Russian Academic Science of the 19th-century about Bulgarian Historiography of the Revival Period

Abstract

In 1762 the Bulgarian monk Paisiy Hilendarski (Paisius of Hilendar) completed his manuscript book Slavic-Bulgarian History. The book, which he began to write in Zograph Monastery, was completed him in the Hilendar Monastery on the holy Mount of Athos. During the Bulgarian Revival Period, between 1765 and 1882, the Slavonic-Bulgarian History was hand-copied over 70 times. From the 1940s onwards Russian scholars became interested in the manuscript copies of Paisiy's book. The interest of foreign scholars persisted until the restoration of the Bulgarian state in 1878. The article reconstructs the so-called Russian Trace in the Bulgarian Historiography of the 18th and 19th centuries. We follow the relations between Vasil Aprilov (Bulgarian emigrant in Odessa) and some Russian professors (Yuri Venelin, Victor Grigorovich, Nikolay Murszakevich, Ossip Berdjanski etc.) who studied the handwritten transcripts of Slavic-Bulgarian History, because they had the ambition to publish them in Russia in the 1940s and 1950s.