Даўнія спісы беларускае Энеіды

Abstract

The article analyzes recently discovered manuscripts of the poem Aeneid. First of all, we touch on individual issues related to the expansion of the famous Belarusian work in Vitebsk region and Smolensk region. Recently discovered by V. Martysyuk “ancient lists” (Ya. Karsky) allow to make a number of significant clarifications regarding the origin and attribution of the poem. In our opinion, the work appeared in the era of the formation of the national identity of the East Slavic ethnic groups, when representatives of the then elites of society tried to awaken the national feelings of their compatriots with the help of literary texts. The author of the Belarusian Aeneid is a poet of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His work was preserved only in reproductions in the Mogilev–Vitebsk intelligentsia in the 1830s (I. Mankowski, the Myslowski brothers and others), as well as in the Smolensk entourage of V. Ravinski. What has come down to our time is the remains of an ancient travesty of an unknown Belarusian author. The study draws attention to the distinctive features of Myslovsky’s manuscript, executed in Belarusian Latin. The analysis of manuscripts of the middle of the 19th century allowed us to state that the work was written in an Odic stanza, which was largely lost due to the oral tradition (four correct decimas have survived). The absence of “tsokannya” (a characteristic feature of the Belarusian language of the Smolensk region) in the manuscript, which comes from the house of the Ravinskis, reduces the attribution of the work accepted in Belarusian literary studies to a marginal one.