“Service for St.Lazar”: between Criticism and Poetics

This paper aims to reevaluate the dichotomy of prose and poetry in the context of the interpretation of Serbian medieval hymnography. The author examines hymnographic punctuation as an important point for literary analysis. Opposing formalistic views of poetry as an autonomous form, based on the phonetic principle of organization, contemporary philosophical poetics aims at reaching the very essence of poetry through rethinking its formal features, such as rhythm and prosody. The paper also offers an edition of the Old Church Slavonic text of the Service for Saint Prince Lazar, based on the manuscript from St. Nicholas Church in Stari Slakamen, Serbia (according to the paleographic description and photographs of the manuscript published by Petar Momirović). The text of the manuscript is examined with regard to the existing edition by Đorđe Trifunović and Irena Špadijer, and analyzed principally in comparison with representative copies of the Service, found in codices H 482, H 509 and D 39 (from monasteries Hilandar and Dečani), as well as codices P 55 (from the Holy Trinity Monastery near Pljevlja), A 290 and A 142 (from the Archive of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts). By investigating the phonetic, morphological, lexical and syntactic differences between textual variants of the Service, this paper shows that the copy from Stari Slankamen (marked as C) is very close to the one found in D 39, thus belonging to the so-called first cycle of copies of the Service, along with H 482 and H 509. Discoveries of codices are thus regarded as fundamentally important: they cast new light on the hymnographic tradition, contributing to the understanding of its liturgical, textual and poetical complexity. Keywords: prince Lazar, Battle of Kosovo, hymnography, medieval literature, cult, Srbljak, textual criticism, rhythm, caesura