For the latest issue of Cabinet I wrote about 13th-century birch-bark gramoty, Slavonic letters and manuscripts that together attest to the remarkable literacy of medieval Novgorod. Of particular interest to me are the gramoty attributed to a certain Onfim, a schoolboy who had the singular habit of illustrating his grammar exercises with drawings of horses, dragons, men with pitchfork hands, and indeed of himself. To read the entire essay, go here.
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The Novgorod birch-bark manuscript No. 203 depicts a remarkable fantasy scene, and represents a perfect fusion of image and text, the twin elements of Onfim's art:
With the words properly spaced, we obtain:
Which is to say: “Lord, help your servant Onfim!”
What exactly is happening in this scene? According to the Soviet philologist Artemii Vladimirovich Artsikhovskii, the words at the top of the gramota are a conventional and very common phrase in the period.[i] He describes the figure at the left as a boy, and implicitly as Onfim himself, while characterizing the figure on the right as indeterminate, as perhaps a man with his hands raised, or even a tree. Most importantly, he determines that the figure on the right is incomplete, evidently abandoned as the artist lost interest.
But it may be that Artsikhovskii’s presumption of the “schematic” character of the figures, and the conventional character of the text, prevented him from giving the dramatis personae more than a casual glance. If we study them attentively, we will notice what appears to be a third person lying on the ground, with his legs sticking up in the air and three toes sticking out from the one visible foot. There is a man or a creature on top of the man on the ground, with wild hair waving on his head. He may be clutching a snake or venomous asp, or he may have the serpent wrapped in his hair, and he may have just killed the man on the ground by means of it. Though it may not be clear what Onfim intended, it is at least clear he has not abandoned this drawing for lack of interest, and, in this light, however conventional the phrase at the top of the gramota may be, when he adds his name to it, as the servant of the Lord to be helped, and places it together with the violent scene born not of convention but of his imagination, the phrase becomes anything but rote. The artist is imploring the Lord to help him, in particular, Onfim, the subject and hero of this oeuvre...
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[i] See Artemii Vladimirovich Artsikhovskii, “Berestianye gramoty mal’chika Onfima,” Sovetskaia Arkheologiia, no. 3 (1957).
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