The Manuscript and Its Copies

The History was not a printed book but a living manuscript. Paisiy could not print it — there was no Bulgarian press — and so it spread as texts spread in a manuscript culture: by copying. The first known copy was made in 1765 by the future St. Sofroniy of Vratsa; dozens more transcripts followed over the next eighty years, carrying the book across the Bulgarian lands, before it was at last printed in 1844. This slow, hand-to-hand transmission is itself part of the story of the awakening.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

A Book Without a Press

When Paisiy finished the History in 1762, there was no way to print it for the people it addressed. The Bulgarian lands had no printing press in the vernacular; printing in the Orthodox Balkans was scarce and largely in Greek; and a book in “simple” Bulgarian, addressed to a subject peasant people, had no publisher (Daskalov, The Making of a Nation in the Balkans, CEU Press, 2004, ch. 1; Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005, ch. 3). The History therefore entered the world by the only road open to it — the road that texts had traveled for a thousand years before print reached the region: it was copied by hand. Paisiy himself is said to have carried the book on his travels and to have encouraged its copying; and once a copy existed, it could beget others, each scribe transcribing the text and often adding, abridging, or amending as scribes do (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1; MacDermott, A History of Bulgaria 1393–1885, Allen & Unwin, 1962, ch. 2). The consequence is that the History survives not as one authorized text but as a family of manuscripts — the autograph and its descendants — with variations among them, a situation the modern critical editions had to sort out after the Zograph autograph was recovered in 1906 (see Writing the Istoriya, 1762).

The First Copy: St. Sofroniy of Vratsa, 1765

The earliest known copy has a distinguished maker. In 1765, only three years after the book was written, it was transcribed by Stoyko Vladislavov, then a young village priest, who would later become bishop of Vratsa and is venerated as St. Sofroniy of Vratsa (Sofroniy Vrachanski) (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 3rd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, “Sofroniy Vrachanski” and “Paisiy of Hilendar”; MacDermott, History of Bulgaria, 1962, ch. 2). His copy is known as the Kotel transcript (Kotlenski prepis), from the town of Kotel where he made it; the tradition connects it with a meeting between the young priest and Paisiy himself, who is said to have brought the History on his travels (MacDermott, History of Bulgaria, 1962, ch. 2; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1).

The identity of this first copyist is significant beyond the fact of the copy. Sofroniy Vrachanski became one of the leading figures of the early Revival in his own right — a bishop, a translator and writer, the author of the first printed book in modern Bulgarian (Nedelnik, or Kyriakodromion, 1806) and of a remarkable autobiography, and himself later canonized by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015, “Sofroniy Vrachanski”; Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3). That the man who made the first copy of Paisiy’s book went on to become a second founder of Bulgarian letters is a neat emblem of how the History worked: it did not reach a mass readership but passed from hand to hand among exactly the churchmen, teachers, and copyists who would carry the awakening forward.

Dozens of Transcripts

From these beginnings the History multiplied. Over the eight decades between its writing and its printing, it was copied many times over; scholars have identified on the order of several dozen manuscript copies (prepisi) and reworkings, made in monasteries, parishes, and towns across the Bulgarian lands and among Bulgarians abroad (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1; Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015). Some copyists reproduced the text faithfully; others adapted it — the best-known reworking being the so-called Tsarstvenik or “Zograph reworking” and related recensions that circulated under altered titles (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). The proliferation of copies is the measurable trace of the book’s spread and of the appetite it met: each transcript represents a place where someone thought the History worth the considerable labor of copying by hand.

It should be kept in proportion, against the later national myth. The manuscript circulation, while remarkable for a subject people, reached in the first generations a limited public — clergy, teachers, literate townsmen, monks — not the whole nation (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6, on the scale of the early reception and the later exaggeration of it). The History’s influence in the eighteenth century was real but narrow; its mass influence came later, through print and through the schools of the nineteenth-century Revival, and above all through the retrospective celebration of Paisiy after national liberation (see National Saint and Symbol).

The First Printing, 1844

The History was at last printed in 1844 — eighty-two years after it was written and some seventy years after its author’s death — but not under Paisiy’s name or in his exact words. It appeared through the Bulgarian teacher and writer Hristaki Pavlovich (Hristaki Pavlovich Dupnichanin), who published a reworked version under the title Tsarstvenik, ili Istoriya bolgarskaya (“Tsarstvenik, or Bulgarian History”), printed at Buda (in the Habsburg lands) (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015, “Paisiy of Hilendar” and “Hristaki Pavlovich”; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). Pavlovich worked from the manuscript tradition, not from Paisiy’s autograph, and edited and abridged the text; the 1844 edition therefore transmits the History in a mediated form, and it did not at first make Paisiy’s own name and authorship widely known (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). Only later in the nineteenth century, as the Revival looked for its own origins and as scholars traced the copies back, was Paisiy securely identified as the author and elevated to the place he now holds; the recovery of the Zograph autograph in 1906 completed the process (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1 and 6).

The long delay between writing and printing, and the mediated form of the first edition, are worth holding in mind. The History did its early work as a manuscript among the few, was printed only in the 1840s in an adapted form, and became the acknowledged founding text of the nation chiefly through the retrospective labor of the later Revival and of scholarship. The book that began the awakening was itself, in a sense, awakened to its own importance by the movement it had helped to start.

See Also

References

  • Daskalov, Roumen. The Making of a Nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004. (The manuscript circulation and the family of copies; St. Sofroniy of Vratsa’s 1765 Kotel transcript; the several dozen transcripts and reworkings; the limited early reception and its later exaggeration; the 1844 printing by Hristaki Pavlovich as Tsarstvenik; the later identification of Paisiy as author.)
  • MacDermott, Mercia. A History of Bulgaria 1393–1885. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962. (The hand-to-hand copying; the meeting with the young Stoyko Vladislavov and the 1765 copy.)
  • Detrez, Raymond. Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (Entries “Paisiy of Hilendar,” “Sofroniy Vrachanski,” and “Hristaki Pavlovich”: the Kotel transcript; Sofroniy’s later career and canonization; the 1844 Buda printing.)
  • Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. (The absence of a Bulgarian press; Sofroniy Vrachanski and the first printed modern Bulgarian book, 1806.)