Department of Slavic Studies

Yale University, USA

October 1980

Dear Miss Kwaszniewska,

This is your Dr. Schultz writing in between classes at the university. Isaac and I are fine. My ears are full of withered kisses. We have quieted down somewhat, and our beds are now on separate continents. I'm working hard. I've begun accepting invitations to conferences, something that I hadn't done for almost a decade. I'm now getting ready for another trip, one that will bring me closer to you. In two years a conference is being held in Istanbul on the cultures of the Black Sea shores. I'm preparing a paper for it. Do you remember Professor Wyka and your senior thesis on "The Life of Cyril and Methodius, the Slav Enlighteners"? And do you remember Dvornik's study, which we used at the time? Well, he's put out a new, amended edition (1969), and I'm reading it with immense interest. My paper will be about Cyril's and Methodius' Khazar mission, the one where the most important documents--the writings of Cyril himself--have been lost. The anonymous compiler of Cyril's biography says that Cyril recorded the arguments he used in the Khazar polemic at the kaghan's court in separate books, in the "Khazar Orations".

"If someone is interested in the complete orations," writes Cyril's biographer," he will find them in Cyril's books, which were translated by our teacher and archbishop, Methodius, the brother of Constantine the Philosopher, who divided them into eight orations." Incredibly, the books with the eight orations by Cyril (Constantine of Thessalonica), the Christian saint and father of Slav literacy, written in Greek and translated into the Slavonic Language, disappeared without a trace! Could that be because they contained too many heretical elements? Did they perhaps have iconoclastic overtones, which may have been effective in the polemic but were unlawful, and therefore after the Khazar mission, were removed from use?

I checked Ilyinski again, his well known Survey if the Systematic Cyril-Methodius Bibliography up to 1934, and then his successors (Popruzhenko, Romanski, Ivanka Petkovich, etc). I reread Moshin. And then I read all the works they list about the Khazar Question. And nowhere is there any mention that Cyril's "Khazar Orations" attracted anybody's particular attention. How could it all have disappeared without a trace? Everyone has preconceived ideas about this question. But along with the Greek original there was also the Slavonic translation, from which one can only deduce that at one time the work was in wide use. Not just during the Khazar mission, but later as well; Its arguments must have been used in the Slav mission of the Thessalonica brothers, and even the polemic with the "Trilinguists". Otherwise, why would the "Khazar Orations" be translated into Slavonic? I think it might be possible to track down Cyril's "Orations" by taking a comparative approach to the entire matter. A systematic check of the Islamic and Hebrew sources on the Khazar Polemic would be bound to reveal some mention of Cyril's works. But that's not something I or a Slavist can do alone; A Hebraist and an Orientalist are needed for that as well. I looked through Dunlop (History of Jewish Khazars, 1954) but found nothing there that might help me trace the lost "Khazar Orations" of Constantine the Philosopher.

So, you see, you over there at your Jagellonian University are not the only one engaged in scholarship. I'm doing the same thing over here. I've finally gone back to my vocation and my youth, which tastes like fruit shipped by sea. I wear a straw, basket-shaped hat, and I can carry cherries from the market in it without taking it off my head. I age every time the Romanesque bell tower strikes midnight in Cracow, and I wake up every time daybreak strikes in Wawel. I envy you and your eternal youth. How is your Abu Kabir Muawia? Does he have a pair of smoked-dry ears and well-emptied nose, as in my dreams? Thank you for taking him in. You probably already know everything about him. Imagine, he's doing something very similar to your work and mine! He's like a colleague. He teaches comparative Middle Eastern religions at the University in Cairo and is interested in Hebrew history. Do you have the same problems I had with him?

Love from your

Dr. Schultz