Pavma Berynda’s 1627 Old Church Slavic Lexicon

https://catalog.princeton.edu/catalog/99131236357206421

This 1627 Lexicon produced by Ukrainian printer Pavma Berynda (died 1632) documents a critical moment in the evolution of a Ukrainian national identity as manifested by a distinct Ukrainian language. It was compiled over three decades during which Ukraine was emerging from two centuries of Polish-Lithuanian dominion, and roughly six decades before domination by Moscow will inaugurate centuries of subjugation of Ukraine to the Russian State: Tsarist Russia, Imperial Russia, the Moscow-dominated Soviet Union, and finally the post-Soviet Russian Federation which will launch numerous attempts to annex or subsume Ukraine under itself and prevent the nation from asserting a Western European identity and independence from Russia.

The Lexicon represents an effort to preserve an independence of the Ukrainian language by defending it not against Russian or Muscovite influences, but against Western influences via Catholic religious аauthorities of the Lithuanian and Polish states. The accomplished and renowned printer Pavma Berynda, a native Ukrainian speaker from Moldavia, produced this work at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery, among the oldest and most prestigious centers of Eastern Slavic Orthodoxy — a distinctly Eastern European Christianity. Berynda’s Lexicon reconnects contemporary Ukrainian with Old Church Slavic — the Slavic languages’ counterpart to Latin. The effort was meant to reconcile the contemporary Ukrainian tongue with the linguistic progenitor from which he felt it had become estranged through centuries of overwhelming Western influence, particularly via the Polish language. This book embodies an effort to re-easternize the Ukrainian language in contradistinction primarily to Polish — a Western Slavic language of a largely Roman Catholic nation, a language influenced by Latin and Romance languages. The consolidation of Ukrainian’s Eastern-ness is achieved by returning to Old Church Slavic and mining it for Ukrainian equivalents of Polish words as well as names and toponyms. Here руська or “Rusian” is the designation for the Ukrainian language itself, as distinct from the Russian language spoken in Muscovy and its territories.

Acquired cooperatively with the Department of Special Collections. Housed in the Department of Special Collections within the collection under the curation of Global Special Collections Librarian Mireille Djenno Okoumba.