From the history of literary ties between Russians and South Slavs

The mutual relations between the old Russian Literature and the old South Slavic literatures (Bulgarian and Serbian) have long been the subject of research. In this field of science, the most has been written so far by Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian scholars. The number of studies becomes even greater if we take into account the studies in general on the cultural relations between these three fraternal peoples, whose cultural development has many common features and trends. It was a natural phenomenon at the beginning of these studies to search for and indicate the influence of the South Slavic literatures on medieval Russian literature, more precisely on the oldest period of its development. Such is indeed the beginning of their relationship, but it alone does not exhaust the nature of the mutual relations between the Russian and South Slavic Literatures. Because ancient Russia not only adopted cultural values ​​from the Slavic south, but in turn it also influenced the cultural development of Bulgarians and Serbs, works of Russian literature penetrated the old Bulgarian and Serbian literature. This process has been particularly strong since the 16th century, but such an influence also existed before the 16th century, albeit in a weaker form. This statement of the problem of the Russian-Southern Slavic cultural and especially literary relations was first given by the famous Russian Slavic scientist M. N. Speransky. Presented first in his introductory lecture "Dividing the history of Russian literature into periods and the influence of Russian literature on Yugoslavia" (Русский филологический вестинк, XXXVI 1896, vol. 3-4, pp. 193-223). Yugoslav and Russian texts "Stories about the construction of the temple of Sophia of Tsaregrad". Speransky managed to present his many years of observations on this common problem in his monograph “Toward the History of the Relations between Russian and South Slavic Literatures (Russian Monuments of Southern Slavonic Literature), published in 1923 in the Proceedings of the Department of Russian Language and Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (vol. XXVI, pp. 143-206). Here the author asserts: “The number of these facts - Russian monuments of one or another type of the indicated works that were in use among the South Slavs, the participation of Russian writers in the life of South Slavic literatures - although not as large as the number of South Slavic monuments in the practice of writing from the old period, is still quite significant, so that the more general question of the role of Russian literature in South Slavic literature can now be raised, just as we at the time raised and resolved the question of the role of South Slavic literature in Russian (p. 12). This correct methodological indication of Speransky is embedded in the scientific literature after him; he develops this thought in his more recent works, prepared for publication, but remained unpublished. Speransky's numerous studies rightly outline him as a scientist who not only knows best the mutual connections between the old literatures of Bulgarians, Russians and Serbs, but also who has made the greatest contribution to revealing the history of these connections. It is this assessment, perhaps, along with the observation that the problem of Russian-Slavic connections in the 11th-17th centuries, which is of great scientific interest, still needs development, that served as an occasion to publish some of Speransky's studies that remained in his archive.