VATICAN EVANGELIUM OF THE 10th CENTURY AND THE COMMON LITERARY LANGUAGE OF THE MEDIEVAL SLAVIA
At the end of the 20th century, there was an event, which made slavists pay their attention to a number of firm attitudes on the history of Slavic writing and its origin. Once again, linguists tried to define the sources of the first literary language of the Slavs and worked on the problem of linguistic similarity of the most ancient Slavic manuscripts and Cyril and Methodius`s texts. The issue of the time and the place of appearance of the first service book in Slavonic language was also raised then. Bulgarian researcher, Trendafil Krystanov, found the letter of the Ecumenical Patriarch of the 13th century, which was written on parchment, from which the Cyrillic Slavic text has been scratched out. It turned out that Herman II sacrificed Aprakos Evangelium (the copy of the ancient Slavic text, made in the 10th century by Bulgarian copyists) to the letter. After a very long work, the scratched-out text of the Aprokos was recovered and published in 1996. The period of the detailed study of the Vatican Evangelium of the 10th century has begun and now it is the time to analyze its value and place among the other Slavic manuscripts of the 10-11th centuries. The author of the article uses the historical and linguistic analysis of the text and endorses Krystanov`s view on the manuscript status - as the most ancient Slavic book, which was written according to Cyril and Methodius`s tradition. The copyist kept the tradition of reduced vowels and yuses and used standard verbal forms. The text had Greek words, which were replaced with Slavic lexemes in texts of the Aprokos of the 11th century. The lexicological and phraseological structure and grammatical structure of the Vatican Evangelium and Aprokoses of the 11th century demonstrate that these texts are written in the same all-Slavic literary language, which was in use in all Christianize part of the Medieval Slavia.