needed for the confirmation of the stated dating.

The Testament of Ivan the Terrible

Cornelia Soldat, Das Testament Ivans des Schrecklichen von 1572: Eine kritische Aufklarung/A Textual Analysis of the 1572 Will of Ivan the Terrible. Foreword by Russell E. Martin, vi + 510 pp. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2013. ISBN-13 978-0779906932. $84.95. The Testament of Ivan the Terrible is not one of the major sources on the history of the reign, if for no other reason than its lack of impact on the succession. Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich's death rendered it irrelevant. No interpretation of Ivan's reign will stand or fall by this document, though it does contain a confession of the testator's sins and a detailed disposition of the lands and property of the tsar. Both add a few details to the story of the oprichnina. To complicate matters, the Testament survives only in a very late copy. Not surprisingly, historians have rarely used it, though Gunter Stokl devoted a short book to it. (1) Cornelia Soldat is convinced that the text we have is a creation of the early 19th century, the work of the antiquarian Malinovskii. The surviving document, for which she provides some facsimiles, is in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA) fond 197, Malinovskii's papers, in an early 19th-century copy with notations by A. Kurbatov(a) dated 1739. Soldat reviews the attempts to find a date for the document, which S. B. Veselovskii on internal evidence dated to 1572. Attempts to find other dates from the 1570s on the basis of the same internal evidence, those of R. G. Skrynnikov and L. Iurganov, she shows to be speculative at best. (2) Eler own methodology, however, is not particularly consistent. Soldat opens with a discussion of Edward Keenan's attempt to challenge the dating of the Kurbskii-Ivan Groznyi exchange (12-20), an attempt based on the assumption of a fixed authorial text, authentic or falsified, an assumption that she seems to share. (3) Yet she then appears to follow Riccardo Picchio and Harvey Goldblatt's conception of Orthodox Slavic literature in general (222-29), which devoted considerable attention to the existence of an tradition for many literary monuments. In their view, Orthodox Slavic scribes added, deleted, and altered texts as they saw fit, and the presence of later textual elements tells us nothing about the date of original composition. In her analysis of the Testament, Soldat follows the Keenan approach, rather unexpectedly since she accepts the authenticity of a part of the Kurbskii-Ivan texts (I owe this point to Charles Halperin). From Picchio and Goldblatt she has taken their auxiliary notion of the biblical thematic clue, a scriptural quotation that begins many Old Slavic compositions and sets the direction for the text. (4) Such a clue is absent in the Testament. Soldat regards this absence as proof that the text is a forgery, though Picchio and Goldblatt never argued that the clue was invariably present. The two approaches cannot be reconciled: if Picchio is right about the open tradition, then trying to date texts based on the presumed dates of particular passages is not fruitful. Soldat's argument rests on three textual similarities that purportedly indicate a later date than the 16th century. One comes from Ihor Sevcenko, who noted in 1974 that an anonymous quotation in the Testament comes from paragraph 21 of the work of the sixth-century Byzantine deacon Agapetus. (5) Sevcenko believed that the version that occurs in the Testament had to come from Peter Mohyla's 1628 Kiev edition of the text, since as a Byzantinist he assumed that Old Russian texts were, like Byzantine texts, products of a closed tradition. There are at least two Slavic translations of Agapetus, one as early as the 11th century and another found in 16th-century manuscripts, both most easily available in Lobakova's study and publication of the Life of Metropolitan Filipp. (6) In the Testament and the Mohyla text the quotation is that the tsar should Bogu ne gnevatisia, i iako smertnu ne voznositisia; in the two Slavic versions of Agapetus we read smertnu ne voznositisia, i aky Bogu ne gnevatisia (329), a simple reversal of the order of phrases. …

Medieval Churches in Shushica Valley (South Albania) and the Slavonic Bishopric of St. Clement of Ohrid

There were numerous Slavic settlements in South Albania (including the valley of Shushica River) at the end of the 1st millennium. In the second half of the 9th c. a significant part of this region was conquered by the 1st Bulgarian Kingdom, and after 870 there were established ecclesiastical dioceses which became part of the church organization of the Kingdom. Slavonic ecclesiastical schools were established in that region as well, after 886 in the context of the so-called “Slavonic project” of the Bulgarian prince, Boris. St. Clement took an active part in this project. It was South Albania where the first Slavonic bishopric in Southeast Europe was founded, in 893, when St. Clement was appointed bishop. His bishopric was organized according ethnic principle, so that St. Clement was called “the bishop of Slavonic people.” The center of Clement’s bishopric was in Velica, which is related to the modern settlement Velçë in the Shushica valley. There are ruins of a cross-in-square church with a narthex in the Asomat region, which is located near Velica. The church was built at the end of the 9th‒beginning of the 10th cc. and dedicated to the Archangel Michael. The plan of this church is identical with that of the so-called “pronaos” of the church built by St. Clement in his Ohrid monastery. In St. Clement’s bishopric Church Slavonic was used as a liturgical language. For that purpose, a set of Byzantine liturgical books was translated from Greek into Church Slavonic, and Clement took an active part in this process. Liturgical pecularities of these books partially observed in Greek manuscripts of South Italian provenance testify to the hypothesis that Greek sources of the earliest Church Slavonic translations belonged to liturgical tradition of Epirus, similar to those of South Italy. This also proves the location of St. Clement’s bishopric in the valley of the Shushica River.

The Historical Erudition of the Compiler of “The Word on the Council of Chalcedon”

The article focuses on a literary monument presenting Christological debates of the 5th century and the circumstances of the Fourth Ecumenical Council (the Council of Chalcedon), its sources, and the history of dissemination in the Slavic manuscript tradition. It introduces a list of forty-two East Slavic manuscripts of the 15‒17th centuries, including The Word on the Council of Chalcedon, a work on the history of Christianity and its dogmas. In thirty-nine of the manuscript copies, the literary monument serves as an introduction to the Slavic translation of Pope Leo the Great’s Tome to Archbishop Flavian of Constantinople (451), confirmed by the Fourth Ecumenical Council as an essential document of dogma. Judging by the provenance of the manuscript sources, in the 15‒17th centuries The Word on the Council of Chalcedon, along with the translation of Pope Leo’s Tome, were widely read and copied in the monasteries and churches of Moscow, Volok Lamsky, Pereyaslavl-Ryazansky, and Novgorod Veliky, as well as those of northern Russia. As its first researcher, O. M. Bodianskii, showed in 1848, the Slavic translation of the pope’s Tome was made from Greek by the monk Feodosii (“Theodosius the Greek”) in the 12th century. However, the attribution of The Word on the Council of Chalcedon to the same translator remains to be proved. The present work shows that the anonymous compiler of The Word on the Council of Chalcedon was well aware of the church history of the 5th century, remembering many historical details he would most probably have come across in Greek rather than in translated Slavic sources. On the other hand, several historical mistakes made by the compiler suggest that he lacked the texts necessary to verify the facts and had to rely on his memory, which occasionally failed him. Nevertheless, despite occasional factual errors and a compilative narrative structure, The Word on the Council of Chalcedon is in some ways more informative than many Byzantine chronicles.

Some Remarks on the Anathemas in the "Palaea Historica"

The original text of the Palaea Historica, a Byzantine narration based on the initial books of the Old Testament, contains two anathema directed against the Phundagiagitae (adherents of a medieval neo-Manichaean heresy), accusing them of the belief in Cain’s being the son of Satanael and in that the union of Adam and Eve occurred in the Garden of Eden already. The analysis of the relevant passages and their counterparts in two Slavic translations of the Palaea, as well as certain other Byzantine and Slavic medieval texts with related content, contributes to illuminating the circumstances under which the Slavic translations arose. The paper also discusses the very term Phundagiagitae (practically absent from all other Slavic sources) and addresses the issue of the supposed non-canonicity of the Palaea.

The Novgorod Antiphonal Psalters: Their Orthographical Peculiarities and Textological Significance

The thirteenth-century Novgorod antiphonal psalters were written for liturgical use by two choirs or readers in alternation; consequently each of them contains an incomplete version of the psalms, and they complement each other only in part. Nevertheless, they are of interest both in relation to the development of Church Slavonic norms of orthography and orthoepy as well as from a textological standpoint. In one of them, the older of the two, the infiltration of dialect pronunciation into the Novgorod variety of Church Slavonic can be detected (a list of the various different examples of cokan′e in this manuscript is provided in the appendix). On the basis of an analysis of the variant readings found in both manuscripts or attested in either of the two sources, it is demonstrated that they belong to Redaction II of the Church Slavonic translation of the psalms, and that they are important witnesses to the dissemination of this redaction among the East Slavs up to the end of the thirteenth century.

The Martyrdom of Polycarp in Church Slavonic: An Evidence of the Academic Menologion

Abstract This contribution deals with a significant gap in the studia Polycarpiana. It focuses, in particular, on a Church Slavonic translation of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, one of the earliest of Christian martyria. This versional evidence has not been published until now and, consequently, not taken into account by any of the previous editions of the Martyrdom. The present article offers a collation and a detailed analysis of the earliest available copy of the translation. Eventually it shows that the Slavonic version may provide an independent (from the extant Greek manuscripts) testimony to the text of the Martyrdom and as such is of significant text-critical value.

Legatum iuridicum Sancti Methodii et les Balkans

Methodius’s translation of the John the Scholastic’s Synagogue of 50 titles, and the very archaic Slavonic compilation « Law for judging people », based upon the 17th chapter of the Byzantine Eclogue are representative of the legal interests of the Panonian archbishop. These two works illustrate the process of adoption of Byzantine civil and canon law by the Slavs in the third quarter the 9th century. Methodius’ translation is one of the most important Slavonic translations. It attests to the richness of the Slavonic literary language, and reveals the definite influence of the Moravian literary school in the reception of the Byzantine Law. The authorship of the « Law of judging people » may be inferred from the reference to the ecclesiastical supremacy of the author and to his great authority in legal matters. The article draws the attention to the passages on the right of asylum and to the use of Codex Theodosianus, XVI, 10, 23 as a very probable source for the first article of this work. These two legal sources attest to the importance of missionary activity among neophytes with clearness of meaning and abridged form of the content. They show the significance of law and legal culture in the early development of Slavonic literature in Great Moravia.

Zitieto na sv. Grigorij dekapolit v r''kopis ms. sl. 307 ot Rum''nskata Akademija

The article contains some preliminary observations on a hagiographical text, discovered in a Slavic manuscript from the collection of the Library of Romanian Academy in Bucharest (Ms. sl. 307). The manuscript that was in very poor physical conditions contains a Triodion and Pentecostarion of Nicephorus Kallistos Xantopoulos with full text of the Synodicon of Orthodoxy. After it we find a vita of St Gregory Decapolita. The text is extremely damaged and almost illegible except the title but it is clear that this is not the only known short vita of the holy man. My work hypothesis is that this text could be the only known copy of the Slavic translation of the Vita of St Gregory Decapolita by Ignatius the Deacon.

“An Early Church Slavonic Translation of the Martyrdom of St Polycarp”: Three Decades Later

Le présent article s’attache à la traduction en vieux-slave du Martyre de Polycarpe. Cette version demeure quasiment inconnue de la communauté scientifique, en partie à cause de l’accessibilité restreinte des manuscrits qui la contiennent mais aussi en raison du manque de connaissance du vieux-slave. Prenant pour point de départ une courte note publiée sur ce sujet en 1979, l’article rectifie d’abord plusieurs erreurs qui s’étaient glissées dans cette contribution, par ailleurs très utile. Il considère ensuite un manuscrit en slavon, resté inaccessible aux auteurs de la note en question. Enfin, il met en lumière la valeur textuelle de cette version en vieux-slave, qui s’avère indépendante des manuscrits grecs disponibles du Martyre de Polycarpe (BHG 1556-1560, 1560a, 1560b, 1560c).

Gotite III: Studies on Gothic Cultural and Historical Heritage in the Bulgarian Lands (2007–2010) ed. by Rossen Milev (review)

Reviewed by: Gotite III: Studies on Gothic Cultural and Historical Heritage in the Bulgarian Lands (2007–2010) ed. by Rossen Milev Alexander Moshev Gotite III: Studies on Gothic Cultural and Historical Heritage in the Bulgarian Lands (2007–2010)Rossen Milev, ed. Sofia: Balkanmedia, 2011. Pp. 352 + 8 color plates. ISSN 0861–5047 Gotite (“The Goths”) III is a collection of articles dedicated to the 1,700th anniversary (according to tradition) of the Gothic bishop Wulfila. This third volume of the series presents studies from the Gothic Research Project (2002–11) along with reports from the participants in a series of academic conferences: Gothic Script Development and Transculturality in Late Antiquity (2007), The Goths and Their History, by Herwig Wolfram [in Bulgarian] (2008), and The Gothic Cultural and Historical Heritage in Novae and the Roman World (2009). In addition, the volume contains some recent [End Page 405] research on the cult of Saint Menas in modern Bulgarian lands and articles from Russian scholars that relate to the history and culture of the Goths. A total of thirty-three scholars from seven countries took part in this ambitious project. Given that the task of making a really comprehensive review of this collection is almost impossible, the focus here will be predominantly on the articles that might be of interest to scholars and researchers of Late Antiquity. The late Bulgarian archaeologist and epigraphist Vassilka Gerasimova (“The Gothic Princesses”) examines a passage in the Historia Augusta referring to the attitude of the emperor Probus to Hunila, the wife of Bonosus, and emphasizing her noble Gothic origin. The emperor Aurelian gave Hunila in marriage to the famous Roman officer Bonosus, who later became one of the pretenders for the imperial throne. The ulterior motive behind this marriage was espionage: the emperor hoped to gain insights into Gothic plans and intentions through Hunila. Axinia Djourova and Vassya Velinova (“Gothic Saints in Bulgarian Medieval Literature”) explore the data about the Gothic saints contained in the Slavonic Prologue in Verses. Their conclusion is that the vitae of the Gothic saints penetrated medieval Bulgaria through Byzantine liturgical texts, whereas the Slavonic translations (mostly into Bulgarian and Serbian) often preserve much older versions. Roumen Ivanov (“Germans and Celts in the Roman Army of Moesia”) analyzes several inscriptions containing Celtic and German names from the Roman province of Moesia in order to discover what information they offer regarding the presence of Gallic and Germanic cohorts in the Moesian provinces (later Moesia Superior and Moesia Inferior) between 12 and 86 ce. He summarizes the existing inscriptions with Gallic and Germanic names in Bulgarian museums. For example, one of the inscriptions has the name of a certain Sulpicius Massa, “natione Tunger.” Bulgarian linguist Ivan Dobrev (“Gothic Traces in Bulgarian Christianity”) reviews and coordinates the scanty and controversial data relating to the presence of the Goths north of the Balkan range after the start of the Hunnic invasion (ca. 376 ce). The sources present two different ethnonyms, Goths and Getae, Dobrev considers whether the Bulgarian personal name Geto, corresponding to the name Getae, may be the only surviving Gothic linguistic trace in Bulgarian. Katya Melamed (“Gothic Fortress of Sadovec, Pleven Region, Northern Bulgaria”) summarizes the results of archaeological excavations initiated in 1934 by Ivan Velkov. Sadovsko kale and Golemanovo kale are two fortresses constructed opposite each other on the banks of the river Vit near the village of Sadovec. Most probably these were inhabited in the sixth century by federate Goths who perished in a fire at the end of same century. The latest coins found in Golemanovo kale and in other fortresses in the region belong to the time of the emperor Maurice and date from 595–96. Archaeologists link the end of the fortresses with the Avar invasion of 597. Ivan Voykov (“The Goths and the City of Abritus”) publishes a recently found coarse clay vessel with a Greek inscription from the ancient city of Abritus (near Razgrad, in northeastern Bulgaria). The inscription can be translated [End Page 406] as “Holy Mother of God, bless this work of Tot.” Voykov concludes that the name Tot likely follows the phonetic characteristics of Gothic language (the name Totila was derived from it...

Early Old Bulgarian Layer in the Office Menaion of Rostov Provenance of the 13th c. (RNL, F.p.I 37)

The article is dedicated to the linguistic and textual peculiarities of the Festal Menaion F. p. I 37 preserved in Russian National Library (S.-Petersburg) and dated to the beginning of the 13th c. Numerous linguistic features of the manuscript testify to Old West Bulgarian (Old Macedonian) literary usage of the end of the 9th — beginning of the 10th c., on the basis of which the earliest Slavonic hymnographical translations were performed. Despite of such an archaic linguistic and textual layers observed in the manuscript, its calendar, structure and content were influenced by the monastic rite based on the Typicon of Patriarch Alexius the Studite which had been translated and introduced in Kievan Rus' at the second half of the 11th c. The linguistic features of the text version as attested by F. p. I 37 have been compared to the manuscripts testifying to the Alexius the Studite text version. It has been affirmed that adaptation of the Old Bulgarian hymnographic heritage in Kievan Rus' followed the unstable trend to neglect the most remarkable South (and South West) Slavonic lingustic features and aimed at establishing “neutral” over dialectal Church Slavonic literary usage. The significant part of the article contains the edition of the earliest Slavonic, i.e., Old Bulgarian, translation of the Greek kanon Τάφῳ παρθενοδόχῳ dedicated to the Dormition of the Theotokos. The earliest Slavonic translation of this kanon has been preserved in the unique available manuscript, that is F. p. I 37. The publication of the Slavonic translation is supplied with the first critical edition of the Greek source performed on the basis of twelve manuscripts, the linguistic commentary of the Slavonic text, and remarks concerning some metric peculiarities of the original Greek version.

The Slavic Adventures of Greek Kohath: On the Origin of the Title of the Old Russian Book of Kaaf

The article deals with the origin of the title of the Slavonic-Russian Book of Kaaf which has been still attributed to a hazy Hebrew source. In fact, the name of the second son of Levi, Kohath (קהת), appeared in the title absolutely accidentally, and the title came from from the Greek gloss Καὰθ ἐκκλησιαστής included in the explanatory onomasticons of Biblical names. This gloss is, perhaps, connected with the corresponding passage in the Testament of Levi from the apocryphal Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Moreover, the article contains comparative data of the spelling of Kohath’s name in Church Slavonic translations of the Pentateuch and in the Palaea Interpretata, in the latter not only in the Testament of Levi, but also in its main text. The adventures of the word Кааѳъ / Каафъ in medieval Russian writing turn out to be entirely literary, and not connected with any hypothetical verbal tradition, which might have proved to have been a tempting explanation for this word.

A Lost Byzantine Chronicle in Slavic Translation

Until recently the so-called Slavic version of the Chronicle of George Synkellos has not been paid proper attention. The attribution of Vasilij Istrin who in the beginning of the 20th c identified the Slavic text as a translation from an abridged redaction of the Byzantine chronicle, was thoroughly accepted by the Slavic studies researchers. As a result, no great importance was attached to the Slavic text preserved in 5 copies from 15-16 cc (of which Istrin knew only 4) because of the closed tradition of the copies and their relatively late date. My research linked to the publication of this unedited Slavic chronicle led me to the conclusion that the text referred to as the Slavic version of Synkellos by both Istrin and his successors is not a translation of the Greek Synkellos but rather a chronographic compilation. It was demonstrated that the first part of the compilation narrating the years from the Creation up to the Resurrection of Christ represents a vast excerpt from the Julius Africanus’s Christian chronography and only the second part covering the years after the Resurrection up to the foundation of Constantinople contains the respective text of Synkellos plus a couple of pages from the Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor that was not translated in OCS. Both the discovery of a non fragmented text of Africanus and the conclusion that the Slavic translation was done during the 1st Bulgarian Kingdom in 10th c raise a series of problems my contribution touches upon.

Predicative possession in Medieval Slavic Bible translations Predicative Possession in Early Biblical Slavic

Late Proto-Slavic (LPS) had an inventory of three constructions for expressing predicative possession. Using the earliest Slavic Bible translations from Old Church Slavic (OCS), and to a lesser degree Old Czech, a number of conclusions can be drawn about the status of predicative possession for LPS. The verb iměti ‘have’ was the most frequent and least syntactically and semantically restricted predicative possessive construction (PPC). Existential PPCs with a dative possessor appear primarily with kinship relations, abstract possessums, and in a number of other fixed construction types; existential PPCs with the possessor in an u + genitive prepositional phrase primarily appear with concrete and countable possessums. Both existential PPCs call for an animate, most often pronominal, possessor. The u + genitive was the rarest type of PPC in LPS, though it had undoubtedly grammaticalized as a PPC.

Indianski mudroznanac (1825) and Indianzki mudroznanecz (1833) in a very successful European literary myistification

The paper deals with two Croatian translations of the so-called "Lord Chesterfield": Slavonian Indianski mudroznanac (1825) by Martin Pustaić-Marijan Jaić and Kajkavian Indianzki mudroznanecz (1833) by Josip Marić. Both translations are part of a wider European phenomenon of translations, imitations and adaptations of "Indian philosopher" whose authorship until recently was attributed to Lord Chesterfield. The real author,however, was the English writer and publisher Robert Dodsley, and the book was The Oeconomy of Human Life (1750/1751), which by the end of the eighteenth century had been translated into several European languages and had appeared in about 200 editions. It was a true literary mystification, so successful that the question of authorship was resolved only recently. The purpose of this paper is therefore: 1. to deal with the question of authorship, the English original as well as the models for the Croatian translations; 2. to determine the question of the structure and content of the Croatian translations, compared with the original and the models; 3. to frame the social and literary context of the emergence and diffusion of the original and the Croatian translations. The methodology used: the analysis and comparison of the original, of the models of the Croatian editions and the analysis of the Croatian translations themselves; comparison with the other South Slavic translations; consideration of the Croatian and other South Slavic interpretations. The most important results and conclusions: the establishment of the author, the original and the models of Slavonian and Kajkavian translations (and the other South Slavic translations since this was a broader phenomenon); the definition of the social and literary context: instead of the introduction of Eastern philosophy into Croatian culture; the Slavonian and the Kajkavian translations represent yet another participation of Croatia in the European literary trends by simply being part of this successful literary mystification.

Second Enoch and The Tale of the Blessed Zerubbabel: Two Different Examples of Old Testament Slavonic Apocrypha

This article examines two Old Testament Slavic Apocrypha— Second Enoch, and the much less well known The Tale of the Blessed Zerubbabel—each of which has its own particular origin. While 2 Enoch has been studied for over 150 years, many questions concerning its origin are still under discussion. This article discusses the relation among the Slavic manuscripts to these writings. This article proposes that The Tale of the Blessed Zerubbabel deserves special attention because it is a rare case of direct translation from Hebrew into Slavic. This is especially interesting since the possibility of early Slavic translations from Hebrew (before the fifteenth century) is frequently denied by some scholars.