Черноризец Храбър: Жизнь и творчество болгарского ученого

Bulgarian monk, scholar and writer
Chernorizets Hrabar (, Črĭnorizĭcĭ Hrabrŭ, ) was a Bulgarian monk, scholar and writer who worked at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire at the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 10th century. He is credited as the author of On the Letters.

His appellation is correctly translated as "Hrabar, the Black Robe Wearer" (i. e., Hrabar The Monk), chernorizets being the lowest rank in the monastic hierarchy (translatable as "black robe wearer", see wikt:Reconstruction:Proto Slavic/čьrnъ and wikt:riza), "Hrabar" ("Hrabr") supposed to be his given name. However, sometimes he is referred to as "Chernorizets the Brave", "the Brave One" or "Brave" which is the translation of Hrabar assumed to be a nickname. The authorship of his work and his identity have been a matter of scholarly debate. His name has been theorized as a pseudonym used by some of the other famous men of letters such as Constantine, John the Exarch, Clement of Ohrid or even by Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria himself.

Chernorizets Hrabar is the credited author of only one literary work, "On the Letters" (, O pismenĭhŭ, ), a popular medieval treatise written in Old Church Slavonic. The work was written in the late ninth or early tenth century. He also provided information critical to Slavonic paleography with his mention that the pre Christian Slavs employed "strokes and incisions" (, črŭty i rězy, translated as "tallies and sketches" below) writing that was, apparently, insufficient properly to reflect the spoken language. It is thought that this may have been a form of runic script but no authentic examples are known to have survived. The dominant view among scholars is that Hrabar was defending Slavonic in response to Greek criticism, while others have argued that his text was a defense of Glagolithic against Cyrillic. The work has also been printed in Vilnius (1575–1580), Moscow (1637), Saint Petersburg (1776), Supraśl (1781). It is the earliest printed work of an early Bulgarian author, included as part of the 1578 version of Ivan Fеdorov's East Slav primer. After their baptism they were forced to use Roman and Greek letters in the transcription of their Slavic words but these were not suitable At last, God, in his love for mankind, sent them St. Constantine the Philosopher, called Cyril, a learned and upright man, who composed for them thirty eight letters, some (24 of them) similar to the Greek, but some (14 of them) different, suitable to express Slavic sounds.''

Hrabar Nunatak on Greenwich Island in the South Shetland Islands, Antarctica is named for Chernorizets Hrabar.