Zaharija Orfelin e il Cantiniere serbo

ZAHARIJA ORFELIN AND ISKUSNI PODRUMAR Orfelin's Iskusni podrumar (1783) is the first Serbian book about wine culture and techniques of beverages production and preservation. First great laic intellectual of Serbian 1700s, Orfelin first declared the necessity to write in the spoken language, in order to contribute to people cul- tural elevation; nevertheless, in his works, various linguistic elements (“Languages“ or “Styles“) are evidenced: Russian Church Slavonic, Slavonicised Literary Russian, Serbian vernacular. Due to the mixture of various elements in several of his works, he is oen considered the creator of the so-called Slavenosrpski, a sort of hybrid language evaluated in different ways by scholars. Also in Podrumar, contrary to the indication on the frontispiece that it was written in Serbian, it proved to be mostly a mixed language, close to Russian Church Slavonic on the one hand and very close to vernacular, on the other. Furtehrmore, in those parts aimed at providing practical instructions, in which vernacular prevails as well, there are Russian Church Slavonicisms and Russian elements. However, this mixture of linguistic elements must not be attributed to the author's inability to write in pure vernacular. In fact, the only existing linguistic literary model in the Serbian culture of the time was Church Slavonic in its XVIII-century Russian form, artic- ulated in linguistic levels and increasingly oriented towards a spoken language in new literary genres far from ecclesiastical use. So, Orfelin's Slavenosrpski appears as a set of stylistic levels based on Church Slavonic and open to commissions with vernacular at every linguistic level, a way of writing that, even if it marks the beginning of system evolution towards the creation of a modern literary language, still remains anchored to tradition.