Chernorizets Hrabar - Literary Work

Literary Work

Chernorizets Hrabar is (as far as is known) the author of only one literary work, "An Account of Letters" (Old Church Slavonic: О писмєньхъ, O pismenech), one of the most admired and popular works of literature written in Old Church Slavonic. The work was supposedly written shortly after the Preslav Ecclesiastical People's Council in 893 and is the only known medieval literary work to quote the exact year of the invention of the Glagolitic alphabet (855).

In An Account of Letters, Chernorizets Hrabar defends the alphabet against its Greek critics and proves not only its right to existence but also its superiority to the Greek alphabet arguing that the Greek letters are neither the oldest known to man, nor divine. At the same time Chernorizets Hrabar opposes Glagolitic dogmatists and makes several suggestions as to how the alphabet can be further improved.

He also provided information critical to Slavonic palaeography with his mention that the pre-Christian Slavs employed "strokes and incisions" (Old Church Slavonic: чръты и рѣзы, črъty i rězy), translated as "tallies and sketches" below) writing that was, apparently, insufficient properly to reflect the spoken language. It is thought that this may have been a form of runic script but no authentic examples are known to have survived.

The manuscript of An Account of Letters has been preserved in some 80 copies, the oldest of which dates back to 1348 and was made by the monk Laurentius for Tsar Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria. The work has also been printed in Vilnius (1575–1580), Moscow (1637), Saint Petersburg (1776), Supraśl (1781).

Hrabar Nunatak on Greenwich Island in the South Shetland Islands, Antarctica is named for Chernorizets Hrabar.