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The man who did the most to give Russian
literature a new style was Pakhomii Logofet, also known a Pakhomii the Serb.
Logofet was not his family name. It is most probably a nickname given to him
because of his talents. In Byzantium "Logofet" was the name for the
prime minister. He quit his native land and went to Russia around 1430, where
he lived for over fifty years. During this long. this long and fruitful period
Pakhomii produced over forty works, mostly "Zhitia," in which he
narrated the life and deeds of Russian saints, church or state dignitaries,
among them Saints Sergius, Aleksei and Cyril (Belozersky), Prince Michael
Chernigovskii, and others. Pakhomii traveled extensively through Russia, and
lived in various localities, collecting documentation or interviewing those
whom he was to write about or who lived or knew something about these
personalities. Not everything in his works corresponded to historical fact, but
Pakhomii should neither be blamed for these lapses, nor for his sometimes
exaggerated poetic and panegyric style which delighted the Russians so much.
They did not wait long to embrace Pakhomii's style which, despite so many
"Serbisms," had tremendously influenced the development of Russian
literature.
The very first contacts with the west European literature were made when the
novel about Alexander the Great was translated into Russian. The novel appeared
under the name of "Serbian Alexandria" just because it was translated
from the Serbian text. Although the original was written in Greek and in the
typical Byzantine style, the translation was softened by stressing the love
affairs between Alexander and Roxanna and by showing Alexander more as a
western "Ritsar') knight, a Christianized and ideal type of leader.
Serbian Alexandria was what we would call the best seller for many years and
remained one of the most popular books to be read even in the 17th century.
Another two popular translations which also reached Russia via Serbia were the
oriental stories: The Tale of an Indian Kingdom and The Twelve Dreams of
Cha-Hai-Shi. The fact that the Twelve Dreams which talks much about the
disappearance and destruction of a country, reached Russia at the time when she
was devastated and enslaved by the Mongols, made this book very popular.
Ordinary people took it as granted that it was actually written about Russia
and this new version reached orally the remotest villages. Its impact was
tremendous and many later popular Russian tales were modeled on the Twelve
dreams of Cha-Hai-Shi.
Despite all these efforts the Russians were not a peoples to be so easily
influenced. Most of the acts and official correspondence that sultans sent to
Moscow"s grand dukes were written in Serbian, which became for over a
century the second most important language in the Turkish Empire, pushing Greek
to third place despite a very large Greek minority.
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