Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštijos rusėniškoji literatūra kaip kultūrinės integracijos modelis

Santrauka

The paper presents a survey of translations made from different languages (Old Church Slavonic, Hebrew, Czech, Polish, Latin, and Greek) into Ruthenian in both the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland. The survey shows a large variety of literary genres and individual texts which have been translated into Ruthenian from different – Western and Eastern – sources. The summary translation activities produced by Ruthenians range them at the first place in the region, so that the Ruthenian literature may be viewed as a vivid model of cultural integration within the Grand Duchy of Lithuanian and beyond. It should be noted that Ruthenian started functioning as a literary language as early as in the middle of the 15th century, e.g. much earlier than it is commonly believed to have emerged. Already a that date the earliest translations from at least three languages – Hebrew, Czech, and Latin – were produced. The paper also discusses the possibility of a general definition of the multilingual Ruthenian literature (as opposed to the multilingual Lithuanian literature) based on formal criteria such as geography, faith, language, and script. The last criterion, while far from being ideal, turned to be most suitable, since the Cyrillic script (which was considered emblematic by the Ruthenian themselves) has been normally applied to both Old Church Slavonic and Ruthenian – the two main literary languages of the Ruthenian people (who did use, but to a lesser extent, also Latin and especially Polish).