Kazhdan A.P.: Knjiga i pisac u Vizantiji

Kazhdan A.P. : The book and the writer in Byzantium

The book is entirely dedicated to the culture of Byzantium, its beginnings, and first of all the most important element - the book. In Každan's opinion, we are talking about the "book" culture, a culture that placed the book at its epicenter as a kind of cultural phenomenon, which is the fruit of a long tradition, the beginnings of which go back to the 5th century BC. It is impossible to understand such a culture without opening a Byzantine book. Každan opened the History of Nikita Honiyat and its stormy, rich, but also anxious world of sad memories and painful moans due to the fall of the ruling city in the hands of the Crusaders.

But before opening Nikita Honiyat's book, Každan introduced us to the beginnings of the Byzantine book, its appearance, way of writing, value and uniqueness. The path to the book was a long journey that only rare and lucky individuals took in life, struggling through the complex system of Byzantine education. The story of the Byzantine book and its writer is a story of society, politics and religion. In more than a hundred pages, Aleksandar Každan managed to summarize this demanding question so that readers understand the basic principles of a thousand-year-old civilization.

Aleksandar Petrović Každan was born in 1922 in Moscow, in a Jewish family on both his father's and mother's side, which was deeply specific due to its origin and position in society. In the time before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Kazdan's family belonged to a layer of smaller, but still sufficiently wealthy citizens, precisely that part of the former imperial society that in the new order found itself trapped between the impossibility of relatively safe emigration and their own unacceptability to the new elite, which perceived the destruction of families similar to Kazdan as a revolutionary goal. Alexander Kazdan's origin, as well as the circumstances of his upbringing, greatly influenced the development of his interests, as well as his understanding of the complexity of social phenomena, as much as those around him, as well as the ancient, Byzantine ones, which he studied with deep curiosity. Like the research into the origins of many Byzantines, which Kazdan carefully conducted in order to learn as much as possible about them as personalities, a brief look at his ancestors is necessary in order to understand in this concise review of his life the deep urge to know the truth. He pursued with his diligence to set new standards in international Byzantinology.