The essays gathered in this volume are devoted to different aspects of the reception of Humanism and the Renaissance in Slavic countries. They mark the beginning of a dialogue among scholars of different Slavic languages and literatures, in search of the ways in which the entire Slavic world – albeit to varying degrees – has participated from the very beginning in European cultural transformations, and not simply by sharing some characteristics of the new currents, but by building a new identity in harmony with the changes of the time. By overcoming the dominant paradigm, which sees all cultural manifestations as part of a separate ‘national’ linguistic, literary and artistic canon, this volume is intended to be the first step in outlining some ideas and suggestions in view of the creation, in the future, of an atlas that maps the relevance of Humanism and the Renaissance in the Slavic world.

This volume, edited by scholars from diverse backgrounds, stems from the original convergence of various geo-cultural viewpoints on the reception of East Slavic cultures and literatures (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian, Soviet): European viewpoints are juxtaposed with those of the Japanese, Chinese, Israeli areas. The volume offers a broad look at the history of the perception of these literatures in Europe, Italy, and East Asia (with special attention to their reception in Japan and China). Contacts, influences, meditations, and difficulties in the perception of literary and cultural phenomena are the subject of original comparative analyses. The vitality with which Slavic-Eastern literatures have found echoes in very distant environments, but also the evolution of the self-perception of Ukrainian literature over time, are among the topics.

This book contains a synchronic grammar and grammatical dictionaries of Old Church Slavic. The framework is based on a substantially revised version of the classical descriptive methodology. The intent is to improve on the classical monographs by Vaillant, Diels, Lunt in the direction of utmost completeness, explicitness, and deliberate consistency between the grammatical structure, the corpus of texts (limited to the seven oldest OCS manuscripts), and the dictionaries. The grammar is intended as a set of rules that provide a complete characterization of any OCS wordform. Peculiarities in the language of each source are described as systematic departures from canonical OCS, a conventional constructed variety primarily described by the grammar. The book is addressed to linguists working in Slavic studies, as well as to specialists in the general theory of grammar, especially phonologists and morphologists.

Sequel to: On medieval and Renaissance slavic writing, and Essays in early Slavic civilization.