The ancestors of modern Czechs and Croats encountered literacy in Old Church Slavonic, but having fallen into the orbit of the Western Church embraced the literary culture of Latinate Europe. Yet, caught between Latin and Church Slavonic, these communities made different choices. The Czechs relinquished Church Slavonic and developed literature in Latin, a foreign learned language. The Croats, while accepting the dominance of Latin in the literary sphere, nevertheless, managed to preserve Church Slavonic and create their own variant of literary language and writing in Glagolitic, which they used in liturgy on a par with Latin. These choices were crucial in determining how literatures in the vernacular emerged and took shape in Bohemia and Croatia. By contrasting these two literary itineraries, the chapter revisits the question of how we study and piece together a literary history, how we understand the concept of a ‘national literature’, and whether this concept should hinge exclusively on the vernacular that corresponds to the modern standard language. Central to the approach is Iurii Lotman’s model of literary traditions as dynamic semiotic cultural systems, in which cultural change results from the coexistence and interaction of two processes of human activity: cultural evolution and explosion.

Early Rus written culture, and eventually literature, developed following the spread of Christianity, which was adopted as the official religion at the end of the tenth century. Christian writings reached Rus in Church Slavonic translation, mainly from Greek originals. Church Slavonic was close enough to local East Slavonic to be treated as the learned register rather than a different language. This learned register was not a closed system. Much Rus writing sticks closely to imported Church Slavonic linguistic and stylistic models, notably in homiletics and in some kinds of hagiography. However, where there is significant local content (in chronicles, for example), there is also more linguistic flexibility across registers. Surviving local compositions are not common. They cannot provide hard evidence of an established culture of literariness. However, they are sufficient to suggest patterns of production in two areas. Prominent among the earliest works are the ‘foundational’ texts whose principal theme is the origins and dignity of Rus itself and of its Christian institutions. Second, a small number of texts hint at a culture of verbal display beyond the devotional, perhaps at court.