Magyarországi magánkönyvtárak. Volume 1 (1533-1657) by András VargaReview by: Martyn RadyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Apr., 1988), pp. 267-268Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4209752 .

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REVIEWS 267

tobui pocatek ve dne moci tve / v svetlosti svatych / z birucha pred svitanim urodich te' (Vintr, p. 220). The Glossed Psalter, in the original ink, has only the unfinished word 'svi'. Vintr entirely justifiably suggests the full word was 'svietlikem' (cf. Middle Bulgarian, svitlik, light or daybreak or dusk'). A fairly recent, forged gloss, Vintr tells the reader, amplified 'svi' to 'svietlonosiem', that is, Lucifer. The Podebrady Psalter has 'dennyczy' (p. 84), that is, the morning star or Venus. What one sees, then, is the development of the Old Czech text from the 'realist' dawn into the esoteric (Cabbalistic) union of the male (Lucifer) and female (Venus), the unison of the sexes in progeniture and in life-ness. Psalm ii o (p. I09), the text which is traditionally interpreted as rendering the seven attributes of the Messiah (or, of Christ), is exegetically one of the most complex. The A. V. has 'the womb of the morning'.

Vintr is no doubt correct when he attributes the feminine gender of various texts to the fact that the vernacular version was made for noblewomen (e.g. p. 45), but he forgets that the majority of nuns were usually not educated in Latin. He makes the vernacular texts more exclusive than is necessary.

For students of Old Czech the consistent translation of (A. V.) asp as krdli'k (later 0. Cz, hare or rabbit) is of literary-historical significance (e.g. Deuter- onomy, 32:33; Vintr, p. 279). I have no qualms in recommending this text as a fine example of thorough philology. School of Slavonic and East European Studies R. B. PYNSENT University of London

Varga, Andra's (ed.). Magyarorszagi magankonyvtdrak. Volume I (I533-I657). Adattar xvi-xviii. szaizadi szellemi mozgalmaink t6rtenetehez, I 3. Academy of Sciences Library, and University of Szeged, Budapest- Szeged, I986. ix + 259 PP. Bibliography. Index. Ft.8o.oo.

IN I98 I a team of librarians and historians at the University of Szeged began publication of the K6nyvtdrt6rtineti fuzetek series, which has now reached its fourth volume. The aim of the project is to establish the authorship, location, and content of the 640 inventories of books in private libraries which survive from the period I 530-I 730. The principal deficiency of this series is that it does not detail individual items in the inventories but confines itself to broad classifications such as 'legal and theological works'.

In this latest publication, the first of a promised new series, the staff of the Central Library and Department of Literary History at Szeged have drawn together a small sample of sixty-nine inventories, the contents of which they list in full. Each inventory is accompanied by bibliographic notes and by a short biography of the owner or custodian, under whose guidance or at whose death the list was compiled. The majority of the inventories come from the Felvidek, although there is a reasonable variety of owners: schoolteachers, clergy, townsmen, lesser and greater nobles. Because they have been published elsewhere, this work does not include the inventories of the greatest private libraries, such as those belonging to Miklos Zrinyi or Hans Dern- schwamm. New material on Adam Batthyany's collection is made available, though, and this provides a valuable addition to the Batthyainy inventories

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268 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

drawn together by Bela Ivanyi and recently republished in A magyar konyv kultuira multjdbol (edited by Balint Keseriu, Szeged, 1983) .

Inventories of private libraries are the surest guide to the literary and academic concerns of this period of Hungarian history. The most frequently cited authors are Aristotle, Cicero, Melanchthon, Luther, and Cardinal Peter Paizmainy. In this way the inventories keenly expose the intellectual and theological battle-lines within Hungary during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. London MARTYN RADY

Kvetnickij, F. Clavis Poetica. Edited by B. Uhlenbruch. Rhetorica Slavica, Band III. Bohlau Verlag, Cologne, Vienna, I985. Cii + 27I PP. DM96.oo.

LATIN and Latin verse composition were major subjects in the syllabus of the Slavo-Graeco-Latin Academy in Moscow in the early eighteenth century, just as they were in the English public and grammar schools of the same period. The study of Latin occupied most of the first four years of the Academy's thirteen-year course, and the theory and practice of Latin verse composition were studied in its fifth year. Rhetoric (two years), philosophy (two years) and theology (four years) made up the remainder of the course.

Fedor Kvetnitsky graduated from the Academy in I 729. A brilliant student, he was appointed to its staff and, like many of the teachers, soon became a monk. Entrusted with the poetics course, on 17 November I 732 he completed his own manuscript textbook entitled Clavis Poetica (a key to poetry). The verse preface in which he addresses the 'new poets', that is, his own students, and which he composed in Sapphics, reveals him as a devoted and enthusiastic teacher. However, after I 732 nothing more is heard of him. In view of complaints made against him in I 73 I by the Academy's rector and a period of arrest in St Petersburg in I 732 he may well have been dismissed from his post.

Professor Uhlenbruch's choice of Kvetnitsky's single work for the third volume of the Rhetorica Slavica series, edited by Professor R. Lachmann, is well justified. Its significance lies not so much in its content, which in his excellent introduction Professor Uhlenbruch shows to have been both conservative and derivative, as in the light which its casts on literary education in the reigns of Peter II and Anne. Further, since Kvetnitsky and Trediakovsky were near contemporaries at the Academy and since Kvetnitsky no doubt reproduced much of the teaching which he himself received in his own textbook, it can probably give us some idea of the course which Trediakovsky could have attended; and since Lomonosov in fact took the poetics course in I 732-33, Clavis Poetica must have been the textbook which he used.

Only three leaves of the manuscript deal with 'Slavonic poetry' (poesis slavonica). They do little more than point out the chief contrasts between Latin quantitative prosody and Russian syllabic prosody. Kvetnitsky gives examples of all the syllabic lines of between four and thirteen syllables, but the fact that he asserts that all the shorter lines have caesuras like the longer lines, a manifest error, suggests that he had little practical knowledge of syllabic

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