20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

About “The Notes of the Yanychar” 591specialist in literary studies, in 1823. It was then published by him in thebook “Collection of Polish Authors” in 1828 as one of the oldest Polishliterary works in prose, still under the above-mentioned title regardlessof the author’s plentiful and unequivocal mentioning of his Serbianorigin. For this reason the work is subtitled as “written by KonstantinMikhailovich from Ostrovitsa”.Another specialist in the field – V. Maceyevski – identifies it as aSerbian piece of prose, translated into Polish, while a prominent expert inthe Slavonic studies K. Irechek, who was the first to put “The Notes…” intoacademic use as a historical document, considers the work to have beenwritten originally in Czech by an ethnic Serb. A different point of viewis held by some other linguists, Ya. Shafarik among them, accordingto them “The Notes…” was written in Polish despite the indisputableabundance of Czech and Serbian words in it.The monument saw its first scholarly publication in 1912 thanks to aPolish philologist Ian Los who also undertook a monographic research of“The Notes…” coming to a conclusion that the original text (nonexistentanymore) was recorded in Polish and was later supplied with some addenda.B. Chirlich believes “The Notes…” to have been inspired andcreated on the instructions of the Hungarian despots in Hungary, as it wasthey who were most of all interested in mobilizing the whole Christianworld in its struggle against Turkey as well as in glorifying the past of theSerbian power, which appears to be the main ideological message of “TheNotes…”Although none of the scholars voices any doubts that “The Notes…”was aimed at calling for fighting with the Turkish danger, their judgmentsand opinions on the ways and methods of achieving this aim, suggested bythe author, vary greatly. While S. Chirkovich, a Serbian historian fromYugoslavia, sees in the book the universality ideas of uniting the wholeChristian world under the Pope, a Polish historian S. Bylina, on thecontrary, thinks that the book was based on the antipope and anti-empireprinciples.In her book The Study of the language of ”The Notes…” published in1972, Gordana yOVANOVICh admits her failure to identify the languageof the original book and to definitely catalogue it, as the Serbian termsmentioned by the travellers cannot be treated as such being in use in allSlavonic languages. At the same time, the Polish version of the text isclearly secondary to the Czech one.In the commentary to the 1959 edition of “The Notes…” publishedby the Serbian Academy of Sciences, D. Zhivanovich states that