From Bogoglasnik to Katavasia : the Spread of Ruthenian devotional songs among the southern Slavs = От Богогласника до Катавасии : распространение русских религиозных песен среди южных славян

Abstract

The cultural exchange between the Southern Slavs and Russia is widely attested and highly visible in high-end cultural products which can be linked to famous historical personages. Important as these age-old and uninterrupted contacts on the level of cultural elites undoubtedly have been to create a compact cultural zone of Eastern and Southern Slavs, they would by themselves probably have proved insufficient to maintain the existing cultural cohesion if they would not have been seconded by the too often invisible activities of cultural exchange below the perceptual horizon of elitist culture. Only occasionally, one will be able to take a glimpse of what was going on in terms of cultural exchange at the more mundane levels of the mass of anonymous culture-bearers, who not only helped to promulgate and put into practice elite culture, but also made their own contribution to knitting a network of common meanings and practices by transfering their own specific cultural artefacts and attitudes. A case in point is the national revival among the Southern Slavs, which would not have taken the shape it took, if it were not for the strong cultural support, which was offered by Russians, but which was also actively sought by Southern Slavs with russophile tendencies. We all know, of course, of prominent activists like Christo Botev, but there were so many more lines of cultural exchange at this period, which were maintained by legions of often uncoordinated cultural activists, whose activities and contribution it becomes the more difficult to trace and identify the further removed from our times they are. Many of them pushed forward the realignment of the Russian-South Slavic cultural sphere by introducing inconspicuous items of everyday culture, which may be expected to have been no less instrumental in bringing about cultural cohesion than any high-strung reform of one or other famous activist. One group of such inconspicuous artefacts are Ruthenian devotional songs, which from the mid 18th century onwards found their way into privately compiled and owned manuscript collections of Serbian and Bulgarian origin. The curious fact of Ruthenian songs gaining popularity among the Southern Slavs has been noticed for quite some time now (Ostojić & Ćorović 1926; Pozdneev 1963), but up to this day no effort has been made to trace the vagaries of these songs and clarify how and through which channels they became disseminated among the Southern Slavs. The present contribution is an attempt to provide an answer to these questions and to identify the milieu through which these songs became part of Serbian and Bulgarian cultural practices