I decided to try one of the few Veltman novels I hadn’t yet read, Райна, королевна Болгарская [Raina, princess of Bulgaria] — it didn’t sound too appealing, and in fact didn’t turn out to be very good, but it was short and eventful and taught me a fair amount of Balkan history, so it was worth it. The odd thing is how un-Veltmanlike it is — I think it’s the only one of his books I wouldn’t have guessed immediately was by him. It’s sort of a prequel to Светославич, вражий питомец [Svetoslavich, the devil’s foster-child] (see this 2013 LH post), which features Svetoslavich’s search for his father’s skull, which had been made into a drinking cup by the Pechenegs; this novel covers the last years of the life of his father Sviatoslav I and ends with his death at the hands of the Pechenegs. But it has none of the bizarreries and divagations of the earlier novel (and indeed everything else by Veltman) — it’s pretty much a straightforward Walter Scott imitation, fictionalizing the events described here and adding the obligatory romantic subplot involving the titular princess (I’m not sure whether Veltman invented her or plucked her out of some obscure chronicle). It appeared in Библиотека для чтения 59 (1843), and wasn’t published separately as a book — it seems to have sunk without trace in Russia, unsurprisingly. The interesting thing is that it became popular two decades later in Bulgaria when it was translated and turned into a play; the Bulgarians, then engaged in a long effort to gain independence from the Ottoman Empire with occasional help from Russia, were thrilled with this tale of their struggle against the Byzantine Empire almost a millennium earlier, also aided by the Russians (well, Rus).
The only interesting feature from a linguistic point of view consists of a few foreign words tossed in as spicy exotica, e.g. кула (Bulgarian кула ‘tower,’ from Ottoman Turkish قله [kulle]) and калугер ‘monk’ (cf. Macedonian калуѓер, from Greek καλόγερος) — on the latter, see this 2006 LH post featuring the rare English word caloyer.
Speak Your Mind