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Article: Russian Literature and Language
- Article from:
- Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
- Author:
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RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.
The category of "old Russian literature," however enduring, constitutes little more than an omnibus retrospection of almost all prose native to Rus' and written in Slavonic or Russian prior to the eighteenth century. It marks the mythic boundary between antiquity and modernity in Russian culture and includes heroic tales and epics, compendia of saints' lives (
chet'i minei, prologi,
etc.), chronicles
(letopisi),
general Christian histories
(khronografy),
and numerous individual codices
(sborniki)
compiled from a wide range of materials, usually by anonymous monastic bookmen.
From the end of the twentieth century ...