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.