A Note on Serendipity
Jan Louis Perkowski
One of the delights provided by archival research is the unexpected discovery of something fascinating but totally unrelated to one's original quest. While still a graduate student I developed the art of creative browsing quite early on. Never mind that work avoidance may have been my prime motivation. In those days the stacks of large research libraries, such as the one available to me, were arranged by subject according to the Dewey decimal system. The later switch to numerical order with no regard to content greatly reduces one's opportunity for serendipitous finds. Nevertheless over the years I have happened upon such finds and would like to share a few with you. Looking for a thesis or an article topic? You need look no further. The following constitutes a sampling of several of these unexplored research opportunities plus the outlines of a strategy to find and utilize more.
Some years ago I embarked on a research trip to the numismatic section of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. [cf. "More on the Grand Duke Georgij Mixailovich and his Collection," Journal of the Russian Numismatic Society, No. 16, Alexandria, 1984, 31 - 38]. My goal was to study their collection of Peter the Great award medals. While there I inquired about the whereabouts of an unpublished catalogue manuscript which allegedly had been ready for publication just when the Russian Revolution broke out - literally there at the gates of the Winter Palace. I.G. Spassky, the senior curator of numismatics, told me that he found most of the text some time after the Revolution heaped in a corner on the floor of a hall closet. He swept up the loose folded foolscap sheets and stored them in a shoe box, which he produced for my perusal. As I sorted through the folded sheets I noted a curious pattern of missing blank sections. If the scribe had written only on the top of the first half of the folded sheet, the back half would be missing. If only half of the second part had been used, then only the unused half would be missing. And so it went with great consistency. When I brought this discovery to Spassky's attention, he informed me that there was such an acute paper shortage right after the Revolution that men were assigned to cut out all blank sections from existing documents for future use, I assume for writing. However pruned, Spassky's serendipitous find was rescued and held for my perusal decades later.
Among other numismatic manuscripts found in the Hermitage Library MS. #68608, acquired in 1869 but dating from 1736/1737, is of potential interest to Slavic linguists. Although I.A. Shlatter is written on the fly leaf, he is not the author, who remains unknown. The text is entitled Risovanie raznyx" medalej i kurioznyx" manet", kotorye delany byli dlja triumfov", radostej i pechalej = Drawings of Various Medals and Curious Coins, Which Were Made for Triumphs, Joys and Sorrows. It consists of 44 sheets of Dutch paper on which are sketched the medals with designations in Russian and German. Though this manuscript has never been published, Le Clerque apparently printed the illustrations without attribution. My guess is that the manuscript was not written by a Russian. Perhaps this is why an accent mark is written over every stressed vowel. Although it is not unusual for Church Slavonic texts to be stressed, one has to suspect the influence of prescriptivism on them. A stressed Russian text written by a foreigner, however, is an interesting source for an inquiry into the history of Russian accentuation.
Last year I spent a portion of my sabbatical leave in Rome searching for missionary correspondence from the Balkans during the Ottoman era in hopes of finding mention of Slavic folk customs [cf. "New Light on the Origins of Bulgaria's Catholics and Muslims," Religion, State, and Society, 22(1) Oxford, 1994, 103 - 08]. Most of the letters which I found were in Italian and Latin, but a few were also in various dialects of seventeenth - nineteenth century South Slavic. In other genres there are even earlier texts.
The letters are found primarily in the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide [= The Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith], which is located next to the Spanish Steps. Luckily there are available two published sources which give some idea of what the archives contain:
Kowalsky OMI, N. and J. Metzler OMI. Inventory of the Historical Archives of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. Roma: Pontificia Universitas Urbaniana, 1988.
Jachov, Marko. Le Missioni Cattoliche nei Balcani Durante la Guerra di Candia (1645 - 1669) [= Catholic Missions in the Balkans During the War of Candia (1645 - 1669)]. Vols. I & II. Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1992.
The following two brief excerpts are taken from Jachov's collection. The first is from a letter written by Epifanie, Metropolitan of Dalmatia, on November 6, 1648.
Mi xotiaxmo svoim" zhivotom" doiti i padnuti prid noge vashe svitlosti kako se bixmo obetali poshtovanomu ocu ... buduci vrime srida zime imajuci bolest" u nogax", i pake imajuchi osam"deset" leta vozrasta ...
[original in Cyrillic]Throughout our life we have wanted to come and prostrate ourself at your holiness's feet as we would have pledged to the Honored Father ... it being mid winter and being infirm in the legs, and moreover being eighty years of age ...
The second is from a letter written by Metropolitan Jeftimije to Pope Innocent X on December 1, 1653:
... nego se v" sie vreme ni priluchi s v" nashej zemli, imal est" povelenie ot cesara j poshal e v" rusiskuju zemlju ...
[original in Cyrillic]... but at that time he did not happen to be in our land, he was commanded by the Czar and went to the Russian land ...
The former would be of particular interest to someone researching the history of Croatian, the latter Serbian. These brief examples are only a small taste of the many more letters still unpublished.
There also exist a few older published sources such as Father Eusebius Fermendzhin's Acta Bulgariae Ecclesiastica ab a. 1565 usque AD a. 1799 [Zagrabiae 1887], which reproduces sample missionary letters written by Franciscan Friars who were converting Paulicians on what is now Bulgarian territory. The following excerpt is a list of signers at the close of a letter dated April 20, 1637 [p.44]. At least one, Father Petko, is writing in an early form of Bulgarian. What about the others?
Ja fra stanisla balouich o selo luxani potuardue gorno pismo.
[= I Brother Stanisla Balouich from the village of Luxani confirm the above letter.]Ja fra Tomas Radoh od Beglame potuarguem gorno pismo.
[I Brother Tomas Radoh from Beglame confirm the above letter.]Ja fra igro bosgnach.
[I Brother Igro Bosgnach.]Jo fra giouan bartoluch js luscani gorni confirmo sopra il detto per il nostro bisogno.
[I Brother Giouan Bartoluch from Upper Luscani confirm the above regarding our need.]Io Don Bartholomeo Petcouhi chapelano di cinque fontane affirmo di sopra.
[I Don Bartholomeo Petcouhi chaplain of Five Fountains confirm the above.]Ia fra iakob corcovic, kapelan marinopolci, potvarduiem gornemu pismu.
[original in Cyrillic]
[I Brother Iakob corcovic, chaplain of Marinopolci, confirm the above letter.]Azi petko stoianof ot marnopolci, koi sam bil pop o recheno selo, svedochemo sa svi kmetovi gorne pismo. [original in Cyrillic]
[I Petko Stoianof from Marnopolci, who have been the priest in the said village, confirm the above letter along with all the mayors.]Ia fra bonaventura markovic pg. p. fra Stefano di Nicholo di Chalugeriza confirmo quanto di sopra.
[up to 'p.' in Cyrillic, and the rest in the Latin alphabet]
[I Brother Bonaventura Markovic pg. p. Brother Stefano di Nicholo di Chalugeriza confirm as to the above.]
Rich as the Propaganda Fide archives are for South Slavic materials, they are even richer for other parts of the world. As I was skimming through a stack of early seventeenth century letters, mostly in Italian, but some in Latin, one by a Father Bolivar written in Spanish caught my eye, because he began by informing the Vatican of a new Protestant English colony somewhere between the Catholic colonies of Quebec and Florida in the New World. He goes on to tell more about it. The letter is a very rare and hitherto unknown description of the Jamestown Colony. A professor of Spanish and I are presently translating it with an eye to eventual publication.
Another repository of Slavic manuscripts which I visited in Rome is the Pontificio Istituto Orientale located across from the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore. Luckily there was recently published a complete catalogue of its 63 Slavic manuscripts. They range in age from the XVIth through the XIXth century. Most have neither been studied nor published.
Dzhurova, Aksenija i Krasimir Stanchev. Opisanie slavjanskix rukopisej papskogo vostochnogo instituta v Rime. = A Description of Slavic Manuscripts of the Papal Eastern Institute in Rome. Roma: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1997.
Manuscript #7 dates from the XVIIIth century and is listed as being in Church Slavonic with colloquial Russian elements. Here are four lines of a prayer in verse attributed to D. Kantakuzin which will interest both Slavic linguists and specialists in Russian literature:
O uvy velikaja. beda =
O, alas a great woe
prixodit" ko mne chreda =
My turn is coming to me.
nevemy budet" kogda =
It will not be known when
ot sjudy vozmut" kuda. =
I will be taken where from here. [original in Cyrillic]
The primary and richest repository of Slavic manuscripts in Rome is of course the Vatican Library, for which there are two published catalogues of interest to Slavists, one general and the other specifically Slavic:
Blouin Jr., Francis X. Vatican Archives: An Inventory and Guide to Historical Documents of the Holy See. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.Dzhurova, A., K. Stanchev, M. Japundzhic. Opis na slavjanskite rukopisi vuv Vatikanskata Biblioteka. Sofija, 1985. = A Description of Slavic Manuscripts in the Vatican Library.
There are 102 manuscripts listed, including the Old Church Slavonic glagolitic codex called the Assemanianus. Since this repository is so well known I will not dwell upon it.
Archives, as thus far described, are certainly not the only context for serendipitous finds. Large, old used book stores are another. Once while on sabbatical leave at Harvard I took a busmanŐs holiday to Boston, where I wandered through several old and venerable antiquarian bookstores, one of which had a large stock of autographed manuscripts. At first I asked for the Russian folder, where I found documents signed by the various czars, the holograph draft of a short story by V. G. Korolenko, letters in French written by Tsaritsa Alexandra, etc. Next I asked if they had a folder of unattributed items and they did. Only one item piqued my interest that day: a set of three fragments, all from the same ancient Chinese scroll, on whose reverse there was writing of a totally different sort. It appeared to be Classical Mongolian, but there are no known examples of Classical Mongolian as old as these fragments seemed to be. I made an arrangement with the owner to sell me one of the fragments at a reasonable price with the promise that I would have it and the others attributed for them. The next day I hunted up my old professor of Mongolian, Francis Cleaves, who informed me that my guess was close. The fragment, approximately 1,000 years old, was in Uigur, whose script the Mongolians had borrowed. Therefore it was even older than classical Mongolian. That fact, though interesting, was not the most striking thing. The fragment was written on the forerunner of modern paper and is one of the very few earliest examples of paper. I was later able to determine that its provenance was a hoard of manuscripts discovered in ChinaŐs Turfan Oasis at the beginning of this century.
As a final example I would like to share with you my most curious serendipitous find. After coming to the University of Virginia, I learned that there had once been a Professor Swan [Lebedev?] in the Music Department who had bequeathed his archives to the library. Since he was known to have been close friends with Serge Rachmaninov, I thought that there might be some interesting letters in Russian. There were, but even more interesting was a radiogram sent by Rachmaninov from a ship crossing the Atlantic in which he thanked the Swans for a bon voyage gift of homemade kvas. The text is a delightfully terse macaronic couplet:
"Good kvas! [kvas=a lightly fermented beverage]
Thank vas! [vas=you]
Serge"
In closing let me address the issue of methodology. To do this I must reintroduce the shoe box of sweepings. When I began my quest for a dissertation topic I first sought advice from Roman Jakobson, who shared the following technique with me: Once you have settled on the general area of your research - be it for a book or for a dissertation - write it on the lid of a shoe box. Then whenever you run across any data or have any sudden insight that relates to the topic, simply jot it down and place your jottings into the box. Decide on a topic as early as possible, so that you have as much non-pressured time as possible to gather snippets of information and ideas garnered from your reading in other areas, discussions with colleagues, middle of the night revelations, and other chance findings or serendipitous sources, such as those already described above. Then when the day comes to begin writing, you already have a ready source of data and ideas about them. This method holds true today as it did then, except that we now have digital boxes available to us and can easily expand to a whole store full of 'shoon!' As the Romanian Slavist Emil Vrabie says, "We are surrounded with answers. All you have to do is formulate the right question." To accomplish this just make a label and put it on a shoe box.
Copyright 1999. All rights reserved
Received: October 27, 1999
University of Virginia
Slavic Languages and Literatures
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Charlottesville, VA 22903-3196 USA