« Liturgie », Chișinău, 1815 : seuil vers les livres roumains en Moldavie
The main cultural threshold to Romanian books from the Bessarabian space is represented by religious texts. These constitute the link between the Romanian background and the new historical context of Russian origin of the 19th century. These texts have had a dual role in the maintenance and development of Christianity on the one hand, and in the propagation of cult variants of the Romanian literary language on the other. This study will analyse the first Romanian book produced in this political framework dominated by the Russian Empire, a liturgical book printed by the Metropolitan Gavriil Bănulescu-Bodoni in 1815, in Chișinău. The Liturgy is written in Cyrillic script, in Romanian, but it strictly followed the compositional structure and formal organization of Russian books.
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